This extra Friday post is for the purpose of picking your collective brains, O Esteemed Readership.
I’m looking at the prospect of producing audiobooks of my novels.
Generous friends provided me with equipment, and I think I’m near the point where I can make good enough quality recordings to satisfy ACX, the Amazon audiobook publishing arm.
My plan has been to start with the Erling books, but now I’m uncertain.
So I ask you – if you bought an audiobook where the narrator is declared to be an Irishman, would it bother you if the book was read in a Midwestern US accent?
I contemplated trying to master an Irish accent, but I’m pretty sure it would never be really right. I could probably carry the accent for a few paragraphs, but over many hours of reading, the illusion would wear off. I’d slip too often into flat Minnesota tones.
So now I’m considering hiring an Irishman to do the Erling books (if I can find one; you can hire narrators on a percentage-of-royalties basis) and just doing my Epsom books myself.
What do you think? Would it disappoint you if I had somebody else play Father Ailill?
Today the whole world is discussing the fall of Assad in Syria, the arrest of the Brian Thompson killer, and the verdict in the Daniel Penny trial.
It is a busy news day.
Which is rather sad from my point of view, because otherwise I’m confident everybody would be talking about the release, this weekend, of The Year of the Warrior in paperback on Amazon.
You realize what that means, don’t you?
It means that you can now own the whole series of Erling Skjalgsson books, all the same size, lined up on your favorite bookshelf, to the envy and amazement of all your most most sophisticated and insufferable friends.
Just make sure to leave a space for The Baldur Game (coming soon).
I started this business of formatting books for Amazon (if I remember correctly, though I have an idea I may be mistaken on some points) while setting up The Baldur Game. I watched how-to videos on YouTube that took me through the process of making a Microsoft Word document into something you could humbly submit to the gatekeepers of the great publishing leviathan.
I was terrified to do it, frankly. I am an old man, what they call a “digital immigrant,” someone who’ll never be quite at ease with all the ones and zeros. And yet I worked at it to the point where I’m actually relatively at ease uploading books now.
So I figured I might as well go ahead and make all my Erling books manifest. One after the other, I worked my magic, and behold, they did appear, and I held them in my hand, like the treasures of far Cathay.
And I cannot lie – there’s a thrill to holding your book that just doesn’t happen seeing it appear on a Kindle. Like holding your baby rather than looking at his picture. (But with less diaper changing and mineral oil.)
I even think I’ve developed a minor flare for design. I think the paper books I’ve created possess a sort of simple elegance. They look good to me. I am not ashamed of them.
I’m sure you’ve spent the whole day wondering how my project of uploading The Year of the Warrior for Amazon (paperback) went this morning. I thank you for your concern, but (as is so often the case) I overestimated my capacity.
What actually happened was that I spent my whole session doing some final tweaks on formatting – I had to create a table of contents, for one thing. MS Word has this utility for creating tables of contents, and it’s pretty slick once you’ve figured it out. Then I fixed my page headings and numbers, which I should have done before creating the table of contents. Because adding the page headings changed the word capacity of each page, so all the numbering changed, and I had to update the table. Also, I had to go through the whole thing and find places where I’d inadvertently created unnecessary blank pages by not keeping my page breaks tight. Which, of course, changed the page numbers again and required another table update. Several, in fact.
I’ll try to upload tomorrow. I’m thinking I’ll probably be able to upload it on my own account, rather than piggybacking on Baen’s listing. The main problem with that is that I won’t have my reviews to go with it. The reviews are many and – surprisingly – largely favorable.
I’ll probably have to beg my fans to put up new reviews. (Hint, hint.)
The video above is, of course, the immortal Sissel Kyrkjebø, doing the Norwegian Christmas hymn, “Deilig er Jorden” on Norwegian TV in 1991 (with English subtitles). The melody will be familiar to you. We call it “Beautiful Savior.” It generally surprises Americans (it surprised me) to learn that “Beautiful Savior” is a Christmas hymn in Norway.
I’ll also draw your attention to the way the Christmas tree is decorated. In Norway, it’s customary to take the silver garlands and run them straight down from the tree-tip to the base. The intention, I think, is to suggest the rays of the star (or angel) at the tree-top.
We Americans tend to wind our garlands around the tree. I’ve always assumed the intention is to mimic the way snow lies on fir tree branches.
Should I share negative thoughts about my own books on this blog? Is it acceptable to indulge in self-criticism, or should the tone be relentlessly rah-rah and self-promotional?
Oh heck, that ship sailed long ago.
I’m working on formatting The Ghost of the God-Tree, the second part of The Year of the Warrior, for paperback. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s got some strong stuff in it.
But I think it’s among my weakest books. There are lots of things I’d change, if I didn’t feel obligated to keep the editions relatively uniform.
And I’m pretty sure why.
I am very grateful to Baen Books, and to Jim Baen the maverick publisher, who gave me what little legitimacy in the industry I possess.
But Jim had a system. A program for his authors. And into that program I did not fit well.
Jim felt that nothing contributed more to an author’s success than having a bunch of books with his name on them all together on the shelves in the bookstores. This worked for him again and again. He knew his business. In order to achieve that shelf-space goal, he wanted several books from his new authors, quick. That’s why I got a three-book deal.
