Now that the holidays are done, I finally can spend some time working on the book launch. In case you didn’t notice, I am launching The Caravan Chronicles on February 16th, 2020. With the release now 6 weeks out, it’s time to work on all the other “stuff”.
The first thing that happened over the holidays was the placing of the “order” for the books I’ll be selling locally. Even though I’ll be doing a push for sales online through retailers like Amazon and the like, a big portion of my advertising and push will be locally through stores and events here in Moncton. So with that being the plan, I had to place a large order for books over the Christmas holidays. Being new to the world of self-publishing through these various platforms, I didn’t know how long it would take for that kind of volume to be produced. Turns out I’ll have my inventory far earlier than expected. This works out to my advantage as I can get a few sneak copies to the right people and go from there.
The other major task I’ve taken on is one that is both really familiar and brand new to me all at the same time: recording an audiobook.
I’ve been doing audio-voiceover work for my own personal videos as well as content for my employer for many years. But this is the first time I’m actually having to do it for an audiobook. In trying to keep my costs down, I opted to narrate the audiobook myself. My wife was nice enough to buy me a nice new microphone and mount kit for my PC so I have been slowly pumping out chapter after chapter. But as familiar as it seems, it’s definitely new at the same time. How?
For everything I have ever done in the voiceover world before, it’s been done via recording stuff into my phone, dumping that recording into Audacity to engineer it, or mix it with some video for some of my tutorial stuff I’ve done. So for me, to sit down and use a new mic wasn’t that big of a deal as I still read from a script (the ebook version actually) and just record it chapter at a time. The biggest difference is the sheer amount of talking I am doing.
Most of the main video voiceover stuff I have done has been limited to less than 15 minutes. For podcasts, sure I’d talk for an hour but I always did it opposite of someone and it was more conversational like than anything else. Now with recording the book, I am reading entire chapters and have learned it’s such a different experience.
You spent a lot of time making sure that you read the text exactly as written but you often want to make sure you emphasize certain words, or speak the sentence a certain way so it conveys things the way you want. I’ve also discovered that keeping water handy has been a huge help. It can be quite exhausting recording all of that audio and your mouth gets dry in no time flat.
Once all of the audio is recorded, I have to go through the process of engineering it which I suspect will take much longer. The engineering part consists mainly of flattening areas where there’s no sound, eliminating hiss or extra pops, and leveling the audio so it sounds as clean as possible. I am really hoping I can get this done and submitted before the official launch date but only time will tell.
But for now I’m off to record the chapter on Las Vegas before heading to bed.
