My 2021 Bronco Sport decided it wanted to contribute to a Real Life Family Event (RLFE), so it threw a check engine light at me this week. How many days did that wreck? I had hoped to finish the audio edits for The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning and feed the files through Adobe Podcast. Did I learn anything that might help improve turnaround time? Late in the week, I decided to re-invigorate promotions for Dreams of Deucalion Book 1: Special Recon. But I needed to do some work first — work I should have done a long time ago. But before we talk about any of that, let’s look at the key performance indicators.
Last Week’s Progress By the Numbers
Getting closer to finishing this edit pass for Point of Extraction!
I finished reviewing Moritz Lehner’s arc in Wayland’s Hammer Book 1: Point of Departure. I’m pretty happy with it. My only hesitancy is that I want to keep tinkering with it, but at some point, I need to let it go. If it’s good enough, of course. Now that I’ve tried to re-invigorate my editing process, I’m finding it hard to know when enough is enough.
Is enough ever enough? If I can push something a little closer to perfect, should I? See, that’s me trying to use rhetoric to fool myself. I should get it as close as I can based on my skill at the time, then move on. I don’t want to emulate George Lucas with the original Star Wars.
Owen Payne’s arc is taking less work than I anticipated, at least so far. His arc was in better shape than I feared. I need to tweak his ending, but I think I know what to do. If all goes well, I should wrap up the edit this week. I’ll then ship the manuscript off to the beta reader and start work on Wayland’s Hammer Book 2: Resistance Movement. I have some tweaks to the opening to make sure it’s aligned with the ending of Point of Departure, specifically regarding Lehner’s arc. Gerhard Wimmer’s arc is in solid shape, but I want to tweak Payne’s arc.
Once I finish with editing Resistance Movement, I’ll ship it to two alpha readers while I get to work on the plot for Wayland’s Hammer Book 3: Lines of Operation. I’m learning from the kinds of changes I’ve needed to make recently. I think I know how to improve how I plot so I can improve my writing. I’d like to keep improving all aspects of my craft and prevent long stretches of time where I’m fixing stuff that I should not have broken in the first place.
Check Engine Light
I had planned to get my oil changed soon, and I thought I might need brakes. On Monday, I was driving my 2021 Ford Bronco Sport and the danged check engine light came on. Whatever was wrong didn’t affect performance, so I figured it wasn’t an emergency.
The earliest they could get me in was Saturday morning, which is my prime writing time. But I went anyway. I was worried for two reasons. First, my Bronco Sport has the 1.5L Dragon engine. One Ford tech told me they tend to catch on fire. He wasn’t kidding. I was worried that the check engine light might mean “kiss your engine goodbye.”
Second, the vehicle has 60,000 miles on it. The stock warranty is 3 years/36,000 miles. Since 2021 was the first year for the Bronco Sport, I listened to my nephew (who worked at the dealership) and bought the extended warranty. It should cover me for 10 years/100,000 miles. Would it work? Or would my repair be mysteriously fall into some exclusion zone?
The dealership finished repairs in under a day. Turns out the check engine light was a sensor in the emissions system, and yes, the warranty covered it. So, while it cost me a day of writing, I now have new rear brakes, an oil change, and a new sensor in the emissions system. It was a pain, but it could have been worse.
The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning
Production is Entering the Final States
I finished feeding all the audio files to Adobe Podcast. I wanted to listen to the whole thing in my Bronco Sport as I went about my business. My goal is to listen to the audiobook as if I had just purchased it. I wanted to make sure it was ready to published; that it sounded substantially similar to the other audiobooks I listen to.
To do that, I bought a license for Audiobook Builder 2. I was able to assemble the chapters into a single audiobook, including the title, which I could then load into Apple Books. I started listening this week.
It didn’t surprise me that Summer Foovay’s narration sounded great. What did surprise me were the changes Adobe Podcast performed. It leveled the volume and eliminated any echoes, which I had expected. But it also trimmed silence. It more or less undid most of the cadence work I’d done. Listening to it now, I think it’s mostly a net gain.
I like the work Miblart did to convert the ebook cover to an audiobook cover.
But it did introduce some extra work. I’ll need to edit all the chapters and add a second of silence at the very start; two seconds of silence between scenes; and three seconds at the end of the chapters. It’s not a big deal. But it’s not something I expected. I’m going to spend some time researching Adobe Podcast to see if that’s how it’s supposed to work, because when I mentioned that behavior to someone more experienced with it, they were surprised.
The key here is that In the future, I think I’m going to feed chapters into Adobe Podcast first. It seems to have taken care of a lot of the edits I made manually. That’s all assuming that my production work results in an audiobook that’s configured acceptably.
