I spent much of this month narrating my new book BROKEN BOWELS, with the intention of releasing it as an Audio Book alongside the Paperback and the Kindle Version.
I’m nearly finished, and provided ACX, Audible, Amazon and iTunes are happy with the files, I’m expecting it to be released sometime in August.
Audio Books are are becoming very popular, and I can imagine that fellow patients could pass the time listening to my experiences while getting a lengthy infusion.
It does take forever to do, and I can’t narrate more than two hours every day or else my voice gets tired. Editing takes a while too, but at the same time it’s a very rewarding experience. I’ve described my setup and the intricate details in some of the links below. Continue reading Created in July 2018→
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”.
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 haveseveral 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.
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.
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!
This month I’ve decided to start this list at the beginning of the month and add to it as I go along, rather than trying to retrace what I’ve been doing (like I did last month). The latter approach takes forever and is prone to losing something I did in the process.
Starting this list early means I can easily add to it, and even schedule the date of publication. It works great both for scheduling as well as a victory log.
Super Survivor Project
I’ve spent the second half of May writing more of my book, something I’ve taken a break from for over two months. To see where I stand, I printed the whole 400+ pages out and bound them using 1″ book rings (just about fits). The book is definitely coming together, but there’s so much more I want to say. It will probably take me the better part of June finish t.
I gave myself an (already extended) deadline: Broken Bowels shall be released on the 4th of July, which means I need to deliver the final manuscript to Amazon no later than June 30th 2018.
My original plan was to have it all done by the end of March but I had reached a point at which it just didn’t flow anymore. As I later found out it was the premise that wasn’t working for me. The more I thought about it, the less I felt that an account of the events as they happened during my cancer journey wasn’t telling the whole story.
What was fascinating me more and more was the question, “how did I survive this ordeal – both mentally and physically”. And as soon as I started writing with that question in mind, things kept flowing like never before. Hence I’m very happy to report that I’m back in the game, hitting the keys almost every day and I’m very much enjoying it!
I had several very successful sessions that yielded more than 4200 words per day (about 20 A4/Letter pages) and the whole project is becoming more than what I had envisioned it to be when I started it. Here’s what I did in detail:
I spent much of this month narrating my new book BROKEN BOWELS, with the intention of releasing it as an Audio Book alongside the Paperback and the Kindle Version.