amwriting – Page 6 – A. L. Lester

Some different audiobook options

It will quickly become clear that this is a blatant promo post about my new audiobook set-up, but I’m combining it with some info about the different listening platforms out there too, as I know a growing number of listeners are looking to move away from Audible. I hope it’s useful from that point of view.

I’ve recently moved the three books I have with Callum away from Audible and they should now be available via local library services as well as other places like Chirp and Kobo. I get as much money from borrows from your local library as I do from Audible credit sales, so knock yourselves out with that and don’t think you’re ever doing any author down by legitimate borrowing rather than buying!

Because of /technical reasons I don’t understand/ I don’t seem to be able to ALSO distribute them via Audible at the moment, but I’m hoping that when I have a free weekend and a bottle of gin handy I can plough through what I need to do to make that happen, as a matter of fairness to people who may have bought the first ones with Audible credits but perhaps haven’t yet got to the rest in the series. For the same reason, I think I will put The Hunted and the Hind up with Audible as well as everywhere else when it comes out in the summer.

HOWEVER, having said that, Audible set their own, quite high, prices for all the audiobooks they sell to people who don’t subscribe in some way. On the non-Audible platforms I have been able to set the price of Lost in Time and Shadows on the Border to $9.99 and the stand-alone, Inheritance of Shadows, to $5.50. A lot of places like Kobo and Google Play will add sales and reductions of their own to those prices and on Authors Direct I am able to directly control pricing without negotiating with anyone else, so I have made the prices $7.99 and $4.40, respectively. The Flowers of Time is still available from Audible and I won’t be moving that away from the platform.

These are some of the different audio platforms out there:

Alternative audiobook platforms are all gradually growing. It’s definitely worth checking the different platforms for your favourite authors.

Plus: Binge Books

And then we have Authors Direct:

Authors Direct is part of Findaway Voices, the audio arm of Draft2Digital, which is the service I use to distribute my self-published books. Each author can set up a little shop of their own for their audiobooks and direct readers/listeners to it. It’s quite new I think, but so far it seems really sensible and flexible. I load up the audio files Callum sends me, they check them for quality and then they send them out to all the different platforms I’ve selected as retailers. And at that point I can also add them to my own shop. Listeners download the app onto their phone and bosh, off they go.

It has an easy-to-use app (as do a lot of the other options) and it’s ad free. And apparently it has a safe-for-work mode where you can blank out your screen so no-one can see what you’re listening to :).

They have a handy infographic to explain how simple it is!

The downside as far as I can see is that there’s no main storefront where you can search for eg LGBTQ books or cook books or books about llamas. Listeners find each author’s books via a direct link to the author’s ‘shop’.

Anyway. I hope that makes sense…speaking as a creator this is much more transparent—the sales information is laid out clearly with a straightforward relationship between units sold, what platform they have been sold via and the sale price. Plus we get seventy percent of the list price of sale rather than roughly forty at the other platforms and twenty-five of whatever price they decided to set themselves at Audible, which is obviously very attractive.

So there we are. I really hope some of these non-Audible alternatives suit some of you, too. As a consumer I find the Amazon machine very convenient; and as a seller it is to some extent too. I just think that there should be alternatives should people choose to use them and this is my little effort to bring notice to the audio options. And sell more books!

Happy listening, whichever platform you choose!

Coming Soon: Sylvia Marks!

Sylvia Marks is a minor character in Inheritance of Shadows. She’s a doctor, who was part of the Scottish Women’s Hospital at Royaumont, France, during the First World War. Down entirely to the encouragement of my lovely editor Lourenza Adlem, she is now about to have her own trilogy set in the little English village of Bradfield in the early 1920s.

Cover: An Irregular Arrangement, four people in 1920s dress.

I don’t have a title for any of the books yet, but I’m sure something will spring to mind before too long!

You can read about other inhabitants of Bradfield if you are a subscriber to my newsletter, in An Irregular Arrangement, a 10,500 word free story.

Read on to find out a bit about Sylvia and her friend Lucy.

Excerpt

“Sylvia! Are you coming?” Lucy called up the stairs.

Sylvia Marks is coming in July! 1920s England! Lesbian Romance! Mystery! Paranormal Shenanigans!

“Nearly ready, just a moment,” Sylvia’s voice was muffled. “My hair isn’t behaving.”

Lucy trotted up the stairs to her bedroom. They were going to be late for the beginning of the film at this rate.

“Let me help,” she said.

Sylvia sat in front of her mirror, mouth full of hairpins and arms cocked up behind her head, shoving them into her coiled hair.

“It’s got to look half-way neat if I’m going to take my hat off,” she said.

“You can keep your hat on,” Lucy said.

“It always seems rude to the people sat behind me,” Sylvia said. “The seats aren’t very well laid out.”

“Hang on, then,” Lucy said.

She stood behind Sylvia and wrested her hands away from her head. “Give me the brush,” she said.

Sylvia’s hair fell in a curtain to below her waist and was thick and wavy. It was brown, a delightful range of shades from light to dark. Some of the women at Royaumont had cut their hair—bathing facilities had been rudimentary—but Sylvia had kept hers long, wound up in a chignon every day.

She handed the brush from the dressing table back to Lucy and Lucy began to run it through from crown to ends. It didn’t really need much brushing, Sylvia had already done that, but she used the brush to gather in all up into one hand, a heavy tail of soft raw silk in her palm. The faint scent of rosemary that she had always associated with Sylvia was from her hair, Lucy realised.

Sylvia removed the hairpins from her mouth and watched Lucy in the mirror. Her eyes were soft. “No-one’s brushed my hair for years,” she said quietly.

“It’s beautiful,” Lucy said.

She began to wind it into a rope around her hand, twisting it up onto Sylvia’s head as she went. She pinned as she twisted, making a flattish coil that would sit easily under Sylvia’s beret. She focused on what she was doing, getting it right. The hair was fine and thick against her palms and she could hear Sylvia’s breathing slow and soften.

As she tucked the last pin in, securing the ends, she said “All right?” and dropped her hands to Sylvia’s shoulders.

Sylvia met her eyes in the mirror and nodded. She was relaxed and pliant under Lucy palms.

The moment hung in time.

Sylvia arrives on 10th July from JMS Books!

New Release: Eight Acts!

Right then, here we go! Eight Acts is out today!

I finished writing Taking Stock last summer and immediately wanted to find out more about how Percy and Adrian, who are secondary characters with quite large parts, got together. This is the result. It’s only a little novella, but I hope you enjoy it!

Eight Acts

London in 1967 is swinging. It’s the summer of love and consensual gay sex in private has just been decriminalized. Percy and Adrian meet through friends and over the summer their relationship deepens and grows. What will happen in September when it’s time for Percy to go back to his every-day life as a boarding school teacher?

A 20k word stand-alone novella with cross-over characters from Taking Stock.

Buy Eight Acts

I’ve been bobbing around the internet with guest posts to talk about the story. You can read a bit more about the history of the criminalisation and decriminalisation in this blog post I wrote for my friend Nell Iris and I have more info and some references about the time period here, on my own website. I spoke to Ofelia Grand about how difficult writing guest posts is and Dani at LoveBytes has an exclusive excerpt. Finally there’s a ramble on the JMS blog about how the title came about.

As the Crows Fly

As the Crows Fly – 13th April

Paul Webster has come out the army after a twenty-two year stretch with a trick hip and no idea what to do with his life. He takes a few weeks walking along the Welsh coast to get his head on straight.

Kevin Davies is a veterinary nurse and an artist. He’s getting lonelier and lonelier in his cottage on the edge of the sea, kept company by his cats and a friendly flock of crows.

What happens when the two men hunker down together to wait out a wild March gale?

Buy As The Crows Fly

Part of the Reworked Celtic Myths collection

Excerpt

When Kevin looked up again it was because the light was going. It had been overcast all day of course, but the oncoming evening combined with the stormclouds meant that even this usually light-filled perch was starting to strain his eyes

He’d done the best that he could with this one, he though, running a thumb over the grey lines of the picture. Waves rolled in off the page, mirroring the storm outside. In front of them stood Web, surrounded by the Murder, dipping and tumbling on the wind. Kevin had drawn him laughing.

He didn’t know if he’d seen him laughing properly yet.

Honestly, he couldn’t get the man out of his mind and he’d only known him going on twenty-four hours.

Said man was watching him over the top of his tablet, brown eyes curious. “Welcome back,” he said.

Kevin laughed. “Sorry,” he said. “I get into a bit of a fugue sometimes.”

“Can I see?” Web’s voice was diffident.

“Of course.” Kevin handed the sketchbook over to him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I should probably have asked first, before I started putting you in all my pictures.”

Web shook his head. “No, it’s fine,” he said. “Really. I’m flattered.” He examined the picture carefully, tilting it toward the remaining light coming in from the windows. “You draw the crows a lot,” he said. “I saw, downstairs, on the walls.”

Kevin nodded. “Yeah. It’s my thing, I guess? I don’t know why. And it’s for my own pleasure. So what does it matter if my repertoire’s a bit limited? He shrugged.

“This isn’t a limited repertoire,” Webster said to him, tracing the feathers on one of the pencil-crow’s wings with a finger. “It’s beautiful.”

Kevin felt himself blushing.

“I need to go and put some potatoes in to go with tea,” he said, busying himself unwrapping himself from the blankets and cushions. He nodded out of the window. “It’s not getting any better out there, is is?”

Webster shook his head, putting the sketch-pad down and looking out. “Nope.” He was succinct. “Pretty bad.”

“It’s supposed to go on all night.” Kevin padded over to the door and switched on the light.

Nothing happened.

“Bollocks,” he said. “I was afraid of that.”

“Power gone?” Web asked, unnecessarily.

“Yeah. Occupational hazard. We’re okay for heat and food and stuff because the range is solid fuel. I made a point of keeping it that way when I moved in. Annoying though.”

Buy As The Crows Fly

character sketch: Fenn of the Hunters

The Hunted and the Hind, Fenn of the Hunters. Coming 30th December.

Fenn of the Hunters is a reluctant traveler from their world to London. At the beginning of Shadows on the Border, they are sent by the Council of Ternants to recapture and bring home an escaped carnas, on of the creatures that feed on magic the Ternants use to police the border between the worlds.

Fenn is a magical worker. The Frem call the energy they use to manipulate time and space kias. Fenn and their family are all very strong natural users. One of their special skills is to track strong sources of kias–in people, things or animals. That’s why they’ve been sent after the carnas. Fenn’s not sure what the carnas is doing lost in London; but it’s their duty as hunter to bring it home.

Will Grant’s London is very different to the Underhalls of the Frem that Fenn is used to and they are grateful for the help that Will and his team provide. Their growing connection with Will Grant himself is something that they didn’t expect and are not quite sure what to do with.

Fenn is tired of being manipulated by the Ternants. They want to finish this job, in this busy, crowded, mechanical world and return to their family.

Previously in Lost in Time character sketches… Will Grant, Lew Tyler, Alec Carter, Ella Fortune.