The problem is, I’m not a fast writer. I’ll admit that some of my languid output is due to laziness and inattention. Fair enough, mea culpa. But regardless of that, it just takes me a while, and many drafts, to produce decent prose. It took me years to produce Erling’s Word, the first part of the book. The Ghost of the God-Tree was written in haste, and suffers from my parental neglect.
On the other hand, judging by history, I’m probably being a little over-critical here.
And there are parts I like. I enjoyed the section where Ailill (Aillil) and Asta go to Thor’s country and meet the god himself. I thought that was kind of fun.
My writing time lately – as I guess I’ve already told you – is devoted to getting my books, previously only available in e-book form, into paperback on Amazon. All my Erling books have been done now, except for two. One is The Baldur Game, the last, still waiting for its cover art. The other is The Year of the Warrior. TYOTW is still published electronically by Baen Books (my toehold on legitimacy). And I’ve also been having the book printed privately (with Baen’s agreement) for hand sale at Viking events and lectures. But I’ve decided it’ll be a better deal – and cheaper – to get it done by Amazon like the others.
No doubt there will be last-minute technical problems explaining the dual publication to the Amazon people. But I’ll cross that cognitive bridge when I get to it.
So here I am, reading the book pretty much for the first time in a quarter of a century.
Am I a great writer? One likes to think so. I like to imagine I’ll be discovered by posterity, even posthumously.
Some parts I like very much. I think that when I’m on my game I’m very good. I think I do a good job at high dramatic scenes – I actually sometimes give myself the shivers, which is a little like tickling yourself.
And sometimes I do dialogue pretty well. When I’m not being preachy – though I’m not as preachy as I feared. Most of the time.
Plotting is my weakness, as far as I can tell. Sometimes I think my plot points are kind of contrived.
And I made one large historical error – I had Erling hold his local Thing at his own farm, which (I’ve learned since) was never done. Things were always held at a distance from the chieftain’s home, to prevent undue influence on his part (which in fact occurs in the scene as I wrote it).
Nothing to be done about that now. Another discussion point for future Walker scholars.
Greetings, fans of the future. I greet you from Eternity.
I forgot to show you a picture of the new, fully realized, paperback version of King of Rogaland. So here it is. That’s a pretty good cover, I think.
I also think I told you I’m working on an Amazon edition of The Year of the Warrior in paperback. At the risk of sounding self-satisfied, I’m actually kind of impressed with it. It’s a good story – grabs the reader and keeps the action going. I’m not sure I’ve improved a whole lot as a writer in the 25-plus years since the thing was published.
I was taken aback to discover that the final draft I’m working with – as well as the privately printed version I’ve been handselling for a few years – features “dumb quotes” rather than “smart quotes.” You probably know what that means – smart quotes are the curly ones, curving forward and backward, that you find in printed material, which MS Word usually creates for you automatically. Somehow (I think it must have been during the text’s brief sojourn as a Google Doc) it lost its smarts. And I’m embarrassed to offer the book to the Amazon public in such a state. It would be a blow to my aforementioned self-satisfaction.
So I did a web search and found a method for converting them back. To my astonishment, it worked. Now I’m trying to figure out how to do the one-slash quotation marks and apostrophes.
I’ll probably mess it up. I need to save backup draft.
A hundred years ago in Vietnam, when the French controlled their education, Edgar Allan Poe was believed to be “America’s literary giant.” They were familiar with eerie stories of supernatural beings, which a long-standing Chinese genre gave them, so discovering Poe was like grandkids discovering Mam-ma.
“Poe’s name evoked liberation of the mind, and he was praised as someone who had ascended from the mundane by the power of imagination,” Nguyễn Bình writes for Literary Hub, offering several examples of Poe’s influence on the nation’s literature.
In 1937, author Thế Lữ began writing detective fiction. “In the story “Những nét chữ” (Letter Strokes), [Hanoi-based hero] Lê Phong told the Watson-like narrator: ‘The stuff about reading people’s thoughts from their faces like Edgar Poe and Conan Doyle said… I’m only more convinced that they’re true. Because I just did so.'” (via Prufrock)
A couple more links for today.
Ted Gioia says the big guys are out to get independent creators. For example, Apple is squeezing Patreon. Google says it can’t find select websites. It’s ugly. Gioia writes, “I’ve been very critical of Apple in recent months. But this is the most shameful thing they have ever done to the creative community. A company that once bragged how it supported artistry now actively works to punish it.”
And is this the best sci-fi classic most fans have missed? “Though it routinely ends up on best-of-all-time lists, somehow, the 1974 science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye never actually seems to get read.” A quick glance at the first of 2200 reviews on Goodreads suggests the book hasn’t aged well.
Photo: Dinneen Standard station, Cheyenne, Wyoming. (John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)
Brandywine Books is indeed your go-to venue for major publishing news! Today, for instance, I find this item, selected purely at random from among the many notices that flood our executive offices:
West Oversea is now available as an ebook on Amazon!
