Spotlight & Giveaway with author JB Sanders {Glen and Tyler's adventures series}

The Glen & Tyler series of adventure books are about a happy married couple getting out there and solving crimes. Or playing hockey. It depends on the day.

Tyler can't inherit unless he gets married ... and when Glen proposes, hijinks ensue. Follow the guys on their world-spanning adventure as they defeat mobsters, an evil step-mother, a rakish brother-in-law and pirates. No, really -- pirates Plus there's an underground super-base. And hockey. Come for the romance, stay for the hockey.

In the second installment of the Glen & Tyler series, the guys find out what happens when you inherit a Scottish castle, tussle with international crime gangs and host formal balls. Yes, balls -- with dancing and everything!

In typical Hardy Boys--er, Glen & Tyler fashion, there are secret passages, irascible old men, caves, missing treasure, fine liquor and kilts. Ok, the kilts thing is new -- but believe me, you’ll like ‘em. Although there isn’t much hockey this time around, there is shinty*. There’s also some romantic anniversary thing, but really, stay for the shinty.

* For those readers unfamiliar with the ancient sport of shinty, think hockey played on a field, without protective gear and with a solid rugby sensibility. Or a riot with sticks and a score keeper.

The third book in the Glen and Tyler series.

Glen and Tyler are young, in love, and the wealthiest human beings on the planet. But when Glen's brother calls from a jail in Paris, they're off to France to tangle with spies, neo-Nazis, evil world-spanning conspiracies and French gangsters. Plus they have a romantic dinner, and find long-lost treasure. Really, it’s a fun-filled non-stop romp.

The author lives with an imaginary cat, and works in computer support (you know, the day job), all in Upstate New York. He divides his time between writing humorous suspense novels, reading science fiction and urban fantasy, absorbing too much British TV (or as his roommate would say "those crappy BBC mysteries"), pondering why he didn't write a scifi or fantasy novel, and his various hobbies. No, reading isn't a hobby. It's more like a vocation. The author also wonders how people get away with talking about themselves in the third person this way. It's awkward.
[cough]
I've been contributing a regular column, the Geek Month in Review, at the Magical Buffet: http://themagicalbuffet.com/

Geek Credentials
RPG: Blue box D&D, lead minis, been to GenCon in Milwaukee.
Computer: TRS-80 Color Computer, Amiga 1000, UNIX system w/reel-to-reel backup tape
Card games: bought Magic cards at GenCon in 1993
Science: Met Phil Plait, got time on a mainframe for astronomy project in 1983
His Blog: http://glenandtyler.blogspot.com(less)

** Author Guest Post... 

How I’ve Managed to do Three Audiobooks

It all started with Josh Lanyon’s post about this website ACX.com. For those of you who might not know (and if you don’t, run out and buy his books now!), Josh Lanyon is a prolific and celebrated author of M/M fiction, primarily mystery and thriller stuff. He’s great!

Anyway, he wrote this article talking about this website which helps connect, in the parlance of the site, Rights Holders (authors or publishers) with Producers (self-engineering narrators, or full production houses). I thought: “hey, that sounds pretty easy, let’s give it a try.”

And the rest is history.

What? You want details? Well, alright, but just this once.

So I uploaded a short sample script, basically a chapter out of my first book (Glen & Tyler’s Honeymoon Adventure), specified a few things about what kind of narrator I was looking for (male, American accent, capable of other accents, etc.), and then waited for the auditions to roll in.

A couple of days passed. I got an audition! I listened to it, with mild dismay. He was a fine reader, but his voice was entirely wrong.

Then like a month passed. Nothing, not a peep. Then I get another audition. I don’t exactly do a  happy dance at this point — I mean, come on! It’s been like six weeks, and I have two auditions? Oh well. I listen to it.

It’s weird! The voice is like, almost an exact match for the Tyler I hear in my head when I read his dialog. I know, it was crazy! I immediately sign him up, and look forward to the fifteen minute preview (the next step in the audiobook creation).

Brian (this is my narrator/producer) bangs out a great preview, and we’re off. The way ACX structures things, you decide on a time-frame for certain milestones, and then how you’ll both be paid. There are two ways to go with payments: royalty split, or an hourly rate. The “hourly rate” is based on the number of finished hours in the final audiobook. I’m not really sure how this goes, or even what a decent rate is, since I’ve only ever done royalty split. When you use the hourly rate, you agree on what you’re going to pay, pay it, and the audiobook is yours free and clear. You just have to use ACX for distribution (since you used them for free for finding your narrator and putting it all together).

With the royalty split deal, on the other hand, you pay no money up front, which for us poor authors works out pretty well. What happens is that after the audiobook goes on sale, I split the royalties evenly with my narrator (Brian): I get 25%, he gets 25%, and ACX gets 50%. I believe that’s for a term of 7 years, but I’d have to go check the fine print. After that time, the full royalty rights revert entirely to me, and thereafter I get the full split. In this case, that would be 50% for me and 50% for ACX, although see the Caveats section below for more recent updates on that score.

Ok, so back to the nitty-gritty. At this point the narrator (Brian) is recording each chapter of the book, and then uploading it. Once it’s up there, I can download it or listen to it in the browser (it’s all web-based). Brian and I have (quite successfully) used a Google doc to track each chapter, and we can both edit the document to leave comments. I got into the habit of listening to each chapter with a copy of the hardcover edition of my book (I love books!) in my lap, following along with the text as Brian narrates. This way, I can catch any errors, missed words, added words, etc. And frankly, sometimes Brian’s “errors” improved my book. I also listened for any flubs (that’s an audio term for a typo), extraneous background noises, or any passages that don’t quite work the way I was picturing them. I’m lucky, that stuff was fairly rare for Brian.

Once Brian feels he’s satisfied with his end of the recording, he presses a button on the website. Then I have to give my approval, or request any changes I might want.

This process continues until all the chapters are finished, and then it’s just deciding on what the Retail Preview Clip will be (believe me, that takes time). Once that’s done, and your Producer hits the Finished button, you then can click on “Request Changes” (if there is some last-minute thing you want different), or “Approve”.

At this point, ACX does a variety of technical checks on the audio. If they find any problems, such as random noise or audio gaps, they’ll bounce it back. If not, they’ll package it up and make it available for sale.

Boom! You have an audiobook.

Caveats

Some folks have probably heard about the controversy circling around ACX lately. It boils down to this: ACX decided that they want a bigger slice of the pie, and reduced the royalty they pay Rights Holders to 40%, keeping 60% for themselves. For anyone doing the Royalty Share, that means they get 20% of the retail price, instead of the 25% they had before the change.

For a lot of people, that’s been enough for them to just walk away.

For myself, I would probably have kept using ACX happily for years, but reducing their royalty share payout, without any obvious increase in services, strikes me as pretty crappy. Nor has the their service been improved in any obvious way since they announced the change — quite the opposite in fact. So while in the short term I will definitely be using them — in the long term, I’m looking around for other options. For my Glen & Tyler books, I have a narrator I’m very happy with, so that feature of ACX isn’t that useful to me anymore.

* Must be 18+ to enter giveaway {International} *

1 winner will receive ebook copies of all 3 books in the Glen and Tyler's adventures series

1 winner will receive an audio book copy of Glen and Tyler's Paris Double Cross, book 3 in the Glen and Tyler's adventures series

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