I’m going to discuss audiobooks again. If this topic bores you, feel free to skip. I know I’ve been rambling on a lot about this topic recently.

I fell into something of a funk after making my last blog post where I said I was putting a pause on making audiobooks. It took me a day, but then I realized this is something I really want to do. Maybe it’s stupid. I admit I do not have the professional quality a lot of narrators do. My house is a small trailer, and with six people living here, closets aren’t a possible place for me to narrate in. There is a chamber-like quality to the audio. It’s not an echo, exactly, but the ear can pick up the “space” around me. This space is my bedroom, and I don’t want to put foam all over the walls to buffer the sound because then I’ll have to remove all the pictures that make the place feel cozy. Also, I don’t know what it is, but there are little clicks that pop up here and there in the audio recordings. I don’t know if it’s mouth noises or something in the microphone. Maybe it’s a mixture of both. Who knows?

What I do know is that my eyes are not as good as they used to be. I can no longer read a paperback or ebook without my eyes bugging out after thirty minutes, and that’s even with the new glasses I got this summer. I have Reticare on my computer to help my eyes out, and it works great. I also take lots of breaks so I’m not staring at the computer screen all day, and unless I have something I need to do, I get off the computer before dinner and don’t return to it until the next morning. I have learned ways to limit eye strain because I want to be able to type on the computer. I have dictated a few books, and while it’s been okay, the editing takes three times longer to go through, and I hate editing. I don’t want to spend 2-3 more time of my life doing something I hate. I’m in this to write because that’s the fun part.

Alright, so I rambled on about all of the above because I want to be able to listen to my own books. No one in this house wants to read them to me. They think romance is boring. (I know. It’s ridiculous, but no one in this house wants to go anywhere near a romance.) The Kindle I have has been sufficient, but the text-to-speech feature has gotten to be uncomfortable for me to listen to. I need a human voice. I can’t afford to have all of my books made into audio. I ran the numbers, and I’d have to pay out over $100K to hire a professional narrator to do all of my backlist. I don’t have that kind of money.

So the option that is easiest for me (as someone who wants to listen to my own books) is to narrate most of them myself and have my oldest son (who is good) help me out with the rest. I know writers are told to avoid putting anything out there that isn’t “excellent” in quality, but this is something I’m doing for me. I am doing my best with the narration, and while I know that makes some people laugh, I’m tired of putting things off just because someone doesn’t like it. I already received feedback that I’m not any good from someone close to me. The person did it gently, so it’s not like she was rude or anything. I took her input into serious consideration, and it’s why I almost quit the whole audiobook thing. But then I thought, “These are my books. I wrote them so I could read them.” Now that my eyes are not able to do the job, my ears will have to. This is why it’s a labor of love. Sometimes you have to make choices for yourself, and this is one I’ve decided to do for me.

I am publishing them through Findaway Voices so they’ll be on multiple retailers. I want to buy them so I can download them on to my phone. I like the cute cover and how easy I can access the audiobooks on my Apple library. I have to publish them so I can access them.

The reason I’m announcing this on this blog is so that people don’t think someone is stealing my books and making them into audiobooks again. I will add them to my audiobook page on this blog, but I’m not going to make any special blog announcements. That way if anyone worries, they can check out the page on this blog and know that I authorized the production of the audiobook in case they wonder if it’s a legit copy or not. I get a panic attack every time someone tells me they saw a stolen version of my book, and I’d rather skip the panic attack if possible. I appreciate how kind you guys are when theft happens. It means a lot to me to know you care about things that happen to me.

My advice is to skip the audiobooks. I’m not even comfortable putting them on You Tube, Rumble, or Bitchute. My son wants to read Return of the Aliens, so we’ll work on that project for those channels. He loves my thrillers. When we do a romance together, I think that might work for those channels, but I don’t want to put up any book on social media unless he helps me with it. He’s got skill at this. I don’t. I can write books, but that’s about it.