In science there is a dictum: don’t add an experiment to an experiment. Don’t make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don’t ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.
Ben Bova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bova
Every story I create creates me. I write to create myself.
Octavia E. Butler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler
I’ve praised the Book Designer website several times on the Colony. Run by Joel Friedlander, it’s not just about the aesthetics of how a book looks, but tackles a range of subjects to do with publishing. His weekly aggregator of the best stories from other sites is worth subscribing to.
In May, I sent off my book cover design for the first story in my Cornish Detective series, Who Kills A Nudist? to The Book Designer to be judged in their monthly eBook cover design award. Some of the covers have been done by the authors, others are the work of professional artists.
I’ve designed all the covers for the 52 eBooks that I’ve uploaded to Amazon KDP. I couldn’t afford to pay an artist-designer, and, as I have a background in art and photography, I have a fair idea of what to do.
I thought I hadn’t been chosen, as my cover didn’t appear last month, but he must have had a backlog, as it was there today. The comments were so-so but I value them.
The Book Designer – Practical advice to help build better books
PAUL WHYBROW submitted Who Kills A Nudist? designed by PAUL WHYBROW. “The seagull appears in the story as a symbol of the fragility of nature, as well as the hostility of the wild world. The titular nudist victim is discovered by a witness in Chapter who sees a gull land and hop across to peck at his eyes.”
TP: The colors of the cover are very nice, but the choice of fonts isn’t too good. There are too many different fonts that were used and they don’t work too well together. It would also be good to use this image from a different angle maybe.
I should write to Joel Friedlander to ask about the problem of designing an image that looks great full-sized and tile-sized – which is how readers first see the book cover on a sales site. I always include an image, a shape that can be discerned in tile size. I agree with the comment about fonts, though funnily enough, I think that I used only two different fonts and that was based on advice from The Book Designer site! This is a very exacting area of book promotion and, even though I’ve been reading their newsletters for four years, I still haven’t worked out which fonts are considered best for each genre.
Why not have a go at submitting to their monthly award?
An article in today’s Guardian reveals crime writers’ relationships with their detectives.
Me and my detective by Lee Child, Attica Locke, Sara Paretsky, Jo Nesbø and more
I’m familiar with most of the series mentioned, some of which influenced the construction of my Cornish Detective series. I’ve completed five novels describing Neil Kettle’s investigations. Hundreds of literary agents have been queried with these books and I’ve self-published them on several sites, currently with KDP Select. I’m nearing the end of narrating and editing the first story as an audiobook.
Although The Cornish Detective has dominated my writing since 2014, I have an ambivalent relationship with my copper hero, for though I like him, he’s not my favourite character. I agree with what Lee Child says about his protagonist Jack Reacher:
The best thing to do is not to get too close to the character. I need to like him less than you’re going to like him. That’s what keeps him alive and honest and authentic. There are many series where the author clearly falls in love with the character and starts to be too protective. I’ve always been very hardhearted. I don’t like Reacher that much; I’m in total control of him. I’m the only person in the world he’s scared of.
Thus, I’ve been cruel to Neil Kettle, turning him into a killer defending himself from a murderer, and I’m about to give him heartache when he falls in love with a tempestuous woman. I intend the series to last twelve stories. He’ll die on the final page; no prequels…unless they offer me a boatload of money!
Lee Child’s advice could be applied to any genre. But, what John Connolly says about mystery fiction is also crucial, I think if you’re writing a series:
There’s a misapprehension about mystery fiction, which is that people read for plot. They don’t – the plots really don’t change much. There’s a murder. There’s an investigation. There’s a solution, however partial. Plot is what characters do and language is the expression of that, and so for a mystery series what keeps people coming back is the pleasure of spending time with those characters.
Readers have to empathise with the MC if they’re going to return to find out what happens to them next. That doesn’t mean to say that they’re always nice people, for irritating or dastardly characters, such as Hercule Poirot and Harry Flashman have charisma.
How close are you to your hero?
Are they a reflection of your personality?
How much internal dialogue do you give them?
Do you like them…or, are they annoying?
At the end of a working week, I usually treat myself to a longed-for book or CD on eBay. I’ve just purchased a book on philosophy written by Lin Yutang.
