Archives for 2015

2015 Audiobook Wrap-up

31 December 2015

As we count down to a new year, I wanted to take a moment to update you on some of my activities this year. Much of this article originally appeared in my profile earlier this week on the Eargasms Audiobook Review site. I appreciated the great questions from audiobook listeners and encourage you to read them.

During 2015, I’ve drastically increased my efforts to help authors and publishers with a backlist understand the audiobook production process and get more of their titles into audio! I wrote a number of articles and created some videos, which I will detail in a moment.

New Links In My Discography

Rest assured, my writing and video production activities are mere extensions of my greatest passion, which is audiobook narration! I’m delighted to announce I released 8 new audiobooks in 2015!

My first release of 2015 was BLY VS BISLAND: BEATING PHILEAS FOGG IN A RACE AROUND THE WORLD, which the talented Melissa Reizian Frank narrated with me. It was a very special narration project, and the story behind the story still gives me chills!

In addition, I performed:

cozy mysteries — DEAD PAN by Gayle Trent and ONE HOOF IN THE GRAVE by Carolyn McSparren
suspense and romantic suspense — DEADLY BLESSINGS by Julie Hyzy and WHAT SHE DOESN’T SEE by Debra Webb
history —THE STORY OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY by Benjamin Levine and Isabelle Story, THE TRIAL OF SUSAN B ANTHONY by Ann D. Gordon (I edited the text to make it more suitable for an audiobook), and Susan B. Anthony’s famous 1873 speech IS IT A CRIME FOR A US CITIZEN TO VOTE

You can hear samples of my 2015 releases in this Soundcloud playlist:

How to Afford Your Editor, Proofer, or Narrator TODAY

9 October 2015

An author recently wrote that her fans were demanding audiobooks, but she couldn’t afford to spend any money up-front for the narrator’s fee and other costs of production.

Narrators frequently bemoan the fact that, instead of narrating the next book, they are spending too much time editing an audiobook because they can’t afford to hire an editor.

I’ve previously written about our words being a self-fulfilling prophecy and encouraged you to think/write/speak what you WANT into being.

Thinking or saying “I can’t afford it” is often a knee-jerk reaction immediately offered by Resistance to keep you from taking action toward the good you seek.

If you’re among the people who frequently tell yourself “I can’t afford it”, I urge you to do this exercise, which I first wrote about in my review of Fabienne Frederickson’s Mindset Retreat last September.

Chat with Audible Approved Producer Eric Summerer

17 September 2015

On 15 September 2015, ACX.com hosted a Twitter chat with Audible Approved Producer Eric Summerer. Erik has recently passed 15,000 sales on royalty share titles.

He talked about his criteria for book selection and other topics of interest to audiobook narrators.

I used Storify to compile and categorize all of the tweets on this page so that the questions and answers are together. I also added some headlines for navigation.

Bly vs Bisland: The Story Behind the Story (Part 1)

16 July 2015

Every now and again, we get a Divine whisper of an inspired idea. Such was the case about a very special and exciting audiobook I created and produced earlier this year.

In 1889, Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland were female reporters in New York. Each went on a daring solo trip around the world at the same time. Nellie wanted to beat the time of Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s fictional character in Around The World in 80 Days. Rival reporter Elizabeth Bisland left on a solo race around the world hoping to beat Nellie’s time!

Nellie sailed east to England in the morning. That night, and unbeknownst to Nellie, Elizabeth took a train west to San Francisco. In Bly vs Bisland: Beating Phileas Fogg In A Race Around The World, I combined the narratives from both women into a single book with 1 timeline! Who will win the race?!

My journal entries tell Part 1 of the story behind the story between idea and implementation.
[Read more…] about Bly vs Bisland: The Story Behind the Story (Part 1)

6 Weeks of Showing My Work

1 July 2015

On Saturday, 16 May, I read Austin Kleon‘s book Show Your Work: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered. He wrote:

When I have the privilege of talking to my readers, the most common questions they ask me are about self-promotion. How do I get my stuff out there? How do I get noticed? How do I find an audience? How did you do it? I hate talking about self-promotion. Comedian Steve Martin famously dodges these questions with the advice, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If you just focus on getting really good, Martin says, people will come to you. I happen to agree: You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. I think there’s an easy way of putting your work out there and making it discoverable while you’re focused on getting really good at what you do….

Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of photographs of your work at different stages in your process. Shoot video of you working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones. Whether you share it or not, documenting and recording your process as you go along has its own rewards: You’ll start to see the work you’re doing more clearly and feel like you’re making progress. And when you’re ready to share, you’ll have a surplus of material to choose from.

While the book is short and easily consumed in an hour or so, its wisdom takes longer to digest.

I decided to do an experiment of showing my work with a Daily Dispatch on Twitter. Before you see all of the Daily Dispatches, let me first tell you 4 few things I learned in the experiment.

Audiobook Roundtable on EWABS

30 June 2015

Last Monday was Ladies’ Night on the East West Audio Body Shop (EWABS) show! On 22 June 2015, I was excited to be a guest on the show and talk with hosts George Whittam and Dan Lenard about my favorite thing — AUDIOBOOKS!

My narrator colleagues Hillary Huber and Ann M. Richardson and publisher Carlyn Craig, founder of Post Hypnotic Press, joined me as guests.

In our 1.5 hours on the show, we covered a variety of topics of interest to both new and experienced narrators.

At one point, I compared the job of audiobook narrator to that of a baseball player. I summarized my thoughts in the graphic below.

Karen Commins

Award Winning

Atlanta Audiobook Share-rator™