[PROJECT UPDATE] World Serpent Arcanist Audiobook
[The print edition of World Serpent Arcanist is out today (December 10, 2020) and you should go get it! But rather than buy from Amazon, why not use BookShop.org and support a local book store?]
Whelp, another volume of the Frith Chronicles is in the can. Total finished time: 16 hours, 45 minutes. This one was definitely another fun ride, as all of the books in the series have been, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
A few folks have asked in Shami Stovall’s Facebook group, on Twitter, and on my YouTube channel when the audiobook comes out. The best answer I can offer is, “It’s hard to say.”
Shami and I use something called ACX, which is the Audible Creation Exchange. It’s the site/service that sits behind Audible and allows rights holders (usually, but not always, the author of a work) and producers (usually, but not always, the voice actor) to connect and get the audiobooks made.
(ACX is where I first started my voiceover career, and where I connected with Shami when I auditioned for Knightmare Arcanist.)
So when we produce an audiobook through ACX, this is the process:
Shami sends me the contract via ACX, and I accept.
Shami sends me the manuscript.
I record, proof, and edit the audiobook.*
I upload and submit the finished files through ACX.
Shami approves the files.
We wait.
Once both of us hit the submit button, it’s then out of our hands. The ACX team then has their own internal quality-check process that they go through to make sure that the audiobook meets the standards that they are looking for before they send it out to the Audible platform.
Under normal circumstances, this can take as long as a month. Pre-COVID, when we submitted Coliseum Arcanist at the end of January in hopes of having the audiobook and the print edition out at the same time, we didn’t hear back until April.
Since then, it seems that the ACX team has only gotten more backed up. I’m sure that part of this is that there are more people submitting audiobooks now that they had some unexpected free time this year during the initial lockdown.
ACX has also indicated that part of the issue is the overall lack of quality in the recordings being submitted: they either aren’t meeting the technical standards the platform requires, or the quality of the narration isn’t what they have found acceptable.
Because of all of that, it means that we really don’t know when the World Serpent Arcanist audiobook will be released. It could be a couple of weeks, it could be a few months. I know that I completed one project for another author back in early October and we still haven’t seen it drop 2 months later, so…
At any rate, I wish I had more substantive news on the subject. Alas, we are now at the tender mercies of the ACX/Audible machine. Stay tuned.
* Oh, yeah, I put an asterisk up there, didn’t I? I think I meant to make an aside as to the actual production steps. I’ve detailed this before in other posts, so I won’t bore you with that, other than to say that since I started using an online tool to help with proofing (making sure I said the words actually written), my production time has sped up by an order of magnitude. It makes the process much, much more enjoyable. It’s still about a 2.5:1 ratio, though, of actual work time vs finished time; that means that for the 16 hours and 45 minutes that this finished audiobook is, I likely put in about 40 hours between recording and editing.
That said…it’s not a bad way to make a living. Especially when this guy comes to visit.
