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Failure’s Freedom

“If you ain’t got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.” Like a Rolling Stone – Bob Dylan

Those two lines from Like a Rolling Stone are an anthem for me. I sing them along with Bob every time the tune comes up in my “Liked Music” playlist. I love the insight into freedom they imply. I think they could, and should, be the anthem of the vast majority of author/indie publishers as well. Them’s that aren’t making money at it. With nothing to lose, we’ve the freedom to write exactly what we want to write, how we want to write it. In short, it allows us to;

“Be yourself, no matter what they say.” An Englishman in New York – Sting

Stories are art. They’re also a consumer product, so it’s understandable that we’re tempted to write the stories we think – or hope – readers will buy and enjoy. But if you’ve been publishing stories for any length of time, you know that discovery – merely giving potential readers the opportunity to choose to read your book – is an almost insurmountable barrier to finding readers, and thus, commercial success. So, given the near virtual certainty of commercial failure, unless you’re a social media celebrity or a well heeled and wily entrepreneur, we author/publishers can safely ignore commercial considerations and simply write stories that appeal to us. We can create pure art, art as a unique expression of our creativity, and then publish it for the rare reader who somehow stumbles upon it and appreciates our vision. Their numbers don’t count, though I should point out that every popular genre, sub-genre, trope, and story beat was once a unique and original expression of some author. We’ve nothing to lose by swinging for the fence.

I should also point out that author/publishers can be in a unique position in the publishing world, in that we can actually publish our undiluted vision. In traditional publishing, authors are not trusted to publish the books they write. Books in traditional publishing, and even in indie-publishing these days, if you listen to the experts, are ensemble creations, co-produced with the help of various editors who work to make it better than the writer’s original version. And since these books are definitely commercial products, “better” probably means more salable. Some, maybe even most authors, appreciate this help – in the various acknowledgments at the end of books, they often give a great deal of credit to their editor. Stockholm syndrome perhaps? But as an author/publisher we can, if we’re brave enough, publish our work in its pure form. We can be ourselves, no matter what – any editor – might say.

Still, you’re likely thinking, we must consider the readers. What readers? Well, to be less snarky, let me rephrase that to say that, we should trust readers. All we owe them is an honest blurb, a sample of our writing, and the best book we can write. We need not concern ourselves with their tastes and expectations. We needn’t worry if they’ll like it or not. If I learned one thing in art, it is that someone somewhere will always appreciate anything. There’ll be readers who will like any story we write. And if we write a book that pleases us, we can at least be certain it pleases someone. A bullet dodged.

Given the steep odds against any commercial success, it seems to me that following our unique vision, without compromise, is actually the wisest course to follow. With nothing to lose, why not?

Of course you all do that already, right?

Creating Auto-Narrated Audiobooks on Google Play

Based on Chuck Litka’s post Adventures in Audiobooks, I decided to go with Google’s audiobook option only. So this post refers exclusively to auto-narrated audiobooks on the Google Play platform.

I have finished setting up and editing one audiobook, which is now live. From that experience, I can make the following observations.

Once you have an ebook live on Google Play Books, it’s surprisingly easy to create an audiobook. That said, I fumbled my way through the process, and my first book went live in an unedited state. I will have to figure out how to keep that from happening with any others I publish, because it is absolutely necessary to listen to the entire book before finalizing it. There are step-by-step instructions in something called the Auto-Narrated Audiobooks Learning Center, but when I started the process, I found myself being hustled through a number of steps without really knowing what was happening. No harm done, however, as far as I know.

On the plus side, once the audiobook was live, it was easy to whip it into shape. I called up the Audiobook Text, which allowed me to both listen to and see the text. I could start and stop playback, make changes in the text, and save them. It’s possible to have more than one version of an audiobook (with different narrator voices, for example), but only one can be live.

There is a large number and variety of narrator voices available, including male and female voices in different age ranges (18-30, 31-45, 45-60, and 60+) with “standard” American, British, or Australian accents. Voices for a few languages other than English are available, but it’s recommended to use these only for texts in those languages. There are no options for English spoken with accents other than those I’ve already mentioned, or with regional accents.

It’s possible to use more than one voice in a book! Theoretically, you could have dialogue in as many voices as you have characters, but I think this would complicate the setup process. So far, I’ve used only one main voice, with a second one to read brief quotations that open a few chapters in my book.

