Hear ye, hear ye!

After something of a gap owing to other commitments (including working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, darlings! Only the best for us!), our wonderful audiobook narrator Guy Hanson has just started work on the third Sam Plank book, “Worm in the Blossom”.  Guy has the perfect voice for Sam – warm, mature, humorous and gently London.  And having read both “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, he’s also a dab hand (throat?) at adjusting his voice to encompass Martha, Conant, Wontner and all our other regulars.

If you’ve not yet sampled audiobooks – ideal for car/train/plane journeys, and good company when gardening/jogging/dog-walking – did you know that you can get a free 30-day trial to Audible (the audiobook arm of Amazon)?  With a free trial you get:

• One free audiobook of your choice – which you can keep even if you cancel after the trial (and if you’re an Amazon Prime customer, you get two free audiobooks during your trial)
• Unlimited listening to the Plus Catalogue, which contains thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and select audiobooks (including mine, of course)
• After the 30-day trial, you can download one book a month, with unlimited access to the Plus Catalogue, for £7.99/month (which renews automatically)
• And you can pause or cancel your membership at any time.

(In the interests of openness and transparency, I should tell you that – should you take out a trial or membership through my link – I get what Amazon calls a “bounty”.  Sadly not a yummy coconut chocolate bar, but just some ordinary money.)

So if you’re tempted to meet Guy/Sam and make a Sam Plank novel your free starter audiobook, here are the links: “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.

And the winners are…

Thanks to everyone who took part in the competition to win a free download code for the new audiobook of “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, the second Sam Plank novel.  (The audiobook of the first, “Fatal Forgery”, was released last year, and work will soon start on number three, “Worm in the Blossom”.)

The answer to the question Which world-famous department store is now located on Great Marlborough Street in London, opposite where Sam Plank was based at his magistrates’ court police office in the 1820s? is Liberty.  Of course it was not there in Sam’s day – it did not open until 1875 – but if you toddle along to that part of London you can still see a small part of Sam’s place of work.  The Courthouse Hotel is now on the same spot as Great Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court, and one of the hotel’s restaurants is in the old court-room.

Sorry: always thinking about Sam!  Back to the competition.  And the winners are:

• Graham Thomas
• Leigh Moss
• Susan V
• Edward Murphy
• Peggy Denk

Your emails with Audible instructions and your personal download codes are on their way to you – many congratulations.  And if any of you feels moved to leave a review…  Well, you have to ask: regular readers (and fellow self-published authors) will know that reviews matter enormously, for morale, guidance for improvement, and seduction of new readers, and for Amazon ranking purposes.

The “Canary” sings

It’s been quite the week in Sam Plank land – first my “Book of the Month” accolade for “Portraits of Pretence”, then the arrival of the bookmarks, and now the publication (if that’s the word) of the audio edition of “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.

Guy the narrator has been working like a Trojan in recent weeks, sending me clutches of chapters of “Canary”, and I have had a ball listening to it all again.  I haven’t read it since I published it, and it’s been great to hear it.  Even more importantly, it is very useful to have it to remind myself of certain character traits and biographical details as I start to wade more deeply into “Plank 5”.  Here’s where I spent most of the past weekend, during that sunny spell:

That’s my A4 “Plank 5” notebook on the left, filled with my favoured plotting method: plot points written in boxes and then joined together with arrows – some going across several pages.  If I had a dedicated writing office (I do have a desk, but it’s in the back bedroom, which is sometimes needed as, well, a back bedroom) I would have a plain white wall for the affixing of coloured Post-It notes, but as I don’t, the arrowed book will suffice.

So now the audio version of “Canary” is available.  (If you’re curious about the royalty/bounty side of audiobook sales, I’ve written about it before here.)  I trust that Audible (the audiobook member of the Amazon stable) will promote it to people who bought the audio “Fatal Forgery”, and I will need to get the word out there as well.  As before, they are going to send me a clutch of promo codes for free downloads, so I will consider how best to use those.  Last time, for “Fatal Forgery”, I offered them on a suitable audiobook forum in Goodreads, so I may do the same again.  Any other suggestions?  I could run a competition, I suppose…  Let me get back to you on that one.

Reading aloud: before and after?

