How to 86 Your ACX

 

Another quality post brought to you by Steve!

Hey, everybody!  Hope you're all doing well.  As I mentioned last month, French Press is going full steam ahead on bringing the demented, phantasmagorical vision of Somer Canon's YOU'RE MINE to your eyeballs next month.  And shortly after that, to your various earholes and other auditory sensory apparatuses.  As a first-time publisher, I could not have fucked this situation up worse.  But, perhaps my shameful failure will bring you some gleeful Schadenfreude.

One thing I've been cognizant of for nearly eight years now is just how long of a process creating an audiobook is.  Narrators (rightly so) can take several months to produce an audiobook of ten to fifteen finished hours.  Often, publishers wait until the ebook and paperback are published before even soliciting narrators on ACX, which is Amazon's audiobook auditioning platform.  At the end of the day, audiobooks often trail their printed siblings by so long, they may as well be treated as a separate release, which many publishing houses also do.

Well, I intended to not let that huge gap happen for YOU'RE MINE.  I knew it was unlikely we'd have an audiobook up before, or even at the same time, as the ebook, but I assumed that if I started producing the audiobook as soon as I knew I intended to publish the ebook, at least we could close that multi-month hole and make sure nobody was passing on the book for lack of preferred format rather than lack of interest.

Boy, did that turn out to be a dumb fucking decision.  But at least I learned some good stuff for next time.  Stuff from which you, my current (or potentially future) self-publishing friends, can learn.

So, first of all, you can't post something on ACX for auditions unless it already exists on Amazon.  It took me a few minutes of frustratedly trying, like an alchemist of old, to generate something from nothing, before I realized this.  But I was not to be dissuaded!  

I went back to Amazon and created a page for YOU'RE MINE for pre-order.  I wouldn't normally put something up for pre-order, and I'll tell you why.  Release day for an ebook is usually its buzziest day.  If you can get twenty, fifty, even a hundred purchases on release day, your numbers will shoot through the roof.  So you might land at number one in a particular Amazon category, and then guess what?  You can market yourself as a Number One Bestseller.  Sure, it may have been in "Latvian Interest Sea Stories," but still.  Number One, baby!

On the other hand, selling twenty copies over twenty days means you hold steady and your number does not go up.  Ditto a hundred copies over a hundred days.  I always attempt to strike with my fist, not my fingers splayed, and a pre-order option screws that up a bit.  Thirty sales over thirty days of pre-ordering is not the same thing as thirty sales on release day.

But, I had to do it in order to pull the Amazon entry over to ACX.  You can see it here.  But it didn't always look like that.  Initially I just wanted something so I could solicit auditions on ACX.  And since I didn't have my cover art yet, the cover just looked like this:

And ACX pulled that cover non-image over.

I spent the last few weeks eagerly awaiting auditions.  And I got...two.  For comparison's sake, last year within that same timeframe I had received about 75 auditions for BROKEN-DOWN HEROES OF THE WESTERN NIGHT.

I was frustrated, I can tell you that.  I hadn't done anything differently.  In fact, I'd taken great pains to get the damn thing up in the most timely manner possible.  But no auditions were coming in!  Did people suddenly hate me?

Well, I wasn't going to have that!  Luckily I have a massive writing community to draw upon, starting with this blog, and ending with my tens of thousands of fans and followers across social media and meatspace.  I would be damned if I wouldn't get Somer the best narrator there was for her book!

So, last week I set out and started actively soliciting narrators.  And I sent the audition link for YOU'RE MINE to one I know personally.

"Oh, man," he said, "You don't have cover art?"

And with a sinking feeling, I realized I'd shot myself in the foot.  Apparently professional narrators look for cover art, and that can be a make or break factor.  Which makes sense.  If I were just a dilettante, I might not get cover art.  And if I were a professional publishing house, as I purport to be, I should have gotten it before requesting auditions.

So I spent the next few hours (sue me, this is why I hire professionals for graphic design) dummying this up: 

Then I spent the next several hours trying to upload it to ACX - which apparently you can't, post ipso facto - and then crossed it over to Amazon, hoping it would populate to ACX...which apparently it won't.  

So I guess now I either have to desperately beg for narrators to audition (which, if you know anybody, please send them here) or wait for the perfect Goldilocks narrator who is good but doesn't mind slumming with some cover art-free basement press, or, I guess, if both of those fail, wait until the cover art is complete and then tear it down and redo the whole McGillicuddy.  Fun fun whichever way it pans out.

But, at least I got a blogpost out of it.  And hopefully you all learned something from my inept bumblings.  All right, have a great week everybody.  Talk to you soon!