Changes made to the audiobook text are not reflected in the ebook version. One hazard here is I was sorely tempted to improve the text! I don’t know how many instances of the word “that” I was tempted to delete, but I decided to make no changes except those needed to improve or correct the speech. I want the audiobook, ebook, and paperback versions to be essentially the same, stylistic problems and all. However, I did find it helpful to add or delete commas on occasion.

The computer-generated voices sound human, much more so than the rather robotic voice of Word’s text-to-speech feature. Nevertheless, they can’t be expected to represent the full range of emotion that may be found in a work of fiction. Google’s info about auto-narrated audiobooks cautions that they work best for texts that do not require a lot of drama and emotion. Still, I found the voices I selected to be better than adequate. Quite often, the main narrator was spot-on, to the point he seemed to embody the first person narrator of the book.

Quirks and Issues

  • Stress and emphasis does not always fall where it should in a sentence. This can’t be changed by adjusting the speed of the narration, but deleting or adding commas helps sometimes. Still, I admit there are occasions when a word or sentence sounds a little “off.”
  • Sometimes there is an awkward pause between a word or sentence spoken by a character and the dialogue tag such as “he said” or “I asked.” The best solution might be to delete selected dialogue tags, but I resisted the temptation to do this, not wanting my spoken and written texts to diverge. But this is another reason to use fewer dialogue tags!
  • Weirdly, a few names are pronounced quite differently when a possessive is added. For one name, I had to provide a correct pronunciation for possessives because the default was unacceptable.
  • Homographs are common enough that you have listen for instances where the wrong pronunciation pops up. For example, the default pronunciation of the word “read” is the present tense (pronounced “reed”). When the past tense pronunciation (“red”) was needed, I had to intervene. Fortunately it’s easy to fix these; a right click on the word in the text takes you to both versions, and you can listen to them before selecting the correct one. There is an option to change the pronunciation of all instances of a word, or only one.
  • Abbreviations such as Mr. and Dr. are usually pronounced correctly, but I encountered a few situations where “Dr.” came out as “drive,” for some reason. I fixed these by spelling out the word.
  • Uncommon words, place names, or words in other languages may be mispronounced. In such cases, you can insert a different pronunciation by spelling the word differently, speaking it into your computer’s mic, or by using the International Phonetic Alphabet. I actually did that for a few place names; fortunately Wikipedia sometimes provides IPA spellings in its articles, so I was able to reproduce them with good results. You can listen to the new pronunciation before selecting it. This was about the most challenging part of the editing process.

So what do I think of Google’s Auto-Narrated Audiobooks?

I think it’s an excellent option for authors who would not otherwise consider producing audiobook versions of their books. It doesn’t cost anything and produces acceptable results.

There’s no doubt that a competent human reader or voice actor would produce a superior listening experience, but at a cost that’s likely prohibitive for most indie authors. Some may have the talents and equipment to be their own reader, but I suspect those are a minority. The AI-narrated option is available for free to anyone.

A few more considerations:

  • You have to publish your books as ebooks on Google Play before you can create audiobooks. Google requires book files in ePub, not Word. I used Calibre (a free program) to convert a copy of the Word doc I used for the Amazon Kindle version of my book into an ePub, which I then uploaded to Google Play Books. It helped that the Word doc was properly formatted and had a linked table of contents.
  • You need a square cover image for the audiobook, but it looks like the rectangular ebook cover image is squared up automatically with a block of matching colour, so you can get away with that.
  • You need to commit the time needed to listen to your audiobook from start to finish in order to correct any serious or even mildly annoying problems in the finished product. The book I worked with is a fairly hefty tome, which ended up being more than 15 hours of listening time. It took me a solid week to complete, spending 2 to 3 hours each day. (Actually, this reminded me why I prefer reading fiction rather than listening to it.)

I encourage anyone who wants to offer their books in audio format to give this a try. The only cost is your time.

Once I’ve converted one more book to auto-narrated audio format I will write a post on my own blog with more details. That should appear in another week or two.

Featured image from Pexels

Adventures in Audiobooks

As promised, here is my report on my experiences with the various free programs to convert ebooks into auto-generated audiobooks.

The first off Google.

