VEHO: A BACKSTORY Gets the Audible Treatment

In trying to understand all this book-writing stuff, another area I wanted to delve into was audiobooks. It has been a long process, but I got a lot of feedback from readers on needing to turn VEHO: A BACKSTORY into an audio version.

I am happy to announce that I dropped down the rabbit hole and now that version is available. After researching this, Amazon Audible was the way to go. Amazon does audiobooks through its ACX program. It is much like the Kindle KDP program for publishing books.

ACX is a publishing platform, a collaboration platform for the creation process, and a marketplace for authors to connect to people who produce and create audiobooks. You can also record and upload your own recorded material, but I was not interested in doing that. One of the cool things about it is that people audition for your story if they find it interesting. VEHO: A BACKSTORY received twenty-two auditions based on a script that I created. It was so much fun to listen to the auditions and hear people bringing something you created to life in a new way.

Part of the process is also hashing out a production contract between the author and the producer.

After listening to the auditions, getting feedback, and going back and forth with a few producers, I finally settled on Anthony Aiello who happens to be an actor, narrator, and audiophile. Working with him and his wife to record VEHO: A BACKSTORY was such a cool process. They brought it to life in a way that just makes the whole thing pop! It is a whole new way to take in something I created and blew me away. I am super excited for you to listen to it and let me know what you think.

You can get it on Amazon audible here: https://a.co/d/f14GNpO

This whole thing with VEHO: A BACKSTORY was going on while I continued to write the first novel in the Humanity Shattered series. I am still in that process now, I passed thirty-three thousand words just this last weekend. It blows my mind that I have written that much in between doing my everyday life. The novel has certainly taken on a life of its own.

From what I understand writers tend to land in a couple of camps when it comes to their writing style. Pantsers and Planners. Pantsers are people who just sit down and start writing, there is no formal plan or outline that they write from. The story kind of unfolds through the process. Planners are the opposite. They write from an outline and meticulously plan out their story.

What am I? Well, I love it when a plan comes together… until I don’t. So, what that means is I initially laid out a plan and created an outline, but I find that there are times when the story takes over and I go in completely unplanned directions.

Just as an example part of my character development process is jotting down what I may know about a character. It helps me to keep track of them and know them a bit. It also keeps me honest when writing them. I don’t want to do something out of character for a character. Well, I created a character early in the story that I liked, I mean I thought he would be a central character for the story (I even named him after my all-time favorite Cleveland Browns quarterback), but as I was writing it became clear that he was going to die. It blew my mind when I was writing, and I even tried to kill someone else instead, but it just wasn’t right. It literally just happened

It threw me so much that my wife asked me what was wrong when I walked into the room where she was. I told her I just killed someone and I wasn’t expecting it.

So, I guess I am a planner until I am a pantser when it comes to writing. What I am saying is that I don’t want to strangle the creative process of story writing with a plan that may or may not be the best serve the situation. I guess I can’t be put in a box.

Shamon