The Divergent Chill: Battle of Nesma audiobook is set to be released soon. It’s been in production for a long couple of months. I used the ACX platform to produce the book and partnered with an incredibly talented narrator and voice actor, Beau Thomas and Grace Noble. Beau narrates and voices the male characters, and Grace performs the female characters. The book is undergoing final review by ACX as the final step before it goes on sale on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.
I even got the original cover artist from the paperback/Kindle version of Battle of Nesma back to design an updated cover for the audiobook. Jerry Shaffer is better than ever. He’s working on some other designs for me and hopefully we’ll have some character vignettes coming soon.
Battle of Nesma has been out for many years now, but the ability to produce and publish an audiobook version remained out of reach for me until recently. I started looking into the possibility after discussing book publishing with my friend, Chris Scarnati, who just published his best seller, Paul Spadafora: Fighting Till the End. I discovered there were many different services I could use to produce the audiobook, but ACX seemed to be the most straightforward and it was affiliated with Audible and Amazon already. Getting the process started with Battle of Nesma was made so much easier with the ability to kind of “side load” all of the book details.
Once I created the book project on ACX with a short excerpt, I immediately started receiving auditions from a slew of talented performers. I was impressed, and it took a lot of back and forth before I decided to go with Beau. From there, a long couple of weeks followed as I worked every night listening to each of Beau’s recorded chapters. I caught his mistakes and I caught many of mine. The review and my discussions with my friend Chris made me aware of the possibility of updating the published books on Amazon to fix these errors. I originally thought this was impossible but learned that so long as corrections do not change the page count by more than 10%, they can be made without having to publish a new version.
I made the fixes, lots of small things like confusing “Alden” and “Olin” a couple of times. I also ran the text through a modern grammar and spelling review in Office and fixed a bunch of stuff. In the end, the page count didn’t change and the book should be much improved.
The audiobook is even more impressive. The narration brings a life to my book beyond what my words were able to do. I’ll share a sample below. It’ll be a slightly extended, draft version of the retail sample and demonstrates Beau’s ability to narrate and voice Beriszl with Grace voicing a young Chilali. I can’t wait to share the final product when it releases!
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