A busy week! If this keeps up, I think I could see doing this for a living. But first, a helpful Tip of the Week:

I mentioned before that I tend to read too fast, both as a protest against the slow, over-dramatic pausers out there, and just because I tend to read fast. When I realize during a narration that I am going too quickly, I can get myself to slow down – for a little while. After a few minutes, I am right back up to 12K words an hour, and that is just not sustainable for me or the listener! So after doing some searching around for TelePrompTer-type software, and trying to get the Windows automatic mouse scroll to be workable (where you click on the scroll wheel and then use the position of the mouse pointer to control scroll speed), I found my favorite solution so far!

Adobe Reader has an automatic scroll feature that has adjustable rates. Are you serious? This is the best thing ever! Here’s how I go about it now:

• If the manuscript I get is not a PDF, it’s a simple process to export the Word or whatever doc into PDF format. While I am in the word processor, I adjust the font, font size, line spacing and paragraph spacing to a standard format that I use for all my manuscripts to read. To do this, check out how to apply custom styles to Word docs.
• In Adobe Reader, get to your narration spot, and have your recording software ready to go.
• In Windows, hit Ctrl-Shift-H. On a Mac, it’s different but similar.
• Use the up or down arrow to adjust the speed of the scroll. w00t!!!
• If you start getting ahead or behind, use mouse scroll wheel to adjust the position, and the scroll will continue on. Adobe RULZ.
• If you haven’t enabled Single-Page-Continuous, you probably should, IMHO.

Let me know what you think if you try this out, or if you have discovered a different solution for pacing.

If you missed the news, you should know that my first audiobook Los Angeles: History of the City of Angels went on sale this week. Come to find out, it apparently isn’t reported to you how the sales are doing for a pfh book. I guess there might end up being reviews on the audiobook, but since I already got paid, I don’t get to know how it is selling. Someday I will find out if that is different for Royalty Share books.

I accepted a pfh offer for a book called Inner Demons: PTSD. This is an interesting work published by Lemon Press and written by several authors – some veterans, some veterans family members, and some by interested third parties. There are poems and personal stories – some quite heartbreaking. This is a project I can invest in, as I mentioned before, but the offer was for pfh rather than Royalties. I hope I can do it justice.

I did accept a Royalty Share offer on a title Trauma and Tenacity, a recounting of a medical doctor’s time spent in Vietnam providing medical care to Vietnam civilians during the war. The author, Dr. Mary Ingui, provided me with several links to interviews and articles about this book, as she is busy promoting the print version while we begin working on the audiobook.

Two other Royalty offers came in this week as well. Shall I Pray or Watch TV? By Vic Zarley, and a technical book on writing programs in offer Python. The Python book is fairly straightforward, but I will probably share more on the other book in the next few weeks as it is a much longer book.

Outside of ACX this past week, I took the plunge and made an attempt to get signed up on VoiceBunny. It was quite a process, and as I have been fairly lengthy in this post already, I can save this story for next time! Anyone else done the bunny yet?

Categories: Voice over Work