Introducing Images and Excerpts on YouTube
a monthly author and her books update
Merry Christmas! It’s almost here, and it truly is the most wonderful time of the year when you focus on the Reason for the Season — Immanuel, God with us.
Today, as I write this, winter has arrived in Nova Scotia — not just on the calendar, but on the ground and trees and cars and… well… everything. We experienced significant snowfall overnight. How long will it stay? I’m not sure. This is Nova Scotia, after all, and rain may come and wash it away. At present, it does look like we will have a white Christmas, and my hubby is out clearing snow and has been for a while.
In my writing life, I’ve been hyper focused on getting out my latest Leenie Brown novel. It releases on Boxing Day (Dec 26) and then, I have to finish the short sequel to it and get that out.
And I need to pick up Hatfield Falls book 4 again. Poor Fred and Esther have been waiting so patiently for attention — although, they seem to pop into my brain with little possible story scenes frequently enough that I can’t forget about them. :)
I don’t remember if I mentioned this to you here or not, so forgive me if you’ve heard this before. I have started working with some digital voice narrators. These narrators are cloned voices of actual voice actors who have willingly made their voices available in this format for use to create all sorts of projects. They are remunerated for the use sort of like the way an author is paid for pages that are read on Kindle Unlimited. They get paid by the number of characters that their voice is used to change a written manuscript into an audio production.
I am grateful for these narrators because it means making audiobooks is within what I can possibly afford and will make my work more accessible to more people.
Using AI voices can limit where an audiobook can be distributed as some booksellers have their own proprietary AI audio creation models (such as Amazon and Apple) and others have limited their acceptance of audio from anyone by Google. (These would be places serviced through Findaway Voices, which would include Spotify.)
I am using Elevenlabs to produce my audio files, so I’m left with fewer options for stores — Kobo. Yep, just that one. :)
I’m working on figuring out sharing them on Patreon. More info will be coming about that in the January update.
And then, there is YouTube, which is where I am truly excited to be able to list my audiobooks for readers to listen to for free, while still being able to earn an income so I can keep writing and sharing stories. However, I do need to get my channel to a monetized level to make that a sustainable option into the future. So far, I’ve met all the goals except the number of subscribers. I need 1000 before I can apply and currently I’m at 251. If you’d like to help me out with that goal, I’d be grateful.
Seriously, sharing books and other videos on YouTube is a desire that I believe God has put on my heart. I’ve felt a prodding towards it for a couple years actually, and then, in October, I felt God tell me to dedicate some consistent time to it. So, that’s what I’m trying to do. It’s a learning experience that’s for sure. :)
And thankfully, I’ve seen improvements in my health (with the long covid stuff) so much so that the mental work needed to figure this all out hasn’t been too besetting. In fact, the more I do it, the better my brain seems to be doing. It gets tired to the point of tears (literal tears) but recovers fairly well with sleep. So that is wonderful, and I thank God for this change.
So far, I’ve gotten a couple of Leenie books completed and posted (because I landed on a narrator for her books before I had two selected for the Hatfield Falls books).
The plan starting in February (hopefully) is to share the Hatfield Falls books by the chapter as I get those done, and then the full book once I have all the chapters finished. That way it will be available to enjoy in two different ways - on a playlist of chapters or a playlist of full books.
I’ve been trying to get familiar with how to best produce the narrators for the HF books. As I have been doing that, I’ve been creating some Images and Excerpts videos and sharing those. Below is the most recent one. This one is from the beginning of book 2 and is set at Lacey and Will’s wedding which happened to take place on December 16 (aka Jane Austen’s birthday). :) It is ready by Chrissy, my female narrator voice. (There are a couple others in the Images and Excerpts playlist, and the first one on the list is by Chris, my male narrator.)
Enjoy!
And have a blessed holiday season.
Annilee