Janus Quadrifrons - Audiobook #Wattys2018

J.Q. - Ch.8 - Edited Version

The edited version is an experiment where I try to find out what works and what doesn't.

I have listened to a few commercial audiobooks and I found out that I don't enjoy as much as I would like the kind of narration that it's like someone is reading you before you fall asleep. I have the first kind of audio editing for that genre of narration. 

At the begining of the book I tried sound effects that would give you more feeling of the space and action between the dialogue. Unfortunatelly since I am still learning about it, the sound balance hasn't been ideal. So for the second part of