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am gradually – very gradually – creating audiobooks of the Sam series.  I am doing it through a website called ACX – owned by Audible, which is in turn part of Amazon – and the basic deal is that the narrator and I share any profits fifty-fifty.  The narrator I found for “Fatal Forgery”, Guy Hanson – in essence, he’s the voice of Sam – has kindly agreed to stay fit and healthy so that he can narrate all seven books, and he’s now working on “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  He uploads chapters to ACX and I listen to them and ask for any changes.  Sometimes there will be a wrong word or a mispronunciation or a misplacing of stress, but Guy is so completely Sam-ish that my requests are few.

However, as I listen to my words read aloud, I do sometimes think, “Hmm, that’s a bit clumsily written”, or “I’ve used that word three times already this chapter – I should have thought of another”.  And sometimes Guy’s words do not exactly match the text but actually improve on it, making it smoother.  I have read the advice that authors should read their books aloud before publishing, to catch just such instances, but I’ve never done it.  I wonder whether I should from now on…

On the positive side, there is a quite a bit of Martha in “Canary”, and it is really helpful for me to reacquaint myself with her as I launch into “Plank 5”, which will focus more on her.  For instance, I have just heard her say this when spotting a fortune teller at the Bartholomew Fair: “Who would want to know their future?  If it’s bad, you’ll waste your life worrying, and if it’s good, it will be a lovely surprise.”  In “Plank 5”, I intend to have her rethink this position, giving Sam cause for great concern.

Meet the voice of Sam

As you know, the audiobook of “Fatal Forgery” has now been released.  Sales are going well: twelve so far.  It has been a great project, and one of the nicest things about it has been communicating with “my” narrator, Guy Hanson (or “AudioSam”, as he’s known in our house).  And I thought that you might like to know a little more about the fine fellow who has brought Sam to life (if you’re not keen on buying the audiobook, you can still hear an audio clip of Guy/Sam on Amazon, Audible and iTunes).  So Guy and I have done a little Q&A for you.

Me: I chose you as my ideal Sam after listening to dozens of voice audio samples on ACX.  But of course it is a two-way agreement, so when I offered you Sam, why did you agree?

Guy: I think very simply because I liked the character of Sam; he is a chap you could imagine running into in a pub in his later life and being able to spend hours just listening to his stories.

Me: And having now spent hours in his company, what do you think are Sam’s key characteristics?

Guy: Sam is a quiet, thoughtful person but tenacious in “getting his man”.

Me: I have written “Fatal Forgery” (and indeed the subsequent Sam novels) in the form of a constable’s notebook – short chapters, with dates, concentrating on action and dialogue rather than description.  Do you think this format works for an audiobook?

Guy: It works brilliantly and reflects Sam’s character too.  Interestingly it more of a challenging as a narrator, because you don’t have much of a lead in and you’re hitting the characters straight away.

Me: Many of the characters in “Fatal Forgery” appear in later Sam Plank novels too, and you have said that – if this audiobook is a success – you would like to do the others as well.  How do you keep track of each voice, so that, for instance, John Wontner always sounds the same?

Guy: I’m sure all narrators have their way of doing this, but my way is to start to build up a library of character voices.  I often add a note or two as well if there are certain thing about a character which I have used to “find” them in the first place.

Me: Most of the characters in “Fatal Forgery” are male but there are some women and girls.  How do you voice them without sounding like a parody?

Guy: Ah now, that an interesting question.  I don’t think that audiences actually have a problem with male doing female characters or vice versa (look at panto!); I think the important thing, as in any performance, is that you must be genuine and believable.

Me: Can you tell us a little about your narration process – for instance, do you read the whole book before starting, or just the chapter you’re about to record?  How long can you spend reading aloud before you have to give your voice (and perhaps your back!) a rest?

Guy: I first like to read through the first four or five chapters just to get a general feel for the piece.  I will then speak to the author and get notes on particular character traits or anything that might affect the voice or the way they speak, so accents, lisps etc.  I have to say that for the most part authors tend to let me get on with it, and then occasionally change something if it’s not right as we go along.  I will often record chapters in sections and tie them together during editing.  If you work on the principle that an hour’s completed and edited audio is around four hours’ work, you can see that a couple of hours’ narration is usually enough, before the voice starts to strain.