The Importance of Living was going for about a tenner new as a paperback, but I was the only bidder on a used hardback copy published in 1947—probably because it’s in well-used condition with browned pages and a tatty cover. Such things don’t bother me: it’s the contents I’m after.
I like that the book shows its age. I wonder how may readers have eyed its pages, gleaning wisdom from the author’s thoughts. That’s something impossible to ponder with a Kindle or smartphone or tablet.
Should I ever get to heaven (I’m hellbound! 
) it would be nice to think that parts of it smell of new books, while others pong of old volumes!
I’m looking forward to sniffing my latest purchase.
Do you like the aroma of freshly printed books and of those that are disintegrating?
Do you own any smelly ancient books?
Over the last few years, the world has gone mad for baking cakes, with such television series as The Great British Bake Off. One day, sociologists and psychiatrists will study this phenomenon, as proof of how the population needed comfort eating to get through troubled times.
I even bought myself cake last week…eight incredibly small French Fancies by Mr Kipling. Eating them, I pondered my WIP Plantation, in which an American Civil War veteran is helping his sister rebuild her plantation ravaged by General Sherman’s infamous March to the Sea.
Before leaving to shop in the nearest town, she bakes sourdough bread in a Dutch Oven, for them to have for breakfast. Sourdough bread has become trendy in the lockdown.
While in Marietta, my MC buys a large catfish to cook for a communal meal involving the freed slaves, who are now share-cropping land on the plantation. He has his eye on a beautiful freewoman and wants to meet her. Then, I thought why not give them cake for dessert? Also cooked in the Dutch oven. They could have apple dump cake.
When I started writing this series, which has been violent, I didn’t anticipate that I’d be searching for recipes for cakes. Even though my tale is geographically an ‘Eastern’, I can’t recall any Westerns I’ve read which feature cakes!
It set me to thinking about other writing genres. Cakes might well appear in highfalutin Literature—W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale—Miss Havisham’s preserved wedding cake in Great Expectations.
The Queen of Heart’s jam tarts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Marcel Proust’s madeline from In Search of Lost Time, and what about the extra cakes that Bilbo Baggins has to raid his pantries for in The Hobbit when a group of dwarves visit him unexpectedly?
I can’t imagine cakes appearing in Speculative Fiction—what, a speculative cake—made of what? Nor in Science Fiction and Fantasy, though there is Mooncake.
Dystopia wouldn’t have room for such fripperies as cakes. Horror stories are short on cream cakes! Erotica and Romance would use cream cakes…even if they weren’t for eating. 
Historical fiction might well include baking as part of domestic scenes, but Adventure and Thriller yarns avoid such niceness. Mysteries and Detective stories tend not to include cakes, although Cosy Mysteries are full of crumbs!
Cakes are popular in Children’s literature
I might be onto something…cake as a lynchpin of writing genre.
Do you include cakes in your stories?
My first audiobook is finally uploaded…I’ll have to wait a month for it to be checked to see if it’s OK, but for the moment, I feel like this:
I’m a big fan of the punch and roll method of correcting mistakes, which saves hours when re-recording. I’m delighted when I find that I had the common sense to immediately narrate a section again if I mucked it up, as I sound exactly the same.
Using Punch and Record for audiobooks
Narrating my first audiobook has been a steep learning curve. One is forced to become a geek playing around with effects and spacing of words, sentences and paragraphs. I know my story by heart after twelve weeks of listening to it!
If you decide to narrate your own book and are worried about the ACX quality control check, there’s useful advice on Reddit and Quora:
Audiobook Creation Exchange: ACX.com – Quora
I offer a few thoughts and tips in this post about narrating, mastering and the process of uploading sound files to ACX.
Recording a story is an informative way of learning a lot of things about your writing. When reading to yourself or out loud, your brain plays tricks by adding missing words and ignoring repetition. Audacity is free to use and you could use your computer’s microphone to record. Listening to your work reveals errors and problems in pacing.
I was mortified to discover two major mistakes that I hadn’t noticed in 100 editing trawls, where I’d misnamed the murder victim and then sent a detective to two different locations at the same time in one chapter.
