Apple Audiobooks; Not for the Fainthearted

From Debra Purdy Kong’s blog via her comments on Audrey Driscoll’s blog, I recently learned that Apple is offering to convert the ebooks into auto-narrated audiobooks – for free. Audiobooks are popular and the price was right, so I investigated the prospect. I found that I did not have to get my books into the Apple Store on my own, rather the conversion is done in partnership with Draft2Digital. I already had my books on D2D, but I was only distributing them to the two European stores, using Smashwords for Apple and all the rest. I would have to switch to D2D to be able to take advantage of the offer. Which I did, and adding all the other stores while dropping Smashwords for distribution, while I was at it.

So here’s the deal. To create an Apple audiobook, you simply select your book on D2D, and click on the audiobook tab next to the description of your book. Here you are offered two options; one to to work Finaway Voice, and the other to have them auto-narrated by Apple. Clicking on the Apple narration takes you to a very (i.e. too) simple interface to create your audiobook.

First, you will need a square cover for your book, which you can either provide a (3000×3000 pixels) one, or let D2D make one from your ebook cover. I had made square covers for my Google audiobooks, but I had to up size them to the 3000×3000 size required by Apple.

Next you have a choice of two voice tones for narrators; a soprano voice, i.e. a female voice, or a baritone, i.e. male voice. And that, my friends, is the only choice you have. Apple actually has 6 AI narrators; one in each sex for fiction and romances, a slightly different one for science fiction and fantasy, and a very serious one for non-fiction. However, the narrator comes with the genre of your book, you don’t get to choose more than the genre.

After you select the sex of your narrator, and the genre of your book, you get to choose your price, and then agree that, among other things, that you will not be able to make changes in the audiobook without paying for them, and that you need to keep the book listed for at least 6 months. And that the conversion process may take up to 2 months .Agree and you’re done. If there is anything more to do after the audiobook is generated, nothing was mentioned.

Debra Purdy Kong decided not to go with the auto-narrated books for reasons you can read in her post. I decided to take advantage of the offer, not without some misgiving. The primary reason for signing on is that my auto-narrated Google books now account for 1/3 of my sales – over 12,000 copies since May of 2022 – and their ratings match their ebook ratings, so that it seems my auto-narrated customers are happy with Google’s results. I would think Apple wouldn’t do auto-narration half-assed, despite the total lack of control the author has over the final result, so I expect them to be as good as AI narrators get. Secondly, I sell the audiobooks for free, so I don’t have to weigh value/quality with price. If people want to look a gift horse in the mouth and complain, fine, but I won’t lose any sleep over it. Thirdly, all my books are first person narratives, so a single narrator is the natural way to read my stories. I’m not an audiobook fan, and from what I’ve sampled, I’ve found that narrators using different voices for different characters sound hokey. No doubt that’s just me. I know some audiobook fans buy books just to hear their favorite narrators. And finally, while my books on Google far outsell Apple, being able to offer my audiobooks right in the Apple Store for an attractive price, may prove to be popular. Time will tell.

I will admit that the total lack of control over the final product is a bit worrisome. I outlined my experience with Google’s audiobook procedure in this post. Suffice to say that you have not only far more options for voices – 12 different English voices for each sex; including American, British, Australian, and Indian accents – but the book is ready in hours, so that you can listen to it, or individual words, to hear how the AI pronounced them – and, if necessary, change how they are pronounced – before you publish the audiobook. For a writer of science fiction who makes up a lot of words for names and places, the ability to hear how they sound is kind of important. This lack of oversight and control makes the whole Apple audiobook venture not for the faint of heart. Or for the persnickety and /or control focused author. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, and trying new ventures is how I promote my books. I’ll report back in a few months to let you know how I fared.

Is It Just Me?

— Mark Paxson

Yes. I’m full of questions today…

I see this everywhere these days. In published books I read. In manuscripts I read for other writers. Typically when I tell a writer about this, the reaction is more or less a shrug of their shoulders. But …

What I see a lot of are books written in third person past tense that include words that shift briefly to present tense. Here’s an example from The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah:

You will be the adult now, her father had said to Vianne as they walked up to this very house for the first time. She’d been fourteen years old, her eyes swollen from crying, her grief unbearable. In an instant, this house had gone from being the family’s summer house to a prison of sorts. Maman had been dead less than two weeks when Papa gave up on being a father. Upon their arrival here, he’d not held her hand or rested a hand on her shoulder or even offered a hand kerchief to dry her tears.

