" A Cure to Die For: A Medical Thriller Hi everyone. I just noticed your discussion on audio books and may be able to shed some light. I recently complet...more
A Cure to Die For: A Medical Thriller Hi everyone. I just noticed your discussion on audio books and may be able to shed some light. I recently completed the audio book recording of my new novel, "A Cure To Die For". It was a remarkable experience and so much fun I’m still smiling. I didn’t want to do a traditional audio recording with one narrator droning on and on, I wanted it to be like the radio dramas of old with a full cast of characters, music and FX. For a model I used the guy and the show that started it all and created the genre, Orson Wells and “The Mercury Theatre On The Air” (You can go to www.mercurytheatre.info if you’re interested to hear these classic presentations from 1938-1940 for free including the original recording of “War Of The Worlds”) To begin with I went to the head of the theatre department at Carroll College here in Helena, Chuck Driscoll, and told him what I wanted to do. He said I had to have a budget. I swallowed hard and told him I’d think about it. Meanwhile, he read my book and loved it. We met at a local Irish pub and he got to talking about all the people he wanted to cast and I got so excited I paid for the beer. That was the start of my $5,000 journey to audio book heaven. My book, I was shocked to discover, has 85 speaking parts! Fortunately, Chuck knows every talented adult and student actor in town and after passing out a case of free books we had more volunteers than we could count. Chuck also has complete authority over the college performing arts theatre so that’s where we set up shop. The place is a huge, ancient stone building that, like most of Carroll College, looks like a classroom at Hogwarts. For over a month or more we met several nights a week and recorded. One of the biggest expenses of the book was keeping a well-stocked crafts table for the actors; i.e., unlimited cheese and wine. An army and a theater company moves on its stomach. The biggest problem was getting quality audio recording. A theatre is not a sound studio and boy is there a difference. Chuck took on the narrator duties. With his magical vocal cords and the endurance of a draft horse, he brought the text to life. Our actors ran the gamut: the obese and affable mortician with green thumb in the book was played by an obese, affable and marvelously talented actor with a master’s degree in Russian! The female protagonist was played by a young actress with range and depth far beyond her years who has since left to make her mark in Hollywood. The male protagonist was played by an angry and volatile young man with matinee-idol good looks who has just completed writing, directing and starring in his first feature film. We had nymphs playing alongside actresses who have been on stage for decades. We had a young and beautiful actress playing one of the major roles who was singing and dancing in one musical at the same she was rehearsing for another; who has her master’s in Theatre Arts and who is, as we speak, directing her first play in the same theatre where we did the recording. The list goes on. I made friends and memories to last a lifetime. One of the characters in my book is a Salish Indian who is a software millionaire with an amazing personality. Our dilemma was that while our marvelous cast could perform almost any accent imaginable, no white person can do an authentic American Indian accent. We needed the real thing. As usual, Chuck knew just the person. Enter Jack Gladstone, a Blackfeet singer, song writer and poet who lives and performs up in Glacier National park and who is currently up for Poet Laureate of Montana. He read my book and drove all the way down from Glacier to perform in our play. The base and resonance in his voice almost blew up our cobbled-together sound system. Not only did he play the character to perfection, he is the character. It was as if I’d known him before I wrote him—which on some level I think I did. One device Chuck and I invented for the recording is pretty clever. The microphones are extremely sensitive and will pick up the slightest movement or turning of pages. The head of the audio-visual department at the college brought us over a projector and screen and we put the Kindle version of my eBook up on that. Everybody could see it like a movie screen and Chuck, as director as well and narrator, could turn the pages with a simple touch of down arrow on his computer. As the author, even I got in the act by doing a few of the one-line parts and standing in on the audio board when our audio engineer had to perform one of the nefarious characters he played. When all was said and done we ended up with about 18 hours of raw, unedited audio. Gulp! Jack Gladstone took me aside and in his quiet, almost non-verbal way, made me see the absolute necessity of hiring a professional audio editor. He introduced me to the man who does all his albums, this amazing musician and audio engineer from Kalispell who has recorded many of the Nashville greats and still tours with a number of bands. He liked the book and our raw recording so much that he has agreed to take on the daunting task of making us “a product we can be proud of” and work with me to hold the costs down. As to audio book distribution, forget “Audible”. They are the biggest elephant in the room and take unfair advantage of it. Their cut is so large that it is impossible to make any money. The place to go is CDBaby.com You can set your audio book up for $39 and their cut is roughly 25%. That means as the author you receive approximately 75% of every sale! That’s huge! And they’re honest. A significant number of musicians and bands have gone over to them. There is more to this story—this is kind of the “Reader’s Digest” version—but Like Woody Allen says, “90% of life is showing up” and as Goethe said, all manner of things appear that you never dreamed possible once you commit yourself fully to a task. The audio book will be out for the Christmas season and I’m hoping it will help cross-pollinate holiday print and eBook sales. I have a major email campaign planned to promote it using some innovative ideas I have developed with this amazing lady who helps me with internet promotion—but that is another story. Hope this is of some help and support to those of you out there on a journey-of-a-lifetime similar to mine. I’ll be happy to answer questions if I can. You can contact me here on Goodreads or email me at info@creativeartistspublishing.com
Stephen G. Mitchell, author of “A Cure To Die For: A Medical Thriller”(less)
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