Google’s conversion process offers 12 female and 12 male voice options with various accents.

You can use different voices for different characters within the book.

You can listen to the book, modify the pronunciation of words, and edit the text of the book. Improvements to the technology are automatically applied to all audio books.

You can charge and change your price as you like, including free.

The process is pretty simple, given the many options.

It takes only hours for the audiobook to be available for sale.

Next Apple via Draft2Digital.

This service offers you essentially no options. Apple/D2D chooses from 2 female and 2 male voices according to the story’s genre.

You can not listen to the narration before the book is released nor modify pronunciation or text.

You can charge what you like. Changes after release will cost money. You cannot withdraw the audiobook in the first six months.

The process takes a minute, given that you essentially have no options to choose from beyond price.

You can set your price, including free.

It takes months for audiobooks to be available for sale. Five of the twelve ebooks I uploaded on the first of January 2024 remain unconverted on the 29th of April 2024. Conversions appeared at random over the course of five months.

Lastly, Amazon.

You currently have a choice of five female voices including one with a British Accent, and three male voices. More are promised coming this summer.

Promised upgrades this summer include using different voices for different chapters, and improvements to the voices. It seems that you will need to manually republish the book to receive the upgrades.

You can listen to your audiobook and edit pronunciation and the speed a word is spoken prior to release.

You are limited to books under about 240K words, or 27 hours of audiobook narration.

Books require a table of contents. The Kindle Create app will add tables of contents automatically.

The process is simple, and depending on how much you want to review and modify, fast.

Minimum price is $3.99. Audiobooks are listed in both Audible and Amazon

Are auto-generated audiobooks worth it?

Note: My audiobooks are free on Google & Apple.

Google – First month sales 431 audiobooks vs 288 ebooks. Second month 1,179 audiobooks vs 506 ebooks, with 5,813 audiobooks sold April 2022 – Dec 2022. This month, April 2024 I’ve sold 461 copies of both audiobooks and ebooks to date.

Apple – Given the erratic release of my books, and the limits of D2D reports, I’ll offer my March and April-to-date numbers. In March I sold 33 audiobooks vs 63 ebooks. In April to date (28th) I’ve sold 51 audiobooks vs 83 ebooks. Five month total: 127 audiobooks sold.

Amazon – I am only including the sales of books at retail price. In March I sold five $3.99 audiobooks vs 40 paid books. Of those 40, 24 were my new releases. In April I sold 2 audiobooks vs 15 retail priced ebooks.

Major downsides.

Google – the necessity of converting your manuscript into an epub on your own which may not provide a perfect ebook to convert. The last book I converted missed chapter headings, so they did not appear in the table of contents for the audiobook, though the text was there. I changed the chapters titles to include them.

Apple – The lack of any options or control over the product and their whimsical attitude to actually publishing the audiobook.

Amazon – the limit to the length of the book, the limits to pricing.

My takeaway.

Audiobooks increase total sales significantly, and can boost ebook sales as well – in proportion to ebook sales volume. They extend your reach into a new and growing market. And, well, you’re in the game at no expense to you.

Auto-generated audiobooks provide an acceptable listening experience, especially if priced below human-voiced audiobooks. I’ve had no reviews critical of the narration, and rating parallel the ebook version. They will only get better over time. And probably fast.

All three programs are free to use vs hundreds to thousands of dollars needed for a human to read your book. This gives you flexibility in pricing.

Rules and Triggers

— Mark Paxson

Audrey Driscoll writes some great stuff about writing. Her latest is about rules and an experiment she ran. Go read her post to see what it was.

One of the things that bothers me about all of these social media “conversations” about the rules of writing is that I wonder if anybody actually reads a story with the “rules” in mind. I don’t. Of course, that may be because I don’t believe in the “rules,” but still I read a story for the enjoyment of it, for the escape it provides. While I’m reading something, I’m not paying attention to sentence structure or word choice or the use of adverbs. I’m just reading the story.

Isn’t that what a writer’s objective should be? Isn’t that also a reader’s objective? To fall into the story and stay there until the end. I don’t know of any rule I’ve heard of that would necessarily help me with that as a reader.

Yes, there are certain things that can cause me to lose interest in a story. I think my two biggest pet peeves are (a) too much description; and (b) too many characters introduced too quickly. Either of those two things can pull me out of a story pretty quickly. The first because I get bored by description and the second because it just gets too confusing too quickly. But for the rest of it … I want to read the story the way the writer wanted to tell it.