Another example from the same book:

Vianne had been in so much pain it was impossible to think of anyone else, especially a child as willful and impatient and loud as Isabelle. Vianne still remembered those first days here: Isabelle shrieking and Madame spanking her.

When I searched for the word “here” in the book on my kindle I found numerous examples of this. But it’s not just “here” that to me sounds like present tense inserted into a past tense narrative. For example, in the middle of a paragraph like above, the line might be something like, “she felt upset now” even though the paragraph is about an event that happened in the past. And it’s not told in first person. It’s third person.

To me, words like here in the above and the occasional use of other words like now are present tense words. They don’t belong in a narrative that is told in past tense.

Am I missing something? Because I really do see this everywhere. I don’t know if when I read for pleasure, I’m just catching things that I never saw before or if this is a new development. Or … am I just imaging that this is a problem and it really isn’t?

Do You Think About These Things

— Mark Paxson

A couple of years ago, I made a commitment to get more active in local writing groups. I joined one such group. We meet once a month to talk about what we’re doing. offer advice and support to each other, and also organize local events, including a day long conference that was presented this past September.

We are discussing putting on a few events in 2024. Each focusing on different aspects of the writing process. At our last meeting to discuss these events, the President of the group offered up some different ideas. One of them was to focus on “character.”

I wish I had taken notes of what was said about what this event would cover, because I spent the entire conversation thinking “people actually think about these things while they write?” For instance, how to make character drive your story. Do you think about that as you write a story?

Another potential topic was point of view. I kind of get this as a topic, particularly after reading the last manuscript I read for another writer. It definitely had point of view issues, but I don’t know how this topic could be turned into an effective workshop topic.

My approach to POV is to decide what the POV will be when I start writing. Sometimes it’s first person, sometimes third, and sometimes it is multiple POV. One of my novels has a first person POV, but from three different characters’ perspectives in alternating chapters.

Once I decide, I stick with that POV choice and I hardly think about it again as I write. The POV is the POV.

I am intrigued by how different writers approach writing a story. Pantsers versus plotters. Idea boards. Mood boards. Character sketches. Back stories that never make it into the story. Writing from beginning to end versus jumping around. Do you know the ending before you start?

Here’s what I do and what I think about while I write. I get an idea, frequently from a prompt, but occasionally from something I observe or just come up with out of thin air. If the idea intrigues me, I consider whether I want to give it a try. If I do … I just start writing.

I think my typical start is to think of the story in first person, because most of my ideas are about putting a specific person, or type of person, into a specific situation … and then seeing where it takes me. Occasionally, I decide from the outset that third person might work better, or at some point during the wriing, I realize that third person would work better so I convert what I’ve already written to third person and proceed from there.

I almost never know what the ending will be when I start writing. I just finished a draft of a short story. It’s first person and it doesn’t need to be more than that because it’s pretty short and there’s no need for a third person narration. When I started, it was from a prompt, and I had no idea what the story was going to be, except for the prompt to start me off. As I pondered the story, I came up with an idea to go further with the prompt into something, but the end still mystified me.

And at some point, I came up with what I thought would be a great final line, and that guided me towards a potential ending. Except something else happened … I came up with an ending that didn’t match that “great final line,” but I thought this new ending was a better way to end it, so that’s the direction I went in.

But that’s about it in terms of what I think about while writing. I don’t think about “character” and what to do with it. I find a POV and I stick with it. And just see where the words take me.

Maybe this is the difference between being a pantser and a plotter. I’m a pantser, definitely a pantser. Maybe plotters think more about these types of things?

Anyway, do you think about things like this while you’re writing? What do you think about while you’re writing? Do you think while you write? 😉

Facebook Ads

— Mark Paxson

In my ocassional, but neverending, quest to find some promotion efforts that will succeed, A writer friend we talk about occasionally in our video chat has told me that she has success with Facebook ads. After months and months of delay, I finally tried two ads over the last couple of weeks.

