Creating an audiobook

 

I do nearly all my "reading" on Audible.com these days, so I'm trying to make my all of my books listenable. For A Long Thaw, I used AI and it turned  out fine, but the experience was nothing like working with a voice artist like I did while creating the audio book for Finding Charlie.

I went back to ACX.com to create the audio book for Blood & Water. The process was similar, but I chose a different payment option and I was able to do a search for narrators based on their payment requirements -some do royalty splits, some have flat hourly rates.

Casey Montgomery was able to voice the five alternating narrators in my book by giving them each a slightly different sound. There's something nearly cinematic in hearing it preformed and I really love the way it turned out.

If you'd like to give it a free listen in exchange for an honest review, please join my review team.

Interview with Jackie Fraser

 

I did a series of author interviews for another website long ago and I've decided to repost them now that the other site is no longer active so they'll continue to be accessible on the internet. I always found it reassuring to hear from different writers the way that there really isn't just one way to be a writer. I think that kind of reassurance is evergreen so please enjoy this one from 2019:

 

I met Jackie years ago in an online writing forum. We later spent time in the same writer’s group and whenever I’ve had to take time away from the group, I beg Jackie to keep sending me her stuff. I’ve been lucky enough to read a lot of her books and I’m rereading her latest now. Jackie is so good at creating characters who feel like real people – the kind you think about long after you’ve finished reading. A big reason for that is her ear for natural dialogue that makes you feel like you’re eavesdropping on an actual conversation. Her new novel, The Bookshop of Second Chances, is like that. I got her to talk to me about her writing style and publishing journey.

Talk a bit about your most recent book. How long did it take to write? Who is your audience?

The Bookshop of Second Chances is commercial women’s fiction. It’s about Thea, who loses her job and splits up with her husband when she discovers he’s been sleeping with her friend. Her great-uncle has left her his house and collection of books in Lowland Scotland. She goes up there to sort out the house and sell the books. She meets Charles and Edward, estranged aristocratic brothers, and decides to stay for the summer, getting a job in Edward’s second-hand bookshop. And so on.

I’d hesitate to say it’s entirely romance, although it’s stuffed with romantic tropes, some more foolish than others. I wanted to see how far I could go with that and still write something I’d like to read. So the audience is ‘me’ and by that I mean ‘women of 45 plus who like a happy ending but don’t always find older women in romance novels particularly relatable’.

It took about five or six months to write altogether – I began in September 2016 and it was more or less done by the following spring, although I had some trouble with the ending. I did a million drafts.

Tell me about your writing process. At what stage of writing do you find outside feedback helpful? How do you sift through differing advice?

I have an idea for the beginning of something, and usually an idea about the central relationship. Then I just hammer it out. I don’t fight it if I get stuck, but I do make myself keep going if I’m bored of typing. I work it out scene by scene (at night usually) and sometimes I’ve done that well enough in my head that actually getting the thing into the computer seems a bit tedious.

Like everyone, I have good days and bad days, on a good day I can write 8000 words, but usually I manage much less than that. I edit as I go along but not in a decisive way – I just often re-read and amend sections as I’m going. My aim is always to just get the first draft finished, though, not to make it ‘good’ in any way. I put the speech marks in at the end, because writing dialogue is my favourite thing and punctuating it gets in the way. Apparently this is a bit weird.

I do a number of drafts and don’t share it with anyone until I’m pretty happy with it. I go on the waiting list for the Women’s Fiction Critique Group (on Facebook, run by ex-Authonomites). The Bookshop went to be critiqued in February 2018, so I’d probably waited, I don’t know, six months for that? I can’t remember. I was writing something else by then, anyway. So it went off to be critiqued. I think it was the fourth of my books that went to the WFCG, and the response was pretty good. I’d been a bit worried that it might be too ‘romantic’ (they don’t do standard romantic novels) but generally it went down a storm. I was slightly surprised, even though I did think it was quite good. (British sense of ‘quite’ there – as in ‘reasonably’.)

