Month: July 2018

My Audiobook Narration Setup for Audible, Amazon and iTunes

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When I decided to narrate my book BROKEN BOWELS for publication through ACX, I had several ideas for the workflow.

In essence, and after many tests as to what would yield the best quality, I did the following:

  • record to my Mac using Quicktime
  • transcode the resulting native AIFC files into Apple Lossless M4A using Finder
  • edit in Adobe Premiere
  • bulk-transcode to MP3 files with ACX specifications using Adobe Media Encoder

I’ve tried various other workflows, but the above seems to work great for me.

Let me share my reasoning and experiment with you here.

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Discovered in July 2018

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Self Publishing Related  Understanding and Working with Print Signatures Why does Storyist add blank pages to Blurb Templates How to avoid KDP File Errors with Blurb Templates from Storyist How to advertise KDP Books Wide Publication with Draft2Digital N. J. Notjohn’s Self-Publishing Guide KDP Manuscript Formatting Guide (includes page count limits and trim sizes) Overview …

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How to fix “download was unsuccessful” on Kindle Keyboard and Kindle DX

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This morning I got a notification from Amazon that Jerry’s new book had been released. I had pre-ordered it a few weeks ago and was eager to start reading it. Having a long journey across town from Miami Beach to Sunset ahead of me, Jerry’s Book of Sin would be a great accompaniment.

My trusty old Kindle Keyboard 3G was all charged up, I was ready to leave, but the book had not been downloaded. “Hm”, I thought, “this should have happened automatically”. Was I signed into the correct account?

Yes I was, and to my surprise, the book was showing up correctly under Archived Items. But when I tried to download it manually, all I got was an error message stating that “The download was unsuccessful. Please try again later”.

Several tries later, and without any luck, I remembered a solution that did the trick: fully rebooting my Kindle Keyboard. This trick also works on the DX and other models, even on Kindle Fire devices. Let me tell you how to do it. 

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How to export multiple timelines at once in Premiere

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I recently had the need to encode several audio clips I had edited in Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5. That’s easy if you export one timeline at a time, by selecting the sequence, then click File – Export – Media. 

But this principle doesn’t work if you have several sequences that need to be exported. 

An article in the Adobe Forums suggests how to do this using After Effects as an intermediary, but it seemed very convoluted and a total hack. Besides, I don’t have After Effects so that’s not really a solution.

Convinced that there had to be a better way, I had a quick fiddle – and lucky for me I’ve discovered an easy workaround that I’ll share with you here. I’m using Premiere Pro CS 5.5, so I’m assuming it’ll work in later versions too.

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How to create a project for narration on ACX

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I wanted to upload an audio version of my book, narrated by myself, for sale on Amazon, Audible and iTunes. It’s apparently very easy to do using Amazon’ own ACX service. You can even login with your existing Amazon credentials.

When I did that, it all seemed fairly straightforward. There was a Projects Tab at the top, which I assumed is where I’d create a new project and start uploading myself. But that’s not how ACX works. Instead, you search for a book on the ACX homepage, which in turn sifts through Amazon’s catalogue. Only if said book exists can you pick it and start working on it.

That’s fair enough, and it makes sense. If you know how the system works. But even then, in my case, said list only seemed to return books open for auditions on ACX, rather than results from Amazon.com. My own books never came up while I was successfully logged in. They only ever came up while I was logged out. What gives?

As so often in life, there is an explanation for this – but of course it’s not something that’s obvious, nor included in the generous Help Section on ACX.

Eventually I’ve figured it out – and here’s how it works.

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Created in June 2018

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Last month I’ve been flat out writing the last chapters of my book “BROKEN BOWELS – Tales of a Super Survivor“. In total I’ve written a whopping 109.944 words.

Not all of them made it into the final cut mind you, which by the way has an astonishing word count of over 132.000. That’s nearly three times as much as I had originally set out to write.

The Kindle Edition is already available, and now I’m working on creating a paperback version too. All my Patreon supporters get a free copy of the ebook!

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Discovered in June 2018

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WordPress Dev Links WordPress Post Transition Hooks wp_update_post() Function Reference Debugging WordPress Publishing a post on a future date automatically Changing the time and date of new posts  PHP Links How to convert strings to Date and DateTime in PHP PHP DateTime Class Reference  Miscellaneous very good solution for the original Rubik’s Cube very good …

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