I'm a machine!

[Paul Whybrow]

I’ve been devoting myself to turning my Cornish Detective crime novels into audiobooks since April 23rd. As I detailed elsewhere, narrating and mastering the recordings takes much longer than one predicts. A chapter that lasts twenty minutes might well take ten times that to master—then there are re-recording and remastering sections ruined by noise pollution and mispronunciations.

I’m listening to the recorded chapters of Book 3 as I write this, which I’ll upload to ACX tonight, for their quality control test if it sounds OK. I’m still waiting for their approval of Book 2. I’ve mastered one-quarter of Book 4 and recorded one-third of the chapters of Book 5, the final story.

I intended to complete this tedious task by the start of 2021.

I’m on target.

I’m a machine, I’m a machine….

Here I am!

How has your writing year gone so far?

 

[RK Wallis]

Stick with it, it’ll be worth it. Audio books are popular.

I intended to finish the first draft of my latest book by the end of November. I’m on track for then or a week after.

 

[Robinne Weiss]

My writing year has been surprisingly productive, given I was homeless for 3 months (in a way it was good this coincided with our lockdown...put all the misery in one compact package), sold a house, moved into a new one ... I've published three books in 2020, wrote the first draft of a new novel, and planned a book festival that (crossing fingers) looks like it's actually going to be able to go ahead in two weeks, as we are still Covid-free here.

What I haven't done is anything at all to actually sell more books (except for my lockdown giveaways, which went well). My Amazon ads have languished, and my grand plans to update the covers of my Dragon Slayer books and do some A/B ad testing with them have only gotten underway in the last 24 hours (thanks to a day of solid rain that kept me out of the garden). And I haven't sent out a newsletter since ... maybe March? David Gaughran's video which @Paul Whybrow posted recently was a good prod to see if I can get onto the marketing stuff in the last two months of the year ...