The audiobook I started posting chapter by chapter on YouTube for my first book, Necropolis, is either on hold, or I may never get back to doing it. Read on for “how come,” and “why,” etc.

Before I get to that explanation, however, I should first offer an apology to the few of you who subscribed to the channel after I asked you to check it out.

To those of you who subscribed to my newsletter and clicked on the graphic that was supposed to lead to where you could have started reading the book on YouTube, you would have noticed the link attached to the graphic is broken. I apologize for that.

The reason for this is, I took all of the audiobook chapters down from the YouTube channel. Now, here’s why.

I received a letter from the narrator saying he wanted to cancel doing the job. I said okay and cancelled it. I then took the three chapters I had up on YouTube down. I did it because the narrator’s request for cancellation of doing the order meant I’d have to find someone to start over doing it from scratch with. 

Now, you might be curious about why he wanted to cancel. Basically, it’s because he said he was not making any money doing the job. Relatively speaking, I had nothing to do with that, mind you.

I paid him his asking rate. His claim to not making money stemmed from his making a lot of mistakes while reading the book. When I received the audio back from him, naturally, I asked him to fix them, like anyone would.

However, to go back and re-record, fix errors, takes time. Time a narrator could use to continue moving forward and make money on other recordings, provided he’d kept his mistakes on a job initially given to read to a minimum. In this business, time spent doing fixes translates into diminishing returns on any given job. 

This is where his claim to not making money became a factor. The longer the chapter he was required to read, the more mistakes he made. He then stated he was not the right person for the job, but not before saying, this is a direct quote, “It is clear that I am not able to produce the work that you are looking for. If you want control over every single syllable then I suggest you go to a studio and spend the money required there . . .”

I never asked for control “over every single syllable.” What I did 99.9% of the time was ask him to please fix his mistakes, which were a constant. As a sidenote, however, control over every syllable,” is required if one is serious about getting your work up to a level where you could demand top pay, but I was never that exacting.

Again, what I did 99.9% of the time was ask that he fix his mistakes. By that I mean all of the basic things you’d expect someone doing this job to have down. Narration 101, so to speak. Things like, I’m quoting this directly from this article: “10 Skills You Need for Audiobook Narration + Voice Work.”

Eye-Brain-Mouth Control
This skill involves reading the script accurately (not omitting, adding, or changing words and phrases). Narrators must strive to mitigate the number of mistakes and corrections in their delivery. Scanning ahead is crucial because the more mistakes you make, the longer it will take you to narrate the book and the less money you’ll make per finished hour. The ability to lift words off the page effortlessly is a skill that takes a lot of practice.

The narrator had a lot of promise but I found out the hard way he didn’t quite have what is mentioned above down. It happens.

So, that’s it. That’s why the audiobook project got stopped. Right now my focus is on doing other work, and I always have a ton of stuff to do. Therefore, I don’t know when or whether I’ll go back to finding another narrator. It’s not a priority for me. However, that said, once again, I apologize to those of you who joined my YouTube channel to hear the book and now there’s nothing there.

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