Meanwhile, a while back I saw list of Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of writing:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (My note: the old, avoid cliches nonsense.)
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

After I saw this list, I came across a completely different list that purported to be Vonnegut’s rules for writing. So, who knows? Maybe this is all BS and Vonnegut never said any of these.

Here’ is my question … do any of you think about things like this while you’re writing? I’ll be honest. I almost never do. Yes, occasionally, I decide something is too cliched, but frequently decide not to change it because if something is commonplace than it can connect to a reader more easily. Not everything in every story has to be creative and uniquely yours.

And yes, particularly when I’m editing something, I may look for words that can be cut out to make my sentences less wordy.

But I just don’t see how I could ever keep all of these things, rules, in my mind while I’m writing or even while I’m editing. The whole process would take even longer than it already does if I had to think about all of these things.

At the end of the day, what I do is … just write. I’m curious though to hear what the process looks like for people who are more concerned with these types of issues.

Which leads me to another rule, but one for publishing rather than writing. Trigger warnings. I feel like we’ve discussed this before here, but I saw this post on the topic and found it as spot on as possible on this topic.

I worked on putting together an anthology recently. One of the writers wanted a trigger warning for her story because it involved a suicide. The only problem is that the suicide was essentially the end of story reveal. I talked her out of it for that reason and suggested that, if the anthology got published, we could have a generic trigger warning for the entire anthology. Due to the theme for the collection, most stories, if not all, were going to be a bit dark.

Other writers involved in the project were dead set against any kind trigger warning. I side with them. Part of reading is the discovery and it is fiction, so none of it is real. I don’t want to discount the very real trauma people experience and can experience in reading a story, but I’m with the author of that blog post. The genre of a story, the blurb of the story, and other aspects of the book will give, or should give, enough of a clue about the content for most readers, and as writers our job isn’t to hold a reader’s hand as they read. It is to tell them a story, that at times can be unsettling.

An Interview with Hozier

— Mark Paxson

People who follow me in other parts of the internet likely know that I am a huge fan of Hozier, an Irish musician whose very first single was Take Me To Church. The song was a huge hit becoming one of the first songs to hit one billion streams on Spotify. He followed I up with one of my favorite albums — Wasteland, Baby.

I’ve rarely heard him talk about his art, but listening to his music, I can tell he takes this stuff seriously. He touches on a lot of themes in his music and sings with an appealing passion. I saw him live in September 2019 at the Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento. The auditorium is a historic place that only seats a few thousand people. Hozier is now performing in much larger arenas.

Anyway, that’s the back story to why I’m sharing this video. A friend shared this with me a few days ago and I listened to it while I weeded the front yard yesterday. There are a lot of things in here that I think creative people deal with, but that a lot of us don’t necessarily talk about.

I share it here … just because. I found it interesting and refreshing to hear that a man who has achieved such monumental success in such a short time struggles with many of the same things I do.

Audiobooks on Amazon

Did any, or all, of you fellow authors with books on Amazon receive an invite to try out Amazon’s new beta program of converting your ebooks to audiobooks to be sold on Audible using their virtual voice narration?

I did and I was wondering if anyone else received the invite and if you have, have you tried this service. I gave it a try, so if you have the opportunity and are interested in my experience, let me know, and I’ll describe my experience.

Proofreading with Google Docs and Grammarly

I’m a sloppy writer. I simply transcribe the voice in my head, paying minimal attention to the words I’m typing. Being a lifelong touch typist, I can clip along, stopping only to correct all those red underlined misspellings. Moreover, I tend to read what I expect to read, so between these two characteristics, I can read my manuscript three to six times and still miss many double words, many missing little words, and never see the difference between where and were, or its and it’s. I need a copy editor. I need my wife. And my beta readers. And Google Docs and now, Grammarly.

I write in LibreOffice, which has a rudimentary grammar checking function – one that begins and ends at telling me when to use “a” and “an.” Several years ago, I discovered that Google Docs has a much better one, so I uploaded and ran all my books through Google Docs to clean them up a bit. For my newest novel, I decided to add the free version of Grammarly to my proofreading arsenal. So how does this system work? Can you rely on Google Docs or Grammarly, or both to do your proofreading for you?

