Promotion

It took us some time to come to Audible. I say us because I rely on my friend and publisher as well as Mr. Scott to help me with this type of decision. I like to write—I don’t much care about the business end of crap. When we looked at doing audio books several years ago, the upfront costs, back end royalties, and some questions about book rights and long term exclusivity left us with too many questions. Since then, Audible and Amazon have made enough changes on the business end that audio is now doable.

Once that decision was made, I needed to find a narrator. I considered reading them myself, but I’d rather write and watch football than commit to the hours needed to accomplish the task. Most of the women narrators that I sampled just didn’t do it for me, so I went with a male and chose D.C. Newman as the narrator. I liked his tone and balance.

There is nothing stranger than to hear your character speak in a voice that is different than the one that you have heard in your head for the last seven years. I wrote the first draft of Saving Emily in November 2011 during National Novel Writing Month. After much work and editing, the book was finally published 4 September 2012. Saving Emily is without a doubt one of my favorite stories.

The truth is that people move into my head and camp there while they share they lives. They show up out of the blue and they depart the same way. Sometimes their story pours out quickly as Janice Bracken’s did, and sometime they have to be coaxed along and it may take a year to get to the end. However long it takes, they share their story in their voice.

Saving Emily was the first book that I assigned an actual voice and personality to. I’ve said before that I always felt Janice Bracken to be a lot like the character played by Rene Russo in Lethal Weapon 3 and 4. So for the last seven years, I’ve heard Rene Russo’s classy, sultry voice in my head telling her part of the story.

As good as D.C. Newman is and as much as I like his work, he sounds nothing like Rene Russo, so when he spoke her words, it was jarring. Not surprising, I wasn’t the least bit bothered to hear him speaking Mac’s words, even though I’d been hearing Gary Sinese in my head all this time. The strangeness stuck with me through the first couple of chapters, but then one day, I just got into the sound of his voice and let it go. For the first time, it was simply about letting another side of the story in.

The process itself is made super simple by D.C. Newman. He does the reading a chapter at a time. When he’s satisfied he has it right, he loads the chapter through the service, and sends me a message. I open the book and the audio file, reading and listening at the same time. I make sure that he’s read it correctly and that it sounds the way I want it to sound. If there’s something not right, I note the location on a sheet and send it back. He’ll make corrections and move on. Working with him has been incredibly smooth and easy. The completed project goes up on audible and it’s on to the next.

He’s recently started work on Blood Link and the first two chapters are in the can. He’s a busy guy who’s doing the narration on several books at a time and he has a waiting list of authors, but he’s got me scheduled so we’ll just keep moving forward.

If you’d like to hear a sample of Saving Emily, just hit the link below.

*Saving Emily Audio Sample*

The Good:
I came out unscathed and the review had some very nice things to say. I excerpted the important bits and posted them in the Editorial Review section on Amazon and on my website.

The Kirkus site was easy to use and they met the promised schedule. The contact that I had with the assistant editor responsible for managing my review was excellent. When I sent mail with the problems I found in the original (and second) supposedly “ready for publication” review, he addressed them quickly, and the issues were resolved in a satisfactory manner.

The Bad:
I sort of feel as though I may have been shuffled off to someone who specializes in reviewing romance. There’s a couple of reasons to feel this way. First. I find it hard to believe a regular reviewer of military suspense or thriller would write, “Morgan and his dog prove to be a stabilizing force for Jenna as she adjusts to a new role under the supervision of her uncle Ted.” I just don’t see some guy saying anything about the dog. Admittedly, I do write terrific freaking dogs, but it just doesn’t seem to fit. Second. Everything mentioned until the end is about the relationships. Yes, I am aware that I write relationship stories, but there’s also a whole lot of other stuff going on. Third. They insist on referring to Jenna as a “police officer” rather than a deputy sheriff. Most folks that deal with military and law enforcement books pay attention to the details, rather than being generic. Last. “Unfortunately, with the dual focus on the drug trafficking and missing person storylines, it is hard to tell which matters more. Even the final pages don’t reveal a point or message.” Have you ever noticed that romance novels only have one plot, a limited number of characters, and a “solvable problem”? I’m back to another reason why I’m not categorized in romance. Catching the bad guys (if the reviewer needs one to be more important than the other, they’re welcome to choose), cutting off a toxic relationship, and facing your demons every day in order to heal and lead a healthy life apparently isn’t a message. I guess I could have dropped into first sergeant mode and had my heroine say something profound, but in real life we rarely come up with the profound until later. How about this for a message – “We’re happy to have done our jobs and come out alive.”

The Ugly:
I paid a pretty fair size chunk of money for a quality product and it took three tries to get a review that didn’t contain errors. On the first run (which they claimed was ready for publication), the number of pages at the top was listed at 300 pp (printed pages). In the body of the review was the following sentence: “Hopefully, at 160 pages, the novel will be expanded further or kick off a new series.” The book is actually 286 pp. The sentence led me to question if the reviewer had only read 160 pages and if that was why the point was lost on them. The other major error was that the reviewer had written Jenna was about to be kicked out the Army Reserve rather than the state troopers. I requested the items be corrected for accuracy and they were. Once again, I received a supposedly ready to publish review only to find that in correcting the sentence with the page number issue, there was now a glaring error with a double word. I sent it back again.

For the amount of money Kirkus charges, these damn things should be polished and proofread with the same exactness they expect of the author.

Would I send another novel to Kirkus to review? I can honestly say that the quality of the review is no better than the reviews I see from the reviewers for the Kindle Book Review and those are free. They don’t have the prestigious Kirkus Review name, but they’re honest and well written. Unless I see a boost in revenue or interest that I can somehow attribute to this review, I’m doubtful that I’d be willing to spend the money again.

Scott-ober has reached its conclusion, and I’m still standing.

First and foremost, I’d like to thank Abbie from The Spontaneous Reader Book Blog and A Million More Pages Group on Goodreads for all of her hard work on my behalf. My goal entering into this was to pick up a few new readers and hopefully a few positive reviews. Done and done.

The winner of the $25 gift card from Amazon was Greta. She participated in most of the discussions and took the time to write an awesome review of Blood Link. Greta also gets a huge shout out as a former medic with the Army National Guard. Thank you for your service Greta, and thank you again for participating.

Was I comfortable with the promotion and would I do it again? I was very comfortable working with Abbie. She took great care of me and it was a very positive experience. I might even go so far as to say that parts of it were a lot of fun.

In general, am I any more comfortable with promoting myself? I’m not sure that I’ll ever really like this part of the job, but I’m trying. .

How all this will play out in the end, I can’t really say. What I can say for the short-term is that I moved a few books, my web traffic picked up, and I noticed that several of my books are now on some people’s To Be Read lists. Those are all positive things.

Of greater importance is that I forged a positive relationship with some wonderful people. Thanks again, for a great month, Abbie.