{"id":171,"date":"2020-01-02T23:36:22","date_gmt":"2020-01-03T03:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/?p=171"},"modified":"2020-02-01T09:22:42","modified_gmt":"2020-02-01T13:22:42","slug":"learning-about-recording-audiobooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/2020\/01\/02\/learning-about-recording-audiobooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning About Recording Audiobooks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now that the holidays are done, I finally can spend some time working on the book launch. In case you didn&#8217;t notice, I am launching The Caravan Chronicles on February 16th, 2020. With the release now 6 weeks out, it&#8217;s time to work on all the other &#8220;stuff&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first thing that happened over the holidays was the placing of the &#8220;order&#8221; for the books I&#8217;ll be selling locally. Even though I&#8217;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&#8217;t know how long it would take for that kind of volume to be produced. Turns out I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The other major task I&#8217;ve taken on is one that is both really familiar and brand new to me all at the same time: recording an audiobook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s definitely new at the same time. How?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For everything I have ever done in the voiceover world before, it&#8217;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&#8217;ve done. So for me, to sit down and use a new mic wasn&#8217;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 <strong><em>amount<\/em><\/strong> of talking I am doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most of the main video voiceover stuff I have done has been limited to less than 15 minutes. For podcasts, sure I&#8217;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&#8217;s such a different experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But for now I&#8217;m off to record the chapter on Las Vegas before heading to bed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now that the holidays are done, I finally can spend some time working on the book launch. In case you didn&#8217;t notice, I am launching The Caravan Chronicles on February 16th, 2020. With the release now 6 weeks out, it&#8217;s time to work on all the other &#8220;stuff&#8221;. The first thing that happened over the &hellip;<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/2020\/01\/02\/learning-about-recording-audiobooks\/\" class=\"more-link pen_button pen_element_default pen_icon_arrow_double\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Learning About Recording Audiobooks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174,"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/174"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewklem.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}