Audiobooks are big and getting bigger. Almost all your Prevail Press favorites are now available as audiobooks. Some are not, unfortunately, since they are ineligible for the Amazon Beta program we’ve been involved with.

Just a handful of computer voices, and minimal control, but I’m sure that will change. Imagine, five minutes to produce an audiobook instead of a month of painstaking labor.

You can add an audiobook for $1.99 when you buy a physical or ebook version of the book, or $6.97 for a standalone purchase.

This opens our books to a whole new world of “readers,” as audiobooks take off. Enjoy a story on the road, a flight, or a long walk. Playback speed is adjustable, and the voice even handles inflection fairly well.

Far superior to KIndle PaperWhite ReadMe Voice, these computer voices are quite life-like. Don’t forget, a young reader who struggles with reading can improve their skills with a book in front of them as they listen to the audiobook (we used this with our daughter, but she didn’t like that voice.)

More audiobooks are being added all the time.

Available on Amazon and Audible.

Enjoy and let us know how you like them!

No, I’m not a Luddite, I’m an author/publisher who believes in protecting copyrights.

Artificial Intelligence is more like Artificial Thief.

Say you want A.I. to create you a cover for your book. You go in, enter your parameters, and click GO.

A.I. does not draw anything, it just snatches graphics from all around the Internet and composites them.

Give it parameters to write a book and it lifts it from other books.

Even if the graphics and text are massaged, it’s not an original work.

I read an estimate that 20% of Amazon books are now A.I. generated.

Congress should pass laws against A.I. stealing other people’s work. It’s an example of Michael Crichton’s warning that Congress is good at making laws against things that exist and don’t matter, but predicting what’s coming and limiting that is beyond them.

Think twice about A.I. generating your cover. If an artist can see their work in it, you may get sued.

A web presence is important for a writer and doubly so for a publishing company, so you can imagine my horror when my web authoring software crashed my computer and corrupted my websites.

Time to move from what I had to WordPress, but www.prevailpress.com is a big site, and www.swanwrite.com is also fairly large. In the midst of writing my latest novel, I had to set it aside and rebuild, rebuild, rebuild.

The upside is that both sites are improved. Initial load is slow, not sure how to fix that…

SEO must be decent, because spammers have found it. Note to self: Install reCapcha on the author site.

www.prevailpress.com

www.swanwrite.com

Post a link to your author site!

I received an email about cutting out dead-end things from your life and one of the tips was not finishing things that aren’t working.

I couldn’t disagree more, at least when it comes to first drafts.

A writer often feels like things aren’t working. Or, like me, the draft is good fun and you’re feeling great, but you’ve got 60,000 words and you’re not even halfway through.

But why not just start over? You feel like it’s not going where you wanted to go, that scene or chapter isn’t working, you don’t like that character…

Power through. Your subconscious has the reins and is taking you on a ride. I know, you think rewriting is awful and should be avoided, but the fact is that rewriting is fun!

There is one problem that may take you out of the book. That’s when you write yourself into a corner. There’s little more frustrating. Here’s what you want to do. Skip it. Jump ahead to a scene you’re clear on. Nothing says you have to write sequentially. You can cherry pick your scenes and then stitch them together. In the second draft, fill in the blanks,

Push yourself to finish.

Let me tell you a story of when I didn’t finish a draft. Typically, I write on a computer, but this time, I had an hour of wait time in the mornings I had to fill, so I started writing, longhand, a western. Eventually, I picked it up on the computer, and then stopped. I don’t even remember why.

My wife and daughter loved the story. They’ve urged me to finish. I’ve found that hard to do. I’ve written five books in that time and I’m in the middle of another. In writing this, I’ve convicted myself. Maybe I will pick that up after I’ve completed The Hurricane Boys.

I’m not saying you can’t work on other projects, or that you have to write every day, but don’t give up on that first draft. It may be the start of the best thing you’ve ever written.

Don’t get me wrong. I admire writers who outline and stick to it. I’ve never been that way. While I definitely have plot points I work towards, the discovery process is amazing.

For example, in my WIP, a chapter one throwaway character just resurfaced in chapter eight completely by surprise. She’s fun, complex and throws an interesting wrench into the works that I hadn’t considered before.

Perhaps a rigid outliner won’t have as much rewriting to do at the end of the first draft, and that’s a plus, but so many things in a discoverer’s (I don’t like the word pantser) process allows for organic growth and delightful surprises. I’d been concerned that a character is too good, and with another throwaway line, I discover his flaw, and how it will engender more flaws.

I admit, I do this all wrong.

• I dove straight into writing with the barest research and pre-planning in writing.
• I had an idea of the genre and sub-genre (historical speculative fiction), but it may evolve away from that.
• I have no planned length (it’s at 110 pages and the first act hasn’t ended yet),
• It’s for young adults, but I’m using short sentences that I may have to make more complex in the rewrite.
• My characters are evolving past my expectations.

Yet… that’s all what makes writing fun. On the bright side, I’m writing a lot faster than normal. That helps.

For you outliners, what do you consider the strengths? How rigid are you? Do you ever throw out your outline, or if there are changes, to you rework the outline? Give us your process!