I got some good, useful feedback, particularly about the end as I recall, plus a significant suggestion about changing the location of one scene. I usually copy and paste all the comments into a document and work through them. Critiques are so useful, even if you disagree wildly with what people are saying. Anyway, I did a ‘final’ draft, and then probably another three. By 2019 I was trying to make myself submit it. I don’t always submit my books, I find it quite difficult, even though rejections don’t really bother me. But submitting is hard work, I hate writing synopses because my books have very small plots that can look quite feeble, and the whole thing is wearisome.

Do you plot it all out on note cards or does the ending come as a surprise to you, too?

Ha, no, I don’t really plot at all. I just ‘put some characters in a room and see what happens’. As I say, I usually have a vague idea – I mean the question is always ‘will X and Y KISS?’ and the answer is ‘YES, OBVIOUSLY’ – it’s not very complex. However how they get there and what the ‘apparently insurmountable barrier to congress’ will be is less clear.

What do you do if you get stuck?

I stop and do something else and assume my subconscious will fix it, which is usually does.

Do you read in the same genre(s) you write in? Are there particular authors who inspire you?

Ah, so this is a tricky one and the answer is… not really. I like literary fiction best. Which I can’t write, although I do try sometimes. I also read a lot of non-fiction (which I also write). Recently I have read a few more books at the lighter end of the women’s fiction spectrum because one ought to read in one’s genre. But I read all sorts of things, and I’m basically inspired by everyone who writes well, in whatever genre.

In terms of my own genre, Georgette Heyer is my greatest inspiration because her books are funny, and her characters are almost always convincing, however silly her plots may appear. My favourite authors include Iain Banks, Douglas Coupland, Claire Fuller, Terry Pratchett, Hilary Mantel, Susanna Clarke, Sarah Perry, E M Delafield, Stella Gibbons, and Kate Atkinson, who I absolutely love. (Interestingly, Atkinson says she’d write books even if they never got published and I would too – that is, after all, what I’ve done my whole life up to now.)

Can you describe your path to publication?

Well. Simon & Schuster UK have a Digital Originals imprint and every year in July they have a one-day open call for commercial women’s fiction submissions. Last year I noticed this on the actual day, and the extremely short deadline was very motivating. I sent off ‘five hundred words about me’ plus my first chapter. That week they came back and asked me to send the full manuscript. I’d never been asked for a full before, so this was quite the thrill.

Then everything went very, very quiet. In October one of the team shared a pic on Twitter of their Kindle with my words on it, which was exciting, but then it went very quiet again. In January they started talking about #OneDay2020, so I assumed it was a no, and planned to email and ask for a formal rejection (for my Rejection Spreadsheet). But when I opened my emails that morning there was one asking me to go to London for a meeting. Obviously I cried.

Anyway, I went to the meeting (I was extremely, surprisingly nervous) and we talked about the book and my soon-to-be-editor suggested a couple of revisions. I went home and did those and then we signed the contract. As an editor myself, receiving my copy-edits was really exciting, and, dare I say it, enjoyable.

I’ve been very lucky, as they’ve sold the rights in Germany and the US, so there will be a German edition (for my German in-laws to read!) and an American one – which will be a physical paperback. (The US edits were extremely bracing – I also had to write an extra chapter for them.) Plus there’s going to be a large print library edition, and US and UK audio books. I’m astonished frankly.

What can we expect to see from you next?

I’m writing two new things at the moment and hoping they’ll want to publish one of them. One’s about a woman who runs away from home, and the other one is about a woman who owns a fancy house that she rents as a retreat for artists and writers. I’ve nearly finished the first drafts of both, and am at the stage of having no idea whether they’re any good.

Reclaimed Baggage

My most recent book, Reclaimed Baggage, was 20 years in the making. I wrote Unclaimed Baggage many years ago and while I was in the query process, an agent told me she’d be interested in the story of Jenna’s mother.
 
This surprised and confused me. Unclaimed Baggage is Jenna’s story. She’s the likeable heroine overcoming challenges that are, for the most part, created by her mother, Barbara.
 
I had conceived of Barbara as the villain, which might have been true from Jenna’s limited perspective, but gets a whole lot more complicated when you step back and look at the broader picture. It took me years of living to see the shades of gray in that picture.