My cover artist charged me $25 to design each ad and I spent about $50 to run each ad on Facebook. I won’t claim to be an expert at this point, but here’s my experience.

You have to have a business page on FB to be able to run ads. You can’t run ads if all you have is a personal page.

There appear to be two different ways to create ads on FB. There is the “Create Ads” option and the “Ads Manager” option. As near as I can tell, they create two different types of ads. What the differences are I have absolutely no idea, but the Create Ads option isn’t as advanced or complicated as the Ads Manager option.

I made my first ad with te Create Ads option and that led to a rookie mistake. I believe, without any evidence of course, that the best ad is one that is clickable so the viewer can click on it and go straight to where the product can be purchased. I did not do that with this first ad and when I went back and looked throughout the Create Ads option, I couldn’t see anywhere to make it clickable in that fashion.

No, instead, it appears that viewers clicking on my first ad were given an option to send me a message or to view my business page on FB. The result was that I got messages from several people begging me for free copies of my book and several others who wanted to sell me their promotion “expertise.”

I set my budget for the ad at $8 a day for a week. I have no idea in the Create Ads option how that money is spent. Unlike in the Ads Manager, where it describes it as an auction, the Create Ads option doesn’t say anything about what happens with that $8 a day. (To be honest, I have no idea how an “auction” works when running ads.)

After realizing that I screwed up the clickable nature of the first ad, I burrowed a little deeper into the FB ad mechanism and decided to use the Ads Manager option for my second ad. I found where to make the ad clickable to take the viewer to where the book is available and added the link from Draft2Digital that shows all of the stores where the ebook is available.

I didn’t get any messages for the second ad like I did for the first ad, so I think I got the clickable function right. But here’s where one of the biggest problems is. While FB allows you to preview your ad, all that does is give you the chance to see what the ad looks like. It doesn’t actually allow you to see how the ad works … as in clicking it to see where the click takes you. As a result, I simply don’t know for sure how the ads function.

The end result of this is that the first ad reached 2,205 viewers. The second ad reached almost 13,000 viewers. What those viewers did when they saw the ad is mostly a mystery. I’m assuming that the vast, vast, vast majority just scrolled right on by.

Since the ads ran, after several weeks without any sales of any of my books, I got four sales for the book covered by the first ad and three sales for the book covered by the second ad. I believe there may be a few more that wander in as sales from the different channels get reported to Draft2Digital (not all channels report them immediately). But it won’t be enough to cover my expenses.

Ad design costs of $50 plus ad distribution costs of $100 versus about $10 in revenue. Well, again, the math on this just doesn’t work out.

I know that there are those who can make these ads work. There are secrets buried in the process of making and running these ads. The Ads Manager has different “objectives” for the ads. Maybe if I had chosen a different objective, I would have done better. Maybe if I understood the auction method better I could have tailored the ads better. There are all sorts of tricks to this. Tricks that I’m completely clueless about. I found a lot of the “helpful” parts of the Facebook ad info, to be either completely devoid of any actual help or to be like reading Greek.

So … I guess the thing is that doing something like an ad is for those who really get into the details and learn the ins and outs of how ads work.

Are You Writing?

I think that most of the regular readers of this blog are writers of one sort or another. That being the case, I have a question for all you writers; how’s your writing going these days? Following some of the blogs of this site’s usual suspects, I’ve gotten the impression that writing isn’t going all that well, at least fiction writing, for some of us. I know that I’m in that boat, and I’m wondering how many of you find yourself sharing that boat.

In my case, I haven’t written any fiction since February, and that was mostly revising something I’d started last fall and abandoned. I abandoned it again after adding maybe 10K words. Since then I have managed to maintain my habit of writing an hour each morning by writing two blog posts a week. I’ve also spent the odd moments all spring and summer daydreaming a new story in fits, starts, and lots of dead ends. And I’m still not at a point where I can say that I have an actual story that readers might like to read. With winter looming and with it, nothing better to do than write, I really would like to find that story. The clock is ticking.

