For better or worse, here is what it was like to be me this last year creating Lionwood Manor.

Let me begin by saying thank you to all the readers who have joined me on this journey and all the readers who have helped get the word out there.

You can get Lionwood Manor (My first in this series) here: https://a.co/d/2fTSuBM

My journey began with a passionate three-month sprint, to finish my manuscript. Words and coffee flowed through me in rivers. I can’t describe how healing it was to get out so much of my anger and frustration. I naively thought writing was the hard part. I’m sure I will laugh about that someday but today it just feels embarrassing. Anyway, I finished my first draft, and immediately planned out my query letters. A few days later I sent them out on the gossamer wings of blissful ignorance. 38, in total. Then I started my first go through to polish my story while I waited.

Let me tell you—that process hurt. You learn a lot about a story by the end of it. Even if you thought you knew where things were going when you started, which I really didn’t, you end up on the other side of the story thinking, “What the hell just happened?” Then, when you start reading it from the beginning, you see all these plot holes you never guessed would be there because you ended the book a different person than when you started.

Eventually though, I got through the second draft and, get this, I told an old college professor who follows my work, that I felt good enough about the second draft to stop there and move to the production phase. He was kind enough not to laugh in my face but he probably would have saved me some crying if he had.

But ignorant as I was, I got to work editing for Audible. I did every ounce of research I could and struck out to create my audio masterpiece. I found software that does text-to-speech and I was off. Reading, polishing, rereading, repolishing, and rereading my work. It was misery. I must have read every word in that book 8 times. For context, it’s 375 pages on a Word document. But that wasn’t the worst part of the journey. Oh no! The worst part for me was the glitches! Now, I am not a perfect human as much as that hurts me to admit, and as such, I make mistakes. So it was with great frustration that I found out the software I was using sometimes randomly scrambles my work up! Worse, it does it after I hit “Export.” Which here means “the button you push to turn all the text you’ve entered into an MP3 file. So, once I had things just where I wanted them, I would hit the export button and wait. Then, I would download the file. Once I’d done that for all my chapters, I was confident that I was ready for publishing.

Wrong again. On a whim, I went through and listed to the first chapter. The audio file I thought was ready for publishing? It was a dumpster fire! Phrases were delivered flat, dialogue was hopelessly garbled, the narrator would pause randomly in weird spots, and there was a ton of random noise! Some of the text even got scrambled so badly I had to delete the entire chapter and start over because I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was awful! But I am nothing if not a fighter, so I fought through it. Here you might ask if customer service was of any help, to which I would laugh then promptly cry. At some point, it felt more like a fist fight but I think you get the picture so I will move on.

I hated it so badly. Ok, now I am done.

Getting back on track. During this time, I hit the six-month trigger for the next round of queries after hearing nothing back from the last batch and this time I sent out something like 24, having far less energy to flagellate myself against the whipping post of professional rejection. I imagined that at least a few agents would be intrigued. Spoiler alert, I received a single impersonal “this isn’t for me.”

Disappointed but undeterred, I decided to self-publish, setting my sights on Audible. My plan was simple: publish the audiobook first, and if there was interest, release a softcover, followed by a hardcover. I didn’t even know about Kindle Unlimited because I don’t own an e-reader I’m a book-in-hand kind of person. The feel, even the smell of the pages, is part of my experience. So, I started my publishing journey with audio as my first and best option.

By this time I was still fighting with the text-to-speech software but getting much better at navigating it. I’d given up entirely on customer support as there never once offered a meaningful fix to any of the numerous bugs I pointed out to them. But finally, I was ready to convert to audio. I thought I was nearing the end of tis books journey, and I could start on the next book. I had no idea how much work was left.

That was when I figured would be a good time to start a social media campaign and built a website! This website! Having no experience in either, the learning curve looked a lot like a wall from where I was standing. Designing a website is far more involved than it seems. I could write another blog on this topic alone. And maybe I will. But for now, lets put a pin in it by saying, I should have been working on this leg of the journey from the time I started writing! Gaining followers alone takes at least as long. Thank God I have friends! That’s all I can say there.

At long last, I was ready to upload my audio files to Audible. With glee in my heart, I set up an account, did the tax stuff and started looking for the “publish” button.

Would you like some foreshadow? I was about half-way to where I am now. Here is where I discovered yet another setback. As it turns out, you need to be published on Kindle before you can publish an audiobook—heavy sigh. Yet undaunted, I pivoted, reformatting, again, my work for Kindle. Thankfully, this chapter of the saga was reasonably straightforward, and I was able to go to publishing in about a week including the three day review period. Now, with a shiny new e-book live, I returned to Audible, hoping to finally get my audiobook out there.

Here is where the crying stopped and the screaming at my computer really took hold. My sound files weren’t up to Audible’s standards. The encoding was off, the volume wrong, and the sample rate incorrect—terms I hadn’t even heard of. So, I dove into a crash course on sound engineering. I had to teach myself what a bit rate was, the difference between that and a sample rate. What is a channel you ask? I can tell you that. Now! Worst of all? I had to go back into my speech to text software and re-format something of the breaks for length because audible only works with files less than 120 minutes.

To put this into perspective, working with this software has been like building a house of cards in the back seat of a moving vehicle. And now, I just got news that I used the wrong suit in about half the cards I built the house with. I could have started a fist fight with a moving train I was so mad.  The only redemption at all is that, after all this practice, I am now a ninja at this stuff. Manipulate sound files to the correct decibel levels and formats? I know the keyboard shortcuts for that stuff now! And let me tell you, as any author might, I never pictured myself selecting sound bites for compression and changing typing ffmpeg -i input.wav -b:a 128k output.mp3 was not something I thought id ever type in my journey but here I am learning command prompt to maki my dream a reality.  

Finally, I was done. I had everything uploaded and I there were no errors reported! I could have been done right there and just hit submit! But, I have trust issues now. So, I woke up at 3 A.M and started re-listening to each audio file. Thinking it a waste of time I just kicked up my feet and prepared to listen to the entire 9 and a half hour long book for the 10^th time. I just wanted to prove to myself that I was done. So, you can imagine my horror when I found an egregious error in the first 9 minutes of audio that forced me to go back to the original text, re-upload an entire chapter, re-format it, and re-upload it! The Text had been scrambled! It made it sound like a toddler wrote the book, and not a smart toddler at that! If I hadn’t gone back…. I don’t even want to think about it. To wrap this up, three other chapters had to be re-uploaded from various stages of production before I was satisfied. And when it was all said and done, I wasn’t strong enough to go back through and re-re-listen to it all for the 11^th time. It was just too much. I just said a prayer and hit the submit button.    

But now, after countless hours of editing, troubleshooting, and fine-tuning, I’ve finally submitted the audiobook for review. It’s expected to take about ten days, and I’m hoping for a smooth approval process. My text version sailed through, so I’m hopeful this will follow suit. This journey was far more than I bargained for, but I’m proud of what I’ve created and grateful for readers like you who’ve joined me on this adventure. Thank you for your support, and here’s to the next chapter—both literally and figuratively!