I’m pleased to have completed my first audiobook. A huge weight lifted from my shoulders once I’d uploaded the final sound file to ACX, and they sent me a confirmation email. I adore writing new stories, but while creating an audiobook, I didn’t feel like a writer. Learning how to narrate a book develops an awareness of how you breathe and lots of voice acting techniques, but after you’ve recorded and mastered the same passage nine times you’ll feel trapped.
It’s certainly masochistic.
ACX is the place where your audiobook is assessed to decide if it’s of good enough quality to be admitted to Audible—KDP’s talking book operation.
Your recorded story sound files could pass ACX plugins, but still be rejected after a living person listens to it. You might have to wait a month for that decision, as they have a backlog of work because during lockdown many frustrated writers decided to complete that book they’d abandoned, then recording and uploading it to generate income.
The ACX website looks clear and helpful, but it’s poor at giving information about the audiobook cover. This has to be of a square format, at least 2,400 x 2,400 pixels. I use IrfanView image viewing and manipulating converter, which is basic enough for me to understand without confusion. It’s good at altering the size of an image unless it’s to a square! 
Online Image Resizer – Crop, Resize & Compress Images, Photos and Pictures for FREE
How to upload to ACX feels like a secret if you look for information on their site. This video helped allay my confusion:
As George Smolinski explains, to upload your sound files, you have to attach your audiobook to the KDP eBook by claiming the rights to it. Doing this usefully downloads the chapter headings you used in the eBook (NB some may be repeated…don’t know why, but it made me panic, thinking I’d done this in the eBook—I hadn’t!
You can’t upload an audiobook without already having the eBook version on KDP.
Remember: each chapter is a separate sound file, and the opening credits (title, place in a series, name of author and name of narrator) and the closing credits (usually just The End) are each in a sound file, as is the Retail Audio Sampler…an up to five-minute snippet used to promote the book. The order I uploaded was as presented to me: Opening Credits, the 50 chapters, Closing Credits, then the Retail Audio Sampler.
It took me about 90 minutes, but that might be affected by how busy the site is. My book was eight hours, thirty-eight minutes duration.
Before doing all of this, you need to provide your financial information, which will likely be the same as you gave when joining KDP. I did everything myself, so it was relatively easy to complete, but if you employed a narrator and a sound engineer, you’ll need their details.
I guess that creating my first audiobook is an achievement, but, as with anything in writing, if no one knows it exists as a product no one is going to buy it.
Thus, I’m returning to self-promotion.
Onwards and…where the hell am I going next?!
One thing this lark has shown me is why the voice of a narrator varies ever so slightly between sections of a chapter. It’s because of re-recording. I’ve found that it’s more likely I’ll get away with it if there’s dialogue in between my narration.
I’m in the final stages of fettling my recordings. For reasons that I don’t understand some sound files (each chapter is a sound file) that previously passed the ACX plugin test were now failing it. All the effects I’d used before to make things right now didn’t work. After taking a break to prevent myself putting a fist through the laptop screen,
This worked for me:
PROCESS:
These instructions are in short-form: Location > Tool: Options > OK
Select the whole reading or chapter by clicking just right of the up arrow button (on the left).
Effect > Filter Curve > Manage > Factory Presets > Low roll-off for speech > OK.
Effect > RMS Normalize: Target RMS Level -20dB > OK.
Effect > Limiter: Soft Limit, 0, 0, -3.5dB, 10, No > OK.
Analyze > ACX-Check.
Once the Audacity aup files have satisfied the ACX check, they can be converted to MP3 format. Create a folder on your desktop labelled MP3. The conversion is easily done in the latest version of Audacity by clicking:
File > Export > Export as MP3. Send the files to your MP3 folder. Remember, opening credits and closing credits (The End) need to be in separate files. The opening credits need to be the same as those on your eBook.
While doing this, a newsletter came in from ACX. It told of one new and one recent quality control tests. The latest is called Audio Lab, whilst Audio Analysis has been around for a few months. So far as I can see, Audio Lab is simply an expansion of the ACX plugin to be used when you’re finished, whilst Audio Analysis is aimed at those unsure of settings and their microphone for them to check what they’re recorded so far.
