In this week's episode, I look at six ways indie authors can effectively work with audiobook narrators to produce great audiobooks. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Update Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 208 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 5th, 2024, and today we're discussing six tips for working with audiobook narrators. Before we do that, we'll have an update on my current writing projects and Question of the Week. For my current writing projects, I'm very pleased to say that Shield of Darkness is finally done and published. By the time this episode goes live on Monday, the book should be live at all the ebook stores and you pick it up at your ebook store of choice. It took a bit longer to write this one because I was obliged to take quite a bit of time off during the writing process, but I'm pleased to report it is finally done. My next project will be the third Rivah book, Half-Orc Paladin and I am 35,000 words into that one. I think the final book will end up being around 80,000 words, give or take. I'm also about 18,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs. Not sure when I would do that one. Possibly after Half-Orc Paladin. I might do another book after Half-Orc Paladin first, but we will see. In audiobook news, nothing has changed from what it was last week. Both Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling and Wizard-Thief are currently underway for production, which would ironically tie into my main topic of this week about working with audiobook narrators. 00:01:14 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's topic: your home Internet goes out, which means you can't use the Internet until your Internet service provider gets around to fixing it. What do you do instead? The inspiration for this question was that I wanted to play Starfield, but the Xbox Network services were down and I didn't feel like going through the settings to get the offline mode to work on my Xbox. So I wrote the blog post for Question of the Week instead. We had an interesting range of responses this week. Our first response is from Justin who says: if the Internet is down, I have many things to do. During leisure and recovery time, I can read, play games, and watch movies just fine without the Internet. Most of my computer games are old and do not require connection in order to function. World of Warcraft is the only exception to that, and I keep that around as much to chat with friends and family who play it. If I need to use the Internet (banking, ordering, directions, etcetera), my phone can act as a hotspot and as long as there's phone service, I have slow connectivity. Adrian says: I am lucky enough to live on an island where all the Internet is via fiber network and we have a minimum connection of 500 megabits per second and only have failures once a year at most and our phone network is about to change to 5G. Adrian is quite lucky here, I have to admit, because 500 megabits is very fast. Jonathan D. says: mostly I listen to my son complaining that he cannot watch YouTube videos and then tell him that when I was his age, we only had four TV channels. After that, I would wonder when I became more like my parents. I do have plenty of books, board games, DVDs, and offline computer games if it's a long-term outage. Joaquim says: this would be my day. Over the years we've amassed nearly five terabyte worth of movies and TV shows from tape video recorder, DVD video recorder, and online video recorder. Also, we have a lot of DVDs. My family would rather stream, even if we have it offline already. For music, we have a lot of CDs and MP3s. We would have an outage if a Caterpillar would cut the cable during driveway refurbishing. The last time this happened before smartphones were available, I used a Mini WLAN router as backup. Now I just bought a 5G smartphone, which can act as hotspot for up to 10 devices and has USB tethering for my router. I tested both modes and the speed was quite good. Surabhi says: my data was over for the day, so I read one of your books. I often have these days. I usually catch up on more homework or read some books. Have you watched Oppenheimer yet? I sadly missed the opportunity to watch it in theaters, but I streamed it recently and it was honestly well worth the hype. I read the screenplay before the movie for some reason and it added the experience for some reason. Nolan’s screenplays always make for a nice experience. In fact, I did watch Oppenheimer in the theater back in July or August, when Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods was done, and I published it and finished the Dragonskull series. That was how I celebrated. I took a half day off and went to the theater to watch Oppenheimer and because it was like a three hour movie, you kind of have to take a half day off work to go watch Oppenheimer. I thought it was quite good and one of my favorite movies ...
