My third audiobook release is coming out in November!
The first one was for The Autumn Lands, done by the amazing Vance Bastian. The second, for my novella Cailleadhama, was narrated by Drew Bacca.
Now I’m about to release the audiobook version of The River City Chronicles – my magical realism “circle of friends” tale that’s my love letter to Sacramento. It’s narrated by the talented Michael Lysan.
And speaking about magical realism, there’s something magical about hearing your story come to life in the voice of a gifted narrator. Like when you see a film based on a book you loved, the character voices are never quite what you expected, but there’s a thrill at hearing how the narrator takes the printed word and spins up a whole audio world that dances between your ears.
Each book brings its own special challenges when you convert it to audio format. For River City, it was all the foreign words and phrases. It’s set in California, so there’s a bit of Spanish, but that’s nothing compared to the Italian that’s sprinkled throughout the book.
There are two Italian characters – Matteo and Diego – and they speak a fair amount of la bella lingua.
Poor Michael. LOL… Still, he soldiered on through all my phonetic corrections:
No, così does not sound like “cozy” – it’s more like “coh-ZEE”!
No, Zocalo is pronounced ZOH-cuhlow, not zoh-COW-low!
And I was really picky about my “pause” length too. Longer… longer! LOL…
Oh, and did I mention the hours and hours it takes to listen to the audio files for issues and corrections?
But now it’s finally done, and I couldn’t be more pleased.
It will be releasing on November 10th, after which the book will be available in all of these editions:
- eBook (all vendors)
- print (Amazon and Ingram/bookstores)
- audiobook
- large print
- paperback
- hardcover
- dual language
- Italian language
It’s my most widely available book yet! Seriously, if you haven’t read it, you literally have no more excuses.
So what’s next?
I’ve got another narrator working on The Ariadne Cycle, starting with The Stark Divide.
More news on that one soon. Watch this space!
To my writer friends, have you released any of your books in audio? If so, did you use ACX/Audible or…? What challenges did you have?