Also, when I was in my 20s, I couldn’t imagine writing from the mother’s perspective. It took me nearly 20 years to write Reclaimed Baggage, to understand how to explain why Barbara did what she did, and how she changed.

-Deborah Kalb Books

New Book Review

Check out this review for Unclaimed Baggage on Reedsy:

"Jenna is the type of person who would rather allow all her coworkers to mistakenly think she’s pregnant than correct a stranger who asks her when she’s due. She allows her anxious, depressed (gay) best friend to sleep in her bed for weeks because she doesn’t want to cause him emotional distress. Even though her sister, Julie, is unemployed and lives at home (never mind that her mother is a perfectly able-bodied adult), she reluctantly leaves college and moves home to care for her dying stepfather.

As the book progresses, we see Jenna’s sense of self and boundaries develop. She meets Sam, who doesn’t use her to meet his own needs. He loves her without asking her to change and allows the relationship to move at her own pace, emotionally and physically. Above all, he allows her to be fully herself—messy family and all.

As she’s navigating all these dynamics, Jenna learns a family secret that makes these complicated relationships downright opaque and must figure out how this unexpected revelation fits into everything else she’s trying to hold together."

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New Book Promo

Unclaimed Baggage just went live last week and0 Reclaimed Baggage will be out next month so I've been doing a lot of promo lately. I thought I'd share some of it.

  

 

 

Q: What do you think the books say about family dynamics?

A: Family love is complicated. You can have a deeply loving relationship with someone who has caused you deep pain and this is a life lesson most of us only get through the kind of forgiveness only granted to family.

-Deborah Kalb Books

How do you measure the success of your writing career? I’d love it if Finding Charlie was picked by Reese Witherspoon’s book club or Unclaimed Baggage was made into a film for Netflix, but the pursuit of those things doesn’t drive me.  I write because I have these stories in my head, and because I have something to say. I write for myself. I don’t know if I can say I enjoy the writing itself. The process can be pretty frustrating. But the finished product is very satisfying. I love hearing from readers. I think that connection may be the main reason I write. Success is a good review. -Laura's Books and Blogs

I’m a hybrid author. I’ve been at this, professionally, for about twenty years. My debut novel was traditionally published. I have two books that I released on my own. A fourth was chosen for publication by KindleScout’s crowdsourcing competition. Unclaimed Baggage and Reclaimed Baggage are coming out with Type Eighteen Books this spring.

I resist writing sequels. I often write family sagas with overlapping characters, so they’re all connected. In that way, the stories are never over. The main character in one book may show up as a peripheral character in another, and vice versa.

Unclaimed Baggage is the first book I wrote with a single narrator. When I decided I wanted to tell her mother’s story, I knew I couldn’t write it from Jenna’s point of view. Much of what shapes Barbara’s character were events that took place before Jenna was born. So Reclaimed Baggage is a sequel of sorts, but with a different main character. -CanvasRebel

Interview with Nolan White

 

I did a series of author interviews for another website long ago and I've decided to repost them now that the other site is no longer active so they'll continue to be accessible on the internet. I always found it reassuring to hear from different writers the way that there really isn't just one way to be a writer. I think that kind of reassurance is evergreen so please enjoy this one from 2019:

 

In the internet era, writing has become a lot less isolated, even if many of the interactions we have are mostly virtual. It’s a lot easier to encounter people facing the same struggles so we can commiserate or share tips. Nolan White is one such virtual soul I’ve met on the journey and I got him to talk a bit about his work and his path toward publication.

 

Are you published or trying to be?

Yes, trying to be. This month I’m putting the finishing touches on the first Pedigree Nation trilogy. Ten years ago I started out with Great Days Outdoors magazine as their proofreader, then moved up to assistant editor. Occasionally, I wrote articles for it as well. I’ve written two dozen short stories and finished the manuscript on two novels.

When did you start writing, when did you start calling yourself a writer and when did you decide that being published was a goal?

