It’s been two weeks since I posted here. I’m not sure how I missed a post last week. I guess I was pretty busy shoveling snow or something.

Anyway, I’m a small amount ahead on Dead End, so Survival and Dead End are still on track to be published in March. I ran a 99-cent sale for The Archons last week. The book is still marked at the 99-cent price even though I shut off the Facebook Ad. I’ll be keeping it there for some time. So, if you missed your chance to get it on sale, now’s the time to take advantage.

Amazon gave me access to their Virtual Voice AI to create audiobooks. I tried out their editor on a test book and was not real happy with it. The biggest issue I had was the fact that the audio didn’t sound any different from the dialog and the thoughts or descriptions. It’s even worse if there are no attributions (who wants to read a book with attributions on every line of dialog? It sounds like one rambling monologue. To top it off, the price I have to charge is a minimum of $3.99. If I could produce a not-great-quality audiobook for free, that would be one thing, but the 4 dollar price tag is too much.

There was another service that I looked at that charged $99 a month for a fixed number of words (I’m trying to find the website where I tried their free sample). It produced a really nice output, but I did the cost analysis for it, and it would take me several months per book to produce an audiobook. That translated into about $500 or more. They had other pricing tiers, but it would force me to spend a lot more time translating my books than I have available. When I saw the beta program for Amazon’s free tool, I was sold… until I had access, and now I’m disappointed. Ah, well. I guess I’ll focus on audiobooks when I have more time, and the price to record is better.

There was the do-it-yourself studio method. I would have to spend a lot more of my time recording the book because I would have to read it and edit the audio. Then, there is a process to equalize the levels to be acceptable by Amazon for publishing. This may become my route to audio, depending on what products become available in the near future.

Anyway, back to the writing desk…