Karen Commins

Tour of Sites With Public Domain Art

17 August 2021

Material in the public domain belongs to ALL of us. You can use public domain material for any purpose you want without licensing it or paying royalties to anyone.

Public domain books are a boon to creative, entrepreneurial narrators! I made a video course exclusively for members of my NarratorsRoadmap.com site called Create Your Own Path. The first video discusses how to research the copyright information to determine whether a book is in the public domain. (I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out that the course has its own set of resources, including collections of public domain books I’ve created for members to peruse for possible projects!)

When planning your cover art for public domain books, consider these quotes pulled from this Publishers Weekly article about publishing new editions of public domain texts:

“It’s been 95 years since they were published in the United States — so we’re thinking about how we can present them as fresh and relevant.”

“The design process for reimagining classic covers also requires a special sort of attention…You just need a cover that’s going to jump out from all the other covers.”

“I always feel it’s important to create covers for classic authors that they would appreciate. I think it’s really important to be respectful of the text.”

Many people who create audiobooks from public domain texts also look to use public domain artwork for their audiobook covers. I’ve done that with a number of books, including:

I found the image for JAILED FOR FREEDOM on the Library of Congress site. The sun on THE DYNAMIC LAWS OF PROSPERITY came from NASA.

You may even need to layer images to achieve the look you want. In the case of SO BIG, my cover designer found a perfect antique, public domain painting of the woman standing in the cabbage field. Meanwhile, I found a modern photograph of a farm boy squatting in a field on a commercial site of stock images. I bought the picture for around $15 and then used Photoshop to place him in the image of the painting with Photoshop. I used a number of filters and effects to give him the same look as the original painting.

Since I’ve seen a number of posts from narrators looking for sources of public domain illustrations, I thought I’d curate a handy list for all of us! Note that I’m not including the plethora of sites with modern stock images or that may charge fees for usage.

Copyrighted Images in a Public Domain Book

11 August 2021

Narrator Pamela Almand recently wrote to me about images in a public domain book from a deceased author that she plans to narrate and produce as an audiobook. She kindly gave me permission to re-publish her question here so that more people can benefit from this discussion.

How to highlight text of iAnnotate search results

22 July 2021

As far as I know, iAnnotate software doesn’t have a way to automatically highlight all your search results.

However, good ole MS Word — even my 2004 copy for Mac — has that option under Find and Replace. This article has instructions.

In addition to or instead of highlighting the text, the Find and Replace formatting box lets you make font changes like underline and bold to the search results. You can even change the font, its size, and color on each search result.

Of course, you also can change the font type and size for the entire document in Word, which you can’t do in iAnnotate. PDF means “portable document format” and was devised as a method to present the text in the same way to all users regardless of their software or hardware. As long as a document is a PDF, you have no ability to change the size, color, or type of the font.

If Word can’t open your PDF, you can cheaply and easily convert it to a Word file using Adobe Export PDF.

Once you’ve made all the global changes you want in Word, iAnnotate automatically opens Word files and converts them back to PDF.

By the way, you can pretty quickly manually highlight your iAnnotate search results if you don’t want to transfer the doc to Word and back. With the search results showing on the right side of your iAnnotate screen, tap the Highlighter tool on the left side with your document. Then, tap on each search result to go to the next instance, and highlight the word.

Members of my NarratorsRoadmap.com site can watch my 12-module video course on iAnnotate to learn how to use this software to its fullest advantage in prepping audiobooks.

Assembly Tips for Custom-Size Studiobricks Booths

7 June 2021

At my previous house, we constructed an additional 16′ x 19′ room in 2005 for my studio. I bought a 6′ x 8′ WhisperRoom which fit well in that space. I happily used it for 15+ years.

After moving to this house in 2018, my WhisperRoom seemed a little too large for the room I chose for the studio. I bought a 6′ x 7′ Studiobricks booth earlier this year. It was delivered in 2 large boxes on 11 May.

Drew and I had watched several assembly videos of standard booths and looked through the instructions from Studiobricks. We thought we were prepared and that the two of us could easily and quickly put the booth together. After all, we’d built the WhisperRoom at each house and disassembled it twice. In fact, Drew almost single-handedly disassembled it this last time for its sale.

Reader, we were not prepared, in large part because Studiobricks (SB) did not send the correct instructions for my booth! This article will outline things we learned through the trial and error method over several weeks and tips for assembly of custom-size Studiobricks booths.

Before I continue, I do want to say that SB has been extremely responsive to our messages. However, I would have expected that a company that’s been in business for over 10 years would have all their documentation ready and wouldn’t piece-meal it to the customer as they run into problems. If we’d had all the correct guides at the beginning, we could have saved a lot of time and frustration. I do recognize, though, that the company is greatly expanding its US sales and continuously improving its products and service all the time.

How I Get Stuff Done

20 May 2021

Last week, the Audio Publishers Association held its annual conference (APAC), which was skipped last year due to COVID-19 and was virtual this time. They ran it on a site that gave us a virtual meeting space, networking areas, and an exhibit section like an in-person event.

The planning committee had asked me to be one of the experts meeting with small groups of narrators to address their particular questions in the Business Diagnostics session. I had the great pleasure of talking with 6 groups of narrators about time management and marketing/branding topics.

One participant’s question took me by surprise: I narrate. I write. I create content for a membership site. I have a full life beyond work. How do I get so much done?

I say I was surprised because I’ve often wondered the very same thing about other people!

[Read more…] about How I Get Stuff Done

Thoughts About Advice in Narrator Groups

11 March 2021

You don’t have to be a student of American history to know about the Donner party.

In the 1840s, this group of around 90 people had heard about the wonders of California and decided to travel west to seek their fortune.

Rather than following the rutted road of the hundreds of settlers before them, they took an unproven shortcut given by a person who had not actually made the trip he proposed and therefore had no business in directing others to go that way. None of the Donner party had traveled the route before, either, so they had no experience or knowledge to measure the shortcut against.

As a direct result of taking the disastrous advice about the shortcut, most of the party didn’t live to tell the tale. Those who did live endured unimaginable and grisly hardships in camp.

People today have heard about the gold rush in audiobooks, leading many to decide to become a narrator. While mistakes in audiobook narration don’t carry such severe consequences, they do have repercussions. Therefore, narrators participating in online forums need to be careful about the advice they give and take.