So how about you? Are you busy writing away? Great. Motivate us. Please.

Or are you like me, floundering? Are you searching for a story that you can get excited enough about to sit down and start putting it into words? And if you are floundering, do you have any idea why? Have you arrived at a point in life where you are wondering why you are trying to do this? Or is it simply a case of a lack of energy or health? Or is it a lack of motivation i.e. you’ve written books, and you are wondering if you need to write any more? Or are you like me; experiencing a lack of a new and interesting story ideas to develop? Or do you think it’s simply a temporary case of writer’s block? In short, are you desperate enough to write a blog post about not being able to write, just for something to write?

Please share your experiences with your fellow writers in the comments below. Misery loves company.

One Year Later

After a decade of publishing through Amazon’s paperback and digital platforms, I made the switch to Draft2Digital a little over a year ago. I’ve written here about my early experiences and wanted to provide an update.

Back then, I published two new books — a novella and a short story collection. After I got those books up and out there, I decided to republish my earlier efforts as well. So, now I have five books published through D2D.

As I’ve written before, if for no other reason than that my books are now more broadly available, I love the results with D2D. Last week, I spent a couple of days in Portland, Oregon. I made a stop at Powell’s Books and scanned the sections to see if any of my books were on the shelves. I even typed my name into their computer to make sure.

No, none of my books were in physical form in their bookstore, but all of them are available on Powell’s website. Just as they are at B & N, Books-A-Million, Walmart, the Harvard Book Store, Smashwords, and numerous other on-line bookselling platforms. I consider that a success.

Since I made the switch to D2D, I’ve sold 162 books via the platform. Not incredible numbers, but I have no idea whether the old way would have been any better. The last novel I published on Amazon sold fewer than 100 copies/downloads and no matter what kind of promo opportunities I try, nothing seems to change those numbers. So, in the light of minimal sales, why not go out as broadly as possible.

If you’re looking around for something other than Amazon and would like to see your books published more broadly, I encourage you to look into D2D or some of the other platforms that promise such distribution (IngramSpark, for instance). Something needs to be done to break the dominance of Amazon and these companies offer authors reasonable alternatives.

Are We Wrong?

— Mark Paxson

We spend a lot of time around here bashing the idea of rules for writing. Particularly in our video chats. But …

The local writers’ group is hosting a conference in September. I was looking at the speakers. One of them teaches creative writing at a local community college and will be teaching writers how to write a dynamic scene that moves the story along.

Just the idea of teaching a creative writing class made me wonder and ask the question in the title of this post. Are we wrong about our ridiculing of the rules of writing?

The reality is that all writers are guided by conventions or rules or structures or something similar in their writing. Whether writing to the conventions of a particular genre or following the three act structure or paying attention to voice or countless other things, we all do some of this. Some more consciously than others.

I know that if I do it, it is in my subconscious. I just come up with an idea and start writing and go from here to there and to over there and eventually wind my way to an ending. Without regard to genre needs or three acts or needing a conflict here or a dramatic scene there. I just … write.

But I do know that there are things that I’ve learned in decades of reading books voraciously. That had to do something to me that impacts how I tell a story when I sit down to write. All of the books I’ve read over the years taught me something. They must have. And so, maybe the “rules” have been embedded in my subconscious and I follow them, or at least some of them, without even thinking about it.

But back to that speaker who teaches creative writing. I shudder at the idea of taking a creative writing class. I shudder at the idea of an MFA program. I just feel like those are environments that demand … rules!!

A couple of months ago I participated in a book fair at a local book store. they had an author speak about her writing and publishing process. Throughout her presentation she kept on saying things with the lead in “okay, you have to do x.” I wanted to run up there and tell her to stop. To knock it off.

But maybe there is a point to some of this for some writers. Maybe a lot of writers. Maybe the “rules” need to be stated for some instead of being processed below the surface by others. Maybe there’s something to be said for providing the guidelines and structures for writers and not being so dismissive of the “rules” of writing.

I don’t know. I still think that a lot of what passes for the “rules” is nonsense, but if it helps some writers do their thing, I’ll let it go. Even if I occasionally ridicule those “rules” here and elsewhere.