That was an exercise in pain. It took almost a year. In between were colds and school holidays and car accidents and emergency late-night server deployments. The raw audio alone was killer. Too many nights I’d sneak out to get some recording done, only to have the (typical bloody Melbourne) weather strike my plans down, ruining the audio. Though the booth is pretty sound-proof, the roof is metal, so rain is amplified. There’s prolly a song in that: “♫♪ The doof-doof on the roof-roof means the booth-booth ain’t so sound-proof… ♪♫”
Then there were the nights in front of Audacity, earphones on, interrupted again and again while cleaning up the audio, removing the pops and clicks, adjusting the amplitude, applying corrections, punching in glitched audio. “Jez, give it a rest. Leave it be. It’s past midnight, turn it off.”
More than once I had to run out and an re-record a section because it was just too hacked up, or I’d used the wrong accent (that’s an issue) or the zombie-voice was a little too zombi-ish and couldn’t be understood. The entire first chapter was thrown in the bin and re-recorded, simply because my voice, by the end of the recording, was significantly different to the start. I’m getting an appreciation, now, for how bloody hard it is for any kind of audio production.
Is there a point to all of this? You bloody-well bet there is. After all of that (and more, I’m not going to spend this entire time complaining. I’ve got better things to do.), and uploading to Findaway and passing QA, I am very proud to say that:
“Iris of the Shadows, the official audiobook, has been produced, released and distributed to major platforms.”
You can see the latest links here: https://books2read.com/iris
As a celebration, it’s on an introductory special of $5.99, so grab it while it’s hot! That’s over 26 hours of audiobook goodness for a couple of cups of coffee!
