I have two new covers to show you - both by Jordan Taylor, who's responsible for the brilliant covers of the Dark Soul series (and especially Dark Soul 1, which has to rank among everybody's favourites).
Most of you know that I've been dipping my toes into the audiobook pool. I'm really making lemonade in times of lemons. Basically, if I can't/don't write, at least I can go wide with the books I do have.
Return on Investment is going to be the last of those though - because it's so long, doing it in audio is really expensive (same for translations), and will obviously take longer to produce. So I'm hoping to get all of those done in 2015, and then tackle Return on Investment.
And people have been asking for audiobooks/translations for Dark Soul and Memory of Scorpions.
On the positive side, I've teamed up with an Italian publisher to do Skybound and Gold Digger with them, and from what I understand, they're also interested in Dark Soul. Dark Soul has also received some interest from Germany, apparently, so before I do anything as an "indie/self-publisher", we'll see how all of that pans out.
In any case, here are the covers.
For Incursion, I hired Gomez Pugh (famous for his work for Jordan Castillo Price), and I'm happy to say that we've wrapped production (well, he did - all I did was listen to it and answer a few questions), and we're now waiting for Audible to approve the audiobook, which can take a few more days. This process will stick in my head because Gomez had some really cool/creepy ideas for the big scene where Kyle "meets" the morph and the the scene really pivots on that idea - it's so cool what you can do with voices that I'd never have considered doing on the page. Also, spoken like he does it, Incursion feels a lot more noire-ish than I remember, which is really cool. Listening to it made me want to write more about the characters and the world. It runs pretty much exactly 3 hrs and should come out before the month is over - Audible willing.
For Gold Digger, I hired Alexander J Masters, who previously did work for Josh Lanyon and has a lot fewer fiction releases to his name than is fair. I was looking for somebody who can do accents, and Alexander has to run through several in that book - British, Canadian, Hungarian and Russian. He does an amazingly sexy Henri, so I'm quite excited about that. He's started and I think we agreed he'd finish up by the end of the month. I'd expect it to run for about 5 hrs when it's done. I'm shooting for a release in September.
After that, Skybound and Deliverance should follow - and once I have the pennies together that, I'm looking at Return on Investment. That's the nice thing about a day job - being able to make investments like that and experimenting with forms/mediums is cool.
And listening to your words is interesting - what stands out are repetitions and "empty" sentences, and I'm glad to say that Incursion stood up pretty well. There were a few sentences I'd write differently now, but overall the audiobook didn't make me cringe (other audiobooks have). What's pretty clear is that some stuff you do on the page just doesn't work in audio - and that's what fascinates me at the moment.
What would a book be like that specifically written for audio? You'd certainly run dialogue slightly differently - maybe write the narrator with more attitude. So I've been entertaining writing a book exclusively for audio - not sure if anything comes out of it, but it's an interesting idea.
In terms of writing, nothing much is happening, but I've been putting together a plot skeleton/super structure for a book set in 1820, apparently entirely written as letters/diary entries and from a female point of view. I know, right. I don't know if that will happen - though it's an idea that's been at the back of my skull for about 3 years now and it's still there, so that means it has a good chance to happen at some point.
I don't even know what to do with it - but I'll consider it an experiment. It's nothing I've ever done, so that definitely half the attraction.
