If you think I’ve been on vacation…

If you think I’ve been on vacation, you’d be wrong. I’ve just finished and published a project I’ve wanted to do for a while. Did I pique your curiosity? I hope so. Wondering what has me so excited?

But first, a little backstory. Two years ago, I hired a marketing group to promote my books on social media. We meet monthly via virtual meetings to discuss the next steps for the coming months. Fine, not so interesting. I get it. However, here is where it all started. I mentioned that a friend of mine had purchased the audio version of my first book in the Consortium Series, ‘The Trafficking Consortium’. He loved it and wanted to know if the next book in the series, ‘Perfect Prey’, was available. Alas, it was not. That started me on a trip to research the popularity of audiobooks. The results surprised me, and I told my publicist.

What to do?

Then we had to come to a difficult decision. I had planned on working and finishing on the Mona Bendarova series. As many of you know, I left my readers hanging after Book 4 in that series. I did not mean to. I suffered a severe head injury, resulting in a concussion that left me sidelined for nine months without a spark of creativity in my brain. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t bore you with the details. When I got my first spark of inspiration toward the end of the first year of my recovery, it led to the creation of the Consortium Series.

In my discussions with my publicist, we had to choose between several choices.

• Keep writing and finish the Mona Bendarova Series
• Put off Mona Bendarova and publish the Consortium Series as audiobooks.
• Work on both project concurrently

The publicist pushed me to do both at once. Well, given my current situation at home, I felt it was impossible to pursue two different creative, independent threads. I decided to publish audiobooks for the entire 12-book series: the main series of 9 books and the 3-book Origin Series.

Decision Time

I thought I could just tell Amazon to create audiobook versions from the ebook manuscript print version. That was before I took my manuscript and ran it through an app I use for text-to-speech with an AI-generated voice. OMG, I discovered the text didn’t flow as I expected. When we read words in print, we tend to fill in gaps or minor editing errors. The text-to-speech made those errors stand out, and I cringed. Shit!!!!

I spent 10 weeks over the summer getting them edited for audiobooks. I finished and published the last of them last week. Hooray!!! They are all now available on Audible.com or Amazon.com. If you already purchased the eBook, you can get the audiobook at a substantial discount.

Technical Problems

Then, I tried to update my website and write this blog, and ran into a technical issue. While working on the first, I discovered a second, more serious one. Tech support solved that in less than 24 hours, which stemmed from something they did on their end to improve services to their clients. The one involving updating my website and publishing this blog took three days, an untold number of hours on the phone, and my own investigation into the problem. They opened a service ticket on their end to work on it, but they did something that broke the entire site. I’m still investigating the damage, but what you see on my pages works. In the end, I found the problem and fixed it. As my partner tells everyone, don’t marry a doctor; instead, marry an IT technician. They can fix just about anything.

So, there you go. I’m free to work on the Mona Bendarova series. Since it’s been more than a decade, I need to reread it to pick up the storyline and move forward. Wish me luck, and thanks for sticking with me!