Google Docs does a good job of finding double words, some wrong words, and most missing words. But not all, as I discovered when I uploaded the Google corrected copy to Grammarly. It is good for detecting the proper tense, but it doesn’t pay much attention to punctuation or spacing.

For Grammarly, I used the free web version to proofread my latest book after running it through Google Docs. I uploaded it chapter by chapter to be edited. Before Grammarly edits your work, you’re given several options to choose from to set the level and aim of Grammarly’s editing process. I chose “Expert” “Informal” and “Tell a story” as my guidelines. So how did Grammarly do?

First off, Grammarly loves compound words. Google Doc never mentioned them. Before, I never knew when to compound adjectives, so that I almost never did. But after Grammarly, I’m going to compound every damn pair, as it seems that anything and everything goes. I’m exaggerating, but it was a lesson in the use of compound words. Besides telling me to use all those hyphens, I’d say 75% of the suggested edits involved adding or subtracting commas. I made the lazy editorial decision just to go along with Grammarly on commas, it should know, right? Before, I put them in places that I knew they belonged and when the voice in my head paused, and where I think the auto-narrator of my books should pause as well. However, Grammarly not only put in more of them, but I think it eliminated commas that my wife thinks should’ve been there. Though to be fair, while I believe that I would’ve also put in the missing ones – they were places that I would’ve put them – I can’t swear that I did actually have them there before Grammarly removed them. Grammarly also found more missing words, and corrected the wrong words, i.e. where instead of were, et al that Google Doc missed. So it was a plus, overall.

Grammarly also offered several suggestions for phases that it thought were too wordy. I ignored those suggestions. Given free reign, I’ve a feeling that Grammarly would strip creative writers of their authorial voice. Thus, my readers will read a few extra words, like it or lump it. It also would occasionally tease its premium service, telling me of two hundred ways it could make my chapter less wordy and confusing, if I paid them. The whole experience, however, was easy. You just click a button to make the suggested changes you approve of, so that it didn’t take me more than two hours to go through a 105K novel. However, you can, and should be fussier than I was. Lesson learned.

I was confident that when I handed this Google Doc & Grammarly proofread ms over to my wife, it would be a clean copy. It wasn’t. There was that question of missing commas, which can easily be addressed in the future, but both services also didn’t catch a few missing word – those little “to”s and “the”s – and neither made any objections to the semicolons I used, which my wife, a stickler for semicolons, objected to.

Note; for example, I’m editing this in Google Docs, and it underlined in red “semi-colon” just now, and suggested “semicolon,” but it didn’t object to the “semi-colon” when it appeared in the line above. These are the inconsistencies that make the Google Doc less than perfect for proofreading.)

Anyway, the semicolon issue can be fixed by going back to always using em-dashes for everything, like I have in the past.

So, looking at the big picture, when I started writing, my wife would find half a dozen or more typos and errors on every page. I’ve gotten more mindful over the last decade, so that now, together with Doc and Grammarly, there can be two, three, four pages without a single error, and most of those errors involve commas this time around. Which is to say, I’ve seen a significant improvement in the process. And knowing all the errors I corrected in Google Docs and Grammarly, I have to give a lot of that credit to Docs and Grammarly.

So, is it worthwhile to upload your ms to Google Docs, or upload it to Grammarly, or use both, seeing that neither are perfect?

The first thing to remember is that both services are free. You can’t beat the price, especially if you’re considering hiring a proofreader or editor. You have no way of knowing if that professional editor is simply using Grammarly Pro to do their work for them. I don’t think human proofreaders guaranteed their work to be error free or your money back. Given this, it would seem to me to be time well spent doing your own proofreading with the help of these two free programs. And if you want more of an editor than a simple proofreader, it might be well worth spending a little money on a month of Grammarly premium to see all those hundreds of suggestions it has to improve your writing instead of big bucks on a professional editor. All in all, I think that the free version is good enough for most of us, especially if you’re better at proofreading than I. It could simply serve as a quick quality check, and perhaps a tutorial on the use of commas and compound words.

Bottom line; you get more than what you pay for. They’re not quite good enough to produce a perfectly clean copy all by themselves, but they certainly can save a lot of time in the proofreading process.