I’m excited to be speaking on Tuesday 23 June at 4pm during the Audiobook Empire Narrator Summit! I’m passionate about my topic From Arthurian Legends to WhodunIts: Creating Your Publishing Empire With Public Domain Books. I hope you’ll be able to join us, especially since we’ll include a Q&A in the session.
You may be thinking, “That’s great, but what does your presentation have to do with AI?”
This article will answer that question.
Twenty years ago today, I was a computer specialist at the IRS. During a break or lunch, I looked at the Barry Manilow message boards on my personal laptop to see what was new. Someone posted an interview with Barry published that day in the Sydney Morning Herald.
One meaningful quote leaped off the screen at me! I immediately reached for the nearest piece of paper, which happened to be a notepad from work, and copied it:
I have never done anything for the money or the charts. I do what I want to do because I believe in it, and it’s always been that way for me.I didn’t even listen to the radio back when I first recorded Mandy, so I never really knew what was going on, and I still don’t.When you start trying to compete with what everyone else is doing, you’re lost. (my emphasis)
After suffering from comparison-itis for years, I wrote in my journal one day:
Maybe this is my purpose!
Maybe my biggest challenge is the thing
I was sent here to learn and teach.
While I can’t say I am completely cured from comparison-itis, I do have some techniques to keep it at bay.
On the wonderful Audiobooks at Sea cruise yesterday, narrator Jess Moran gave a detailed and inspiring presentation demonstrating how she intentionally and thoughtfully develops things to share on social media without making life’s work out of each post.
Someone asked how to store and catalog all the assets that you create. Our fabulous host Joel Froomkin suggested that Evernote would be a good tool for this purpose.
He’s right!
As I’ve previously written, I love Evernote because it synchs across my devices and is always accessible to me. It offers tremendous flexibility in how you store info and search for it. You can use tags, the title, key words, and dates in your search.
You can add videos, photos, and audio to a note. Evernote also will transcribe your media, including your handwriting!
A Google search revealed plenty of apps for the specific purpose of holding your social media components. Airtable would also work well for this task, but I don’t know whether or how well you can use your phone with it for uploads.
I didn’t want to buy another app or test Airtable. I use Evernote for everything and wanted to try it for this purpose.
As an experiment today, I used my iPhone to:
The ship’s Wi-Fi is horrendously slow. I also found that it often timed out or logged me out on my phone, especially when I was uploading the videos. I had much steadier reception using my laptop.
Since it was so problematic, I uploaded the images from my phone to an iCloud folder. I then signed onto the Wi-Fi with my laptop and imported the media into my Evernote notes.
I wouldn’t have any issues in uploading videos and pictures straight from my phone into Evernote using regular cellular service or land-based Wi-Fi.
Here’s the 2:26 explainer video I made in iMovie. It doesn’t highlight screen taps as I normally would show in a video I produced at home. However, I think you can get the gist and see how quick and easy it is to use Evernote to catalog your clips and photos.
When you’d want to use the asset you’ve stored in Evernote, you could Open it and Share it to another app, or download it. I’d rather Open and Share it from within Evernote so I don’t have multiple copies of the thing.
A better option might be to store the resource you’ve made somewhere in the cloud like Google Drive and add its Share link to Evernote in addition to or instead of the asset. You then could use Evernote for inventory and search and always have a link to the component.
This Evernote note has the intro clip that we filmed after breakfast that I used in the video demo. I corrected the date and transcribed the video. The video doesn’t load for me on ship, but it should be available and will probably download if you’re on land.
I recorded this tip for cruisers:
If you want to see the notebook containing all the clips I created today, please send me an email. Note that I will process the requests after I get home.
Want to learn more about Evernote? I created a 10-module video course for members of NarratorsRoadmap.com. I show Evernote’s basic features and how I use it for my Customer Relationship Management (CRM) records.
I also want to mention that when I write anything substantive on a social media platform — whether my own post or comments on someone else’s — I copy it from the platform into Evernote so I might repurpose it later. My words belong to ME!
I found in today’s experiment that I took far more pictures and videos than I usually would in a month! Plus, I learned how to do some things; for instance, I’d never used iMovie on my phone. I also learned the importance of uploading videos to YouTube rather than my WordPress site!
The biggest benefit to the experiment was that I felt more creative throughout the day as I was specifically looking for interesting things that I might want to include in my private journals, articles, and social media posts.
Thanks so much to Jess Moran for explaining your system and giving me a new approach to documenting my life!
PS. We had a great time shopping in Grand Cayman! I saw this sign as we walked around and couldn’t resist sharing it here!
Ideas love speed…or do they?
It was 5 years ago today — 18 March 2021 — that I first heard about the situation that inspired my forthcoming book.
Updated 4/4/26
Inspired by this article about how John Steinbeck used his diary while writing The Grapes of Wrath, I’ve been documenting my progress in researching and writing my non-fiction book in my daily journals. My journals are much more interesting as a result!
I then photograph my journal entries related to my book and use Evernote to transcribe them. Longtime readers know I’m an Evernote evangelist and use it for everything. I love it even more since Evernote actually transcribes my handwriting!
Authors who write in longhand could use this technique to quickly generate editable text rather than having someone laboriously type it.
I store these transcriptions in the Evernote notebook I created to house my book’s 1900+ (and counting!) research notes.
I tag the journal entries to be able to easily find them later. Once I launch the web site for the book, I’ll re-purpose all my journal entries into a new blog devoted to the book! The blog will certainly improve my SEO ranking for my book’s topic.
Since I was already doing that, I thought, “Why not transcribe the entire journal entry?”
After 20+ years of narrating books written by others, I’m thrilled to announce that I am writing my first book!
I’ll share more as I continue with this project.
