What The Luck - Audiobook Released (Patreon)

Great news my people: after about 8 months of hard work, a short break, plenty of wait time on quality control at ACX and a ton of fun, Brian and I are ecstatic to share with you the brand new release of What The Luck as audio book!

I've included the official Retail Audio Sample for your listening pleasure here. Let me know what you think!

This is the second book I've narrated for Brian, after we had such a nice collaboration going last year on Flicker World. What The Luck is a travelogue with Sci-Fi elements, filled with funny plot-twists everywhere our hero goes - from Texas to Japan. 

It took me about the same time to narrate as the previous book, in the same setup as before (i.e. my linen cupboard that has since become my new streaming booth). We started work on the project in January, with the plan to work around my day job and other creative projects. A few months later the COVID crisis started hitting hard, upsetting my schedule and routine. I started daily Stardew Streams, chaos at my dayjob didn't make things easier, until I finally received word from my oncologist that it might be best to skip work until further notice. This caused a break in my narration schedule for a few months until June, with about 40% of the book in the can.

With the dayjob being put on hold indefinitely (YEY!), I had time to delve in and head for the finish line, narrating the remaining 60% of the book over the course of July and August. And now we have a product available on Audible and Amazon, with iTunes following shortly (it takes a week or so longer)!

Post Production

Narrating is only part of the whole process, and as you can imagine, no read is ever perfect the first time around. I frequently make mistakes while narrating, or I need to wait for some other technical titbit. Imagine a tourist on a noisy motor bike or hired sports car driving by on Ocean Drive, or one of my upstairs neighbours starting pouring out a bucket of water slowly for about 10 minutes (yeah, savour the moment). Those bits need to be edited out, and that's part of my job too. 

Thankfully I have a background in video editing, and I can use the same tools for the job that I'd use to edit one of my YouTube videos: Premiere Pro. Shortcuts to trim out bits (Q and W, combined with the Cut Tool) make this a breeze. Still it takes time to do, and the more time you invest, the better the product will be. Plus, you want to enjoy what you're doing, and not rush yourself.

As a guide, to produce one hour of narration, it takes me roughly

• 1.5 hours to read (perhaps longer)
• 2 hours to edit
• 0.5 hours to export and upload
• possibly 0.5 hours to fix issues after delivery

After I upload a few chapters, Brian then spends time to listen to my delivery and corrects anything I may have screwed up (in this case, Japanese pronunciations). Once everything is online, we both start listening to the whole book from beginning to end and check if there's anything else that needs tweaking, either creatively or technically. 

We use ACX for delivery and distribution, a company that acts as an intermediary and distributor for Amazon, Audible and iTunes. They require that we follow strict technical guidelines to make sure the listening experience is excellent (i.e. levels and sample rate, the mic and compression need to sound good, etc). 

Premiere Pro has tools to make sure I sound handsome, but sometimes it can happen that although the levels are technically correct, one chapter just sounds louder/quieter than the next (because... it is). Some manual tweaking is required to make the book as a whole production sound as good as we want it to be.

When we're both happy, Brian presses the big "Submit" button, at which point the Quality Control department at ACX listens to the whole book and as soon as they are happy, the title is officially for sale on Audible and Amazon. Apple then do their own checks, which is why the iTunes release takes a little longer. 

Book Trailer

While waiting for ACX to do their thing, Brian put together a promotional trailer for the release of the audio book. He's used the character animation tool iClone and threw in some photos that feature scenes from the real-world locations the book is based on. It'll all make sense when you're familiar with the story. Sadly Patreon doesn't let me embed it here, but I can give you a plain link to the video. 

If you're interested to learn how he did this from a 3D point of view, there's a series called Over The Shoulder on Brian's channel, in which he goes into great detail. 

What's Next

I have a couple of Supporter Exclusive "behind the scenes" treats for you about the audio book production process, watch out for those next. 

This week I have my head buried in PHP and CSS code, as I refresh both of my main websites. It's a challenging job on both a technical and mental level, and I have a video on how I'm doing it coming up. I'm very happy with the outcome, and I enjoy the process, but it's taking time away from making videos at the moment. 

If I work how to do it, I'll share my Trello Board of planned videos with you soon :-)