My Audiobook Venture, Part 3: After the contract is signed

So last night I offered the contract to Jay Dyess to produce my audiobook through ACX, and he accepted, but wanted some tweaking of the deadline dates, which was fine. However, apparently you can’t edit the contract once it’s accepted by the narrator, which I didn’t know. Since we both agreed on the new dates in writing it’s not a problem, but something I want to remember in future, to discuss the dates and agree upon them before offering the contract.

Since the ACX messaging system is NOT a joy to work, we also agreed to communicate by email except for “official” communications, such as agreeing on production dates, which we’ll do in the ACX messaging system where a record is kept.

I’d spent the last 2 days going through the book and making a list of every character who actually had a speaking part. From there, I did a character profile of each with a brief description if it was a major character, their role, and any particulars I had in mind as far as their voice. Being OCD, of course, I separated the hero and heroine and the most important secondary characters and put them at the top, then alphabetized the rest, LOL. So I sent that over to Jay so he could peruse it and start to get a feel for them.

At this point, Jay is doing a full read-through of the book before he gets started. Then he’ll narrate the first 15 minutes of the book and get that to me for checking. Our deadline for that is the end of the weekend and at that point we’ll go over any questions he has about the characters, any concerns I have about the narration so far, etc.

Also last night I contacted Dar Albert of Wicked Smart Designs, my cover designer, because we needed a specific format for the audiobook cover, and darned if she didn’t get it to me within the hour! It’s almost the same as the regular cover but rearranged a bit to fit the square size required, and we added Jay as narrator underneath the title. It looks fabulous!