Plank on two fronts

Heavens, I’ve been so busy recently that I quite forgot to update you on my progress.  The crazy thing is that I am working on two Planks at once – the audiobook of “Fatal Forgery” and the final draft of “Portraits of Pretence”.

Audiobook first.  This is now published, and you can buy it all over the place – well, on Amazon, Audible and iTunes.  So far we’ve sold four!  A friend who is very big in the charity sector suggested that I should get it listed in the Talking Books catalogue for the Royal National Institute for the Blind, so I am finding out about that.  The narrator (known technically as the producer, as he did all of the fancy stuff with the audio files) has received his ten free download codes from ACX and is busy promoting them.  I am waiting for mine, and plan to use them to tempt reviewers.  I’ve not dealt with audiobook reviewers before, but I am going to assume that they are like all book reviewers: they have too many books to review, and you need to convince them that yours is worthwhile, so choosing the right reviewer who likes your genre of book is crucial.  (For instance, I was considering one until I looked more closely and realised that s/he reviews mainly erotic audiobooks – one of the questions is “How steamy does it get?”.  Sam is many things, but steamy he ain’t.)

Now for “Portraits of Pretence”.  Well, it’s been a busy weekend.  I’ve made the main edits suggested by Roy the beta reader – a mixture of typos, better phrasing suggestions, and actual alternations and clarifications.  I have registered the book with Createspace: at this point, all I have to give is the title, and this means that I can get the (free, Createspace-issued) ISBN.  I need to quote this inside the book as well as on the cover, so it’s good to have it.  I have cut and pasted all of the plain Word text into the book template, so that “Portraits of Pretence” will have the same interior look and feel as the other three.  This is a painstaking job that required a whole bag of chocolate buttons.  I have given a title to each chapter – this is a fun job.  I have worked out the (almost final) page count (334 – about twenty pages longer than “Worm in the Blossom”) which enabled me to set up the Createspace cover template that the cover designer needs and I have sent that to him.  (Until you have the page count you can’t calculate the spine width.)  So I have done all I can to facilitate the cover, and my remaining (big) task is to do my final read-through of the formatted text.  Thankfully my husband is away on Thursday and Friday, so I will have a mini-retreat for that.  In short, Sam and I are on track.

AudioSam is here!

It’s here!  The audiobook of “Fatal Forgery” is now available for purchase from Amazon, Audible and iBooks, with five-minute free samples offered on all three sites.  Obviously I am a novice at this, but here’s what I have gleaned so far (from a technical, publishing, money-earning perspective).

On Amazon, the link is made automatically between other editions of the book and this new audio version, so all the existing reviews can be seen – hurrah!  If you want to buy through Amazon, you are patched through to Audible, which Amazon now owns, but it still looks more Amazon-ish than Audibl-ish.  Once there, you have two options: ordering a one-off download, or setting up a monthly subscription to Audible (£7.99 per month) which allows you to download one new book a month.  They are currently offering a 30-day free trial, and there is also a system of credits that you can buy to save money on your monthly sub.  If someone signs up to the monthly sub and downloads “Fatal Forgery” as their first book – which demonstrates that “FF” is what brought them to Audible – and then they stay with Audible for at least two paid monthly cycles, I get a bounty payment.  It’s US$50, and it’s shared equally between the narrator and me.

You can also do all of this (one-off download or monthly sub) by going direct to Audible, rather than through Amazon – but the net result is the same.  Well, almost the same: the one-off download is (today) priced at £14.60 on Amazon, and at £16.69 on Audible.  (I mentioned a while ago that the strangest thing about audiobooks for me as a self-published author is that the pricing is out of my control – I’m used to setting my own prices.)

Lastly, if you’re Mac-ish by nature, you can download the audiobook to your iPhone or Mac from iTunes.  I’m not nearly as au fait with this system, but I have managed to find the link, and today the iTunes download price for “Fatal Forgery” is £10.95.

As far as I can tell – and this is all theory at the moment, as I have had no sales yet – I can track it all via my ACX dashboard, which will record all sales and bounties.  And, as with paperback and e-book sales, I will no doubt fail almost instantly in my resolution not to check the figures every hour or so.