A Free Man in Paris

It’s been a year since I set out on the road. I can’t recall either a better – or worse – year in my life. It is customary in these cases to quote Charles Dickens’ famous opening lines “It was the best of times, it was the worst…” which was the opening of his Tale of Two Cities. But I am a man of two centuries, not two cities. I am breaking with custom and quoting myself.

“Hell yeah! Run away from home and go exploring!”

The oft-quoted opening of the Tale of Two Cities

After exhausting effort, the print book is finally done, the eBook is finally done, and the audiobook is almost done. How many of you have ever listened to an audiobook? I tried it but didn’t like the ones I found. The voices of the narrators bothered me. For me, it had to be a perfect voice, just as I imagined. If the voice was incongruous with my expectations in any way, I found it impossible to listen to the audiobook.

What if the audiobooks listened to themselves?

And here I am, trying to make an audiobook. Step One, write the book. Then, do about a million other things that never seem to end. Step Two, create an eBook for people who don’t read print books for one reason or another. For example, the person who says, “Why would anyone read a print book when you could read on a Kindle instead?” To this person, I would say, “Because a good print book is a work of art. It’s not just the words inside, it’s the feeling, the cover, the paper, the font, the design, all of it.”

Step Three is to create an audiobook for people who no longer read. This situation confuses me. As a child, I was read to, and I loved it. Then, as I grew up, I learned to read, and no one had to read to me anymore. I was free to read anything I wanted, any time. I loved it. Perhaps when I am old and blind, someone will have to read to me once again. But until then, dammit, I will read books on my own.

This may not be that far in the future for me…

Why? There are those perfect moments when the author has set down in words a beautiful sentiment that I could not put into words, or captured a fleeting moment so perfectly that it is hard to believe.

When I am reading, I can just stare at the words, the sentence, the paragraph, for as long as I like. But if it is an audiobook, I’d have to hit rewind, rewind, rewind, to hear the words over and over again. I doubt the words would have the same impact in my ear as they do upon my eye as I gaze down upon them.

I knew nothing about making an audiobook, so as with every other aspect of my new career, I had to start from scratch. Unsurprisingly, someone has to record the book. The so-called experts advise the author not to record his or her own book. At first, this is hard for the author to understand. The author understands the book better than anyone and would presumably be able to give it the right inflections.

However, the experts say, the author may be too close to the material, and the author’s voice may not be suitable for professional narration. The author’s voice might sound strange in an audiobook and people might not like it. This would be a rather embarrassing and awkward situation for the author indeed. And last, while the author may be good at writing, it is also an exhausting task to narrate an entire book.

What if you narrated your own book and no one liked your voice?

So, who would record the book for me? As it turns out, I have a nephew, Artie, who is an aspiring voice actor, and a very good one, IMHO. His challenge is like mine: how do you get started without experience, and without experience, how do you get started? I hired Artie to record the book, and I think he did a great job. Then, all that was left was to upload the audio recording onto the ACX audiobook platform.

Wrong. You cannot just submit audio recordings without having someone master them, any more than you can publish a book without first passing it through the hands of an editor and a proofreader. I had to find an audio engineer, but I didn’t know any; I didn’t even know anyone who knows an audio engineer.

An audio studio. All those knobs make me nervous.

So, I went online and found one through Fiverr.com, a gig website. Self-employed people who need work offer their services in a competitive online marketplace. People like me try to find the best person to do the job. Fiverr helps customers by tracking and reporting the performance ratings of the giggers.

I found a guy named Jonathan who lives in Germany but speaks native American English and Hebrew. It’s a curious combination. I would like to know more, but on Fiverr, you just pay the money and wait for delivery of the job. Jonathan had excellent online ratings and he did an outstanding job.

An unpaid plug for fiverr, a safe-liverr

The problem is, I had to upload the audio masters he sent onto the ACX platform. ACX analyzes master recordings and tells you if they pass the validation test or not. My masters did not pass the test. I got mysterious messages saying the frequency was a tad low, the bit rate was not constant, and so on. I do not even begin to know what a 44.1 khz frequency is. I do not know or care about a constant bit rate. No matter. I sent the messages to Jonathan, who understood them, and he fixed everything. ACX said OK.

Once again, the author is humbled by his or her reliance on others who possess the skills for success.

The fact remains that audio engineers are behind every music recording you have ever heard, and you probably don’t even know the name of one such engineer. As Joni Mitchell sang in 1974, they are stoking the star maker machinery. The musician, or in my case, the writer, may feel free and alive, but the song goes live only when the audio engineer says it is ready.

One of the greatest songs from one of the greatest albums ever

I was a free man in Paris/I felt unfettered and alive

Nobody was calling me up for favors/No one's future to decide

You know I'd go back there tomorrow/But for the work I've taken on

Stoking the star maker machinery/Behind the popular song

So here we are. I am waiting for the final master, which is the retail audio sample. This is a five-minute snip of audio intended to enhance the public to purchase the audiobook and listen to it. I hope that it is the exact right frequency and bit rate for ACX so that I can upload it and it can go live very soon.

Stand by for yet another exciting episode of what it takes to make a book in this day and age. See ya.