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Reading

Oct 23, 2024

I haven’t spoken much about reading recently so thought I’d give you a quick update on where I am with that.

I started off October with a plan to make it a habit to read for 40 minutes per day. And that went well but it didn’t really feel like enough.

Back in the day, ten years ago probably, I was reading so much. I was getting through 75+ books a year. Now I’m currently on 32 books for the year and in 2023, I only read 36 books total.

It’s not that I don’t love reading. It’s one of my favourite things to do, but there’s always something else that’s easier to do and there are so many distractions and… you know how it goes.

There are a lot of personal reasons why my reading has taken a hit. Just looking at the dates when it dropped off it’s easy to connect it to Jude.dropped off it’s easy to connect it to Jude. And that makes sense.

The thing is, reading and writing are so closely connected that trying to get back into writing without getting back into reading isn’t going to work.

So in the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading a lot more. I’m listening to audiobooks, I have three digital books on the go and most of the time when I’m not writing, I’m reading. I’m not tracking any of it in the short term, but the numbers will be reflected in the number of books I finish each year.

I’m enjoying it a lot and really enjoying it.

And on the writing stuff: that went very well, but nothing to really tell you about that.

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Pre-Production

Stories planned (total): 8

Production

Words written today: 1,150

Words written total: 26,496

Plus / Minus target: +2,496

Currently writing: Son of Mars

Follow Up on A.I. Audiobooks as Accessibility Tools

Nov 21, 2023

After writing yesterdays blog post I was listening to episode 501 of the Sell More Books Show where they were discussing a recently announced KDP plan to allow authors to create A.I. audiobooks. If yesterdays post was interesting then you might want to give it a listen.

I hadn’t heard about Amazon’s plans to release AI narrator tools, but I assume it will work in a similar way to the Draft2Digital / Apple Books system. With the added benefit that the books will be available on Audible as well, which is by far the biggest market for audiobooks.

It does lead me to wonder whether I will need to pick one store or the other. A brief look at the terms and conditions for the audiobook program suggests that for the term of the contract, you can’t create additional versions. That is likely how it works with traditionally narrated books as well, so I’m not too surprised about it. Fortunately, the contract is only for 6 months, so if the KDP program is fully up and running by May / June next year, I should be able to move things over.