AMA About Producing Scifi Audio Books

I talked about this a couple of weeks ago on the Microblog - I've produced a number of audio short stories out of my scifi shorts and the process is a journey unto itself. I thought people would like to see how it works so I'm doing an AMA to celebrate the launch of my next audio short - THE ROCKET.

This isn't just 'a veneer for a book promo.' Audio book production is fun, but work, and people have asked 'How hard is it, how does it feel, what’s surprising about it, what are the motivations behind it?' I'll answer that in a reply to this post.

I've described the process before on Imgur - here are the first two steps:

https://i.imgur.com/VWcp77K.png
First, there's having an idea and turning it into a story. The Battle of Victoria Crater was based on my ideas of what a space western would look like in the 21st century, now that we know so much about Mars, space travel, and Elon Musk. I wrote Victoria Crater in 2019 and decided to turn it into an audiobook in 2022. Onto the next step:

https://i.imgur.com/bS1PmTU.png
Next step - find a voice actor and work out a way for you to work together. In this case - after a quick audition, I found Jeremiah Jones (@JeremiahJonesVO) - a voice actor on the East Coast who was willing to work together with me on a profit-sharing agreement. Both of us are up-and-coming artists and we've learned the value of sticking together while chasing our dreams. I give Jeremiah the story, and he starts working on what the characters sound like ...

Continue Reading on Imgur

Meantime, I'm going to finish doing some internal work on the Youtube channel. I can answer questions about audio book production while I wait for stuff to upload. AMA!

inkican, 3 months ago

'How hard is it, how does it feel, what’s surprising about it, what are the motivations behind it?'

Producing an audio book - from story to publishing onto a platform/YouTube - takes as much time as it does to write it. For example, The Rocket took me about 40 hours to write, re-write ... it took me another 40 hours to produce into an audio book, not counting whatever time Jeremiah spent on audio work.

How does it feel - It feels great, even if it's tiring, to make something cool. I want to focus on how the book will make readers feel, so I try to keep thinking about them as much as possible.

What's surprising about it - I think the thing I'm most surprised about is how anti-climactic the end state is. You make something, poured your blood, sweat and tears into it, and then ... yeah. That's it. People listen to it, some respond. Then it's onto the next thing. I won't think too much about the project after I'm done with it, but then I'll go back and listen to it again. Gives me a sense of pride and joy to be able to see something I still believe in, months or years down the road.

what are the motivations behind it? - My original motivation to tell stories is something I've talked about on the blog, so I'll assume you're asking about 'motivation to make audio books.' TL;DR - I like to make movies, too. Turning audio books into mini radio dramas with pictures is something that scratches a fun little itch for me. It's this close to making movies, and so it brings me a lot of joy to cut video/audio/SFX together in Premiere.

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