Okay, so I have completed making an audiobook! I have spent the last 2 weeks or so narrating the first in my X-Calibur series and I have produced just over 6 hours of narration.
It was a lot more difficult than I expected.
I thought the main difficulty would be using the software to make the audio meet the ACX requirements, but as it turns out that was the easy part. The most difficult part was the narration itself.
I talk a lot. A LOT. And I seldom have trouble saying the words I want to say in the order I want to say them. So why does that change when I am reading a piece of text into a microphone? The X-Calibur books are written with an age of 12+ in mind, so don't have much in the way of long, complicated words in them, but I still struggled to get out the words I wanted in the way I wanted it to sound. Some sentences I would do 4 or 5 times before I could make it sound right.
Once I had finished narrating, editing, fixing and tidying, making the audio files meet the ACX requirements seemed relatively easy. I used google and a plug-in for audacity which assessed each file, and after 20 minutes of tinkering it said that they met the ACX requirements. They have now been submitted and are awaiting the ACX audio review.
Fingers crossed...