While working for my hometown newspaper in ad sales, I was tasked with producing a tabloid. Since I had to also write its contents, I became a writer. One of my articles featured a local contestant in a scholarship pageant, which led to my launching a national pageant magazine within months. It seemed only natural that I should write articles about that industry and its winners.

But it never occurred to me that I could write fiction until I read an article in USA Today about the donor organ business. It unnerved me. The result was a novel I wrote in the thriller genre. Its plot had the hero’s runaway daughter picked up by a televangelist’s outreach network and sent to a so-called rehab center that fronted for a donor organ cartel. It was a novel whose time had come. Yes, ripped from the news headlines and easily embellished for drama.

I sent query letters to 45 publishing houses but quickly learned how difficult it was to accept rejection. So, to develop my craft and become a “real” writer, I joined a local literary club in Fairhope, Alabama. It helped me to be more optimistic, too.

Do you read in the same genre(s) you write in? Are there particular authors who inspire you?

I’m a voracious reader because I’m curious about everything from genetics to sociology. I’ve long admired James Lee Burke’s prose and gritty characters. I also enjoy the talents of Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Mosley, and T.K. Thorne.

Talk to me about your writing process. What is your preferred writing environment? How long does it take you to complete a book?

For me it took years. After all, I had a day job. Running a marketing company with 45 employees consumed my time, so writing novels was a hobby. But ideas consumed me. While on the road I wrote longhand, spending time in restaurants, coffee shops, and hotel rooms. I’m now retired so I revise my debut novel. I also write short stories, at least enough to keep my critique group busy.

At what stage of writing do you find outside feedback helpful? How do you sift through differing advice?

Anytime, actually. The best feedback comes from a friend who’s also my landlady. She writes children’s books, and I’m amazed by her insight into my various character’s motivations. I’ve come to rely on many male and female readers. A different POV is always welcome, including that of an award-winning author. She’s candid and the world’s best at spotting redundancies.

I’ve learned that critique clubs are not all created equal. Many people have a built-in bias for social conservatism, so when my novel presented a televangelist in a bad light, one critique member assumed I was attacking her Christian values. “Hey, back off,” I wanted to say. “It’s fiction.” I left the group before she reached the part about polygamy.

When do you think about the audience your book appeals to?

Well, that’s a bit tricky. When will readers agree that matching people who have compatible genes will produce better babies? It’s fiction, true, but it’s based on real science—its use and misuse, eugenics versus dysgenics.

Pedigree Promise began as a thriller but it’s much more than that. Its hero, a standup comedian, has the “youth gene,” but he’s conflicted about using his genetic asset for the eugenics cause (it’s supposed to prevent heritable diseases). Or, because he needs the money, will he allow a cabal of billionaires to patent it for their materialistic (and nefarious) purposes?

A stigma still surrounds eugenics because some people can’t separate it from the science of 1930s politics. Hitler, they insist, invented it. No, he perverted and coerced it. Meanwhile, his VW gets a free ride. Readers must decide if genetic matching is “playing God” or if pedigree is a cause worth mating for.

So the plot evolved into a hybrid story, meaning I’m using elements of mystery, psychological intrigue, humor, and social commentary to make readers think about humanity’s future. By the way, I’m optimistic about that, too.

 

You can find out more about Nolan White on his Facebook page.

Book Review: Commonwealth

 

This one started out slow, and I had trouble focusing on it at the beginning: a chicken-or-the-egg problem I seem to have with a lot of audiobooks. Another problem I had is that there are so many potential main characters: six children and two sets of parents the book follows for about fifty years. It's hard to decide which one to connect to or root for.

But once I figured out what the story was about, I was hooked. As someone who is normally drawn to character-driven novels, this was somewhat new to me. Writers of autobiographical fiction will likely find this especially fascinating and I will probably go back and read it from the beginning to see what I missed.

The inciting incident of the novel is relayed from varied perspectives and through hazy memories. It is the order of the narrative that makes it feel like a slow burn, and makes the revelations so satisfying. The moral questions it raises about who has the right to tell a story and whether it belongs to anyone are never fully answered. It is up to the reader to decide, or at least, to consider.