Wednesday 25 November 2015

Audiobook

I finished my latest book I Was A Teenage Pharisee (through making myself stop adding things to it) and quite unexpectedly, Jeremy pressured me to do an audiobook. At first I thought this was ridiculous, as there are so many pages in my book, but for some reason I started in on it.
     And it was interesting.  Things that are visual and work in a book (charts, quoted lyrics, pictures) do not translate into audio.  And I also realized I could do things like sing the lyrics instead of quoting them, and get people to read the little quotes they'd provided for my book, with stand-ins reading for those who wanted anonymity.  It's been ridiculously fun to get people from various far-flung parts of the world to read things into their cell phones or tablets, and send them to me to edit into this thing.
     I think that hearing real voices, often of the actual people who provided the quotes about their own experiences, has a much deeper emotional impact than merely reading the quotes in black and white.
     I found doing the audiobook has allowed me to add all manner of interesting or silly sound-based things, while knowing various charts and things will have to be left out.  And I  found that really, it's more like a podcast.  A long thing people can put on to listen to while working out, or in the background while washing dishes or something.  And I'm not interested in selling it or making money from it.  So it's just... there.
     Still hard at it, working on chapter five.  I put up a site for the book, mainly to put up the audiobook bits.It's here: http://www.teenagepharisee.com/
     Feel very free to share it around, and to comment to let me know what you think.