* Audio Lab – Sound Check: Audio Lab Launches on ACX
* Audio Analysis – ACX Audio Analysis Tool FAQ’s
As you can tell from my recent posts, narrating, editing and mastering an audiobook takes a long time and is exasperating.
My recorded chapters have passed the ACX check, the Audio Lab and Audio Analysis without any problems, but they could still fail at the Human Quality Control. There are hundreds of ways of mastering what you’ve recorded and yet, there’s this dire warning on the ACX website:
Human Quality Control at ACX (the theatrical test after you pass ACX-Check technical test) does not like heavy processing. You should be as gentle as you can with as few corrections as possible. Don’t even think of submitting readings that sound like a bad cellphone, speaking into a wineglass or reading in a bathroom.
The AudioBook metaphor is listening to someone telling you a story over cups of tea. Anything that distracts from that ideal should be avoided.
They don’t define what “few corrections” means! How few?
I’m in the final stages of getting my first audiobook ready to upload to ACX, the vetting arm of Audible.
The pervading sensation of narrating, mastering and preparing the project to fit ACX’s requirements is of seemingly endless repetition. I haven’t felt like a writer for the last four months, more a slave to the process. Fine-tuning a short paragraph that can be read in 90 seconds might take ten minutes initially, then another ten minutes weeks later when I realised that, for some reason, I’d speeded up my narration and it sounds wrong.
Yesterday, I finally completed re-recording ten sections where my voice altered. These were all parts in which I’d re-recorded a sentence and spliced it into a paragraph. This doesn’t work! Re-recording the whole paragraph and maybe those before and after it is the way to go if you want to maintain continuity as a narrator. It takes more time, but it works.
Last night, I spent a dispiriting couple of hours converting the sound files for 50 chapters from Audacity’s aup format to MP3. Fortunately, it’s easy to do, as the latest version of Audacity includes a converter that exports the files in MP3. But, it’s repetitive and time-consuming. Those words again!
ACX only accepts audiobooks in separate sound files for each chapter, with separate files for the opening credits—title, place in a series and author and narrator (these should be the same as the eBook)—and end credits, which are simply The End. I’ll be uploading them today. Although my sound files passed an Audacity ACX plugin check, this is no guarantee they’ll be acceptable after being listened to by their robot or even a living and breathing human being. It might take them a month to get back to me.
To add to the fun, ACX requires an audiobook cover in a square size of no less than 2,400 x 2,400 pixels….similar to how a CD cover looks. The cover that I designed for the eBook is paperback-shaped, so unacceptable. For continuity, I wanted to use the same seagull I’d used for the eBook and POD paperback. I found those designs straight away, but it took me an hour to track down the original photograph, which I had the presence of mind (thanks, brain!) to save on Google’s Drive.
Faffing about with IrfanView, I made a couple of versions for the audiobook.
Since returning to creative writing in 2013, I’ve done every aspect of the work involved to produce and publish a book myself. This was partly down to my cantankerous nature and poverty.
It costs a small fortune to hire experts to create an audiobook. Unless you’re wealthy, forget hiring famous actors or voice actors (who might do voice-overs for commercials as well) or experienced narrators with a good track record of sales.
It’s advised that debut narrators charge a minimum of $80/£61 an hour, meaning my eight and a half hour novel would have cost me $680/£518 to be told by someone as unknown as me! Once more experienced at narrating, audio experts suggest a rate of $225/£174 per 10,000 words, meaning my 80,000-word book would cost $1,800/1,392.
Well-known narrators charge much more.
But, what would you do if you hated the end result?
There are ways of saving money, by sharing the profits with the narrator:
Then, you’ve got the expense of mastering your recorded sound files by an experienced audio engineer. That would be a minimum of $1,000/£772…likely two or three times more for 80,000 words.
As you can see, the expenses mount up, but paying experts will save you a lot of heartache and time. I’m proud of my first audiobook, but it’s taken me four months to reach a point where I think it’s ready to publish. I’ve done no creative writing since April.
If you’re interested in creating an audiobook, take a look at this:
How long does it take to produce an audiobook? – Quora
Should you venture down this rocky trail remember to back up your work! You will devote hundreds of hours to narrating and mastering the recordings. Do you really want to do it all again?