Granted, it was available on Amazon the day before yesterday, too. But in the interim I have worked my publishing magic. WO is no longer a Nordskog Publishing book, but part of my own burgeoning publishing empire.
Tomorrow I hope to get the paper version uploaded.
I may or may not make a splashy announcement about that. Depends on how slow the news day is.
Today was a big day for me for another reason. I finally found myself with a few hours I could call my own, and I went out and bought myself a new laptop. For years I’ve been bouncing from one cheap laptop to another; you may recall me kvetching a while back about how hard the letters on my keyboard were to read, and the fact that I couldn’t view the thumbnails of my saved photos. The keys on this one are white on black – and illuminated(!). And I can see the thumbnails just fine. Seems to have been a matter of digital memory or the flux capacitor or something. I am reveling in the snappy response and the vivid graphics.
Occasionally I get a brief respite in my life where my financial head is above water. This is one of those times. So I treated myself. A parsimonious man I am, son of a haywire farmer. Making a semi-large expenditure is a challenge. But I do use the contraption for work, I must insist.
My only complaint is that I couldn’t plug in the plug-in thing for my wireless mouse. Have they changed USB connectors that much since I bought the thing? I’ve got a replacement coming from Amazon; until then it’s the humble track pad for me.
I also bought a little tensor lamp to illuminate the Sigrid Undset biography I’m translating, so I can work more easily at night.
It’s all conspicuous consumption, I guess. I did, after all, grow up near the home of Thorstein Veblen.
I have no idea where I’m going with tonight’s post. I just have some thoughts provoked by my paperback book project. As I’ve told you before, all my self-published Erling Skjalgsson books (except for The Baldur Game, still waiting in the wings) are now available as paperbacks, thanks to backbreaking effort on my own part.
Currently I’m working on West Oversea. Its previous publisher, Nordskog Publishing, has transferred all rights to me, and I’m currently going through the manuscript, formatting it as an e-book form. Nordskog was kind enough to provide me with the graphic files for all their neat art, and I’m embedding that stuff now. My version won’t look exactly like Nordskog’s, but it will have similarities.
Which gets me thinking about some of the stuff I sort of learned in library school… some of which I sort of remember. I’ll probably get the terms wrong.
First of all, we studied what a work is. I reviewed True Grit last night. True Grit, as conceived and written by Charles Portis, is a work. Print it in hardback, print it in paperback, make it an e-book – it’s still the same work. If you adapt it as a movie, that’s a different work, because substantial changes have been made. A comic book version is also a different work (if I remember correctly).
But the hardback, the paperback, and the ebook, though the same work, are all different editions. And when it went out of print, and then got printed again, that became a new edition.
The individual copy you hold in your hand, on the other hand, pretty much identical to all the other copies of the edition, but distinct in its individual quiddity and whatever notes you might have scribbled in the margins, that’s called an instantiation.
My new e-book of West Oversea, similar to but different in detail from Nordskog’s, will be a new edition.
This is all complicated by the question of editorial changes. As I’ve been working through the manuscript, I’ve made small corrections. Mostly in punctuation. Very rarely, I’ll change a minor word. I don’t want to go crazy – I feel I must let the chips lay where they fell, even if I could do a better polishing job now than I did back in 2009. Mostly for the sake of the people who already bought it and think they’ve read the work.
I think that makes my new edition a different iteration of the work.
The Norwegian word for “busy” is “travelt,” which always makes me thing of a crowded road. Which is pretty much what I feel like right now. I have a) my “novel writing” work, which currently means formatting books for paperback, b), the magazine I’m editing for the Valdres Samband, the ethnic organization that hired me for this purpose, c) my translation work on the Sigrid Undset biography, and d) the monthly newsletter for my Sons of Norway lodge (which won’t take long but should have been finished by now).
This morning it rained. The first rain we’ve had around here in months. It’s been raining all day, except for when it snowed (alas for the trick-or-treaters!). When I was done with my novel writing this morning, I happened to look outside and found that the first four of my cartons of orphaned books had arrived from Nordskog (see last night’s story). I have an idea the mail carrier was unhappy about being made to carry those heavy cartons, because he left them on the very outside edge of the porch, where the drip from the awning would pour straight down on them.
Some of the cartons were soaking wet; all were damp. I brought them in immediately and freed the books from the cartons. They’re air drying in my living room now, as are the cartons.
Most of the books are fine. A few have covers curled. But I’m getting these things for pennies on the dollar, and don’t expect to outlive the supply anyway.
Ten more cartons arrived this afternoon (perfectly dry, I’m happy to say). Also I finally got my paperback copies of The Elder King from Amazon. I’d been looking forward to that – photo above.
And… I got a surprise. Some moron – and there’s no moron but me on this job – accidentally put the wrong title in the page headers. All the right-hand pages in this edition say at the top that the book is Hailstone Mountain, which it is not.
I wouldn’t have this problem if I’d done the prudent thing and ordered a review copy for myself before releasing it. But I lack the patience. Now I have this.
It’s easily fixed. I’ll republish it tomorrow. Which means the book will be briefly unavailable. The few copies already sold will go down in history as errata, no doubt to become sought-after collectors’ items.
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