Distributing Audiobooks
I did some research this week to figure out how to distribute the audiobook. I looked at three different options, starting with ACX. ACX is Amazon’s audiobook’s distributor. If I only wanted to sell through Amazon, I could earn 40% from sales. But I didn’t want to be exclusive, because there are some markets where Amazon isn’t the biggest audiobook platform. I could still use them for Amazon, but that would mean multiple platforms, and I want to keep things as simple as possible.
I looked at INAudio. They used to be FindAway Voices until Spotify bought them. Supposedly, they will distribute to a large number of points of sale. But based on feedback from writers in 20BooksTo50K (Facebook group), the company’s still trying to find its post-acquisition footing. Support seems to be an issue, and since this is my first audiobook, I fear I might need support. So, I crossed them off the list.
PublishDrive looked very, very promising. It’s a subscription service, which is a minor concern. But the pricing isn’t unreasonable, and it looks like they reinvest that in support. They distribute to a large number of resellers. So far, so good.
PublishDrive doesn’t just handle audiobooks. They also handle ebooks. On one hand, having a single platform is attractive. On the other, I already have an ebooks aggregator in Draft2Digitial. I only have Evolution’s Hand with them right now, but that’s going to change soon. So, I would need to either move Evolution’s Hand to them or find an audiobook aggregator that focused only on audiobooks.
Which brings me to Author’s Republic. They take a 20% cut of the net profit. According to writers in 20BooksTo50K, they offer great support, on-time payments, and great tools to track sales. They also distribute to global partners, which includes Amazon/Audible.
You can probably tell that I’ve settled on Author’s Republic. This’ll give me ebooks on Amazon, and if something horrible happens there, I can still distribute through Draft2Digital. By adding Author’s Republic for audiobooks, I’ll have coverage for ebooks, paperbacks, and audiobooks for most regions in the world.
I’m almost there! I just need to finish listening to the audiobook and adding the chapter start/stop and scene breaks. Then we’ll see how this works!
Preparing for Dreams of Deucalion Promotion
You probably remember that I recently pushed the entire Dreams of Deucalion trilogy through a proof edit. I published it too early and with too many typos. Yes, at some point I’ll stop beating myself up over that. But today’s not that day. The bottom line is that I think it’s time for a new promotion.
I ran some numbers. The read-through from book 1 to 2, before fixing the typos at the end of August 2025, was a dismal 16%. Book 2 to 3 was still around 90-95%, but my theory was that the typos were turning people off.
After fixing the typos, from September 1 to present, the conversation rate of book 1 to 2 is now 35%. Book 2 to 3 is still north of 90%. That’s encouraging.
Now that the conversation rate is higher, I wanted to start promotions again. But I’m just not happy with the sales this month. Is it just Facebook ads undergoing the changes other writers have talked about? I’m confident in the cover and am kinda confident in the blurb. So why aren’t I getting more conversions? Do potential readers not like what they read when they click “Look inside?”
There’s something that’s been bugging me about chapter 1 since the day I wrote it. Trent Raven thinks about how he’d like to be able to hurl (ralph, cough up his cookies, etc.) to “voice” his opinion of the situation. It made sense when I wrote it. But I didn’t like it. I finally decided to pull it. So today, I reworked sections of the first chapter in Special Recon to remove those references. I think it reads better now. I’m happier with it. I now think that the book’s in the best shape I can make it.
Will it help sales? We’ll know soon enough!
Progress Against Last Week’s Goals
Here’s how I did against last week’s goals:
- Finish processing the audio files for The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning. Done!
- Finalize research around audiobook distributors. Select between INaudio, Author’s Republic, and PublishDrive (or others). Done!
- Continue working on the gift for my newsletter recipients. In process! I’ve refined my plan to focus on a guide to the Sirius colonies.
- Finish revising Moritz Lehner’s arc in Wayland’s Hammer Book 1: Point of Departure. Done!
- Begin revising Owen Payne’s arc in the same book. Done!
Goals for the Week in Progress Report 2025 Week 46
Here’s what I hope to achieve this week:
- Finish revising Owen Payne’s arc in Wayland’s Hammer Book 1: Point of Departure
- Bid a beta reading job for Point of Departure
- Continue listening to the audiobook version of The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning; it should take another week or two
- Continue developing the Sirius colony guide as the new lead magnet/newsletter gift
- Begin adjustments to Wayland’s Hammer Book 2: Resistance Movement to sync it with the changes I made to Point of Departure (Stretch Objective)
What Do You Think?
Do you sell audiobooks? If so, which distributor did you choose and why? I’ve love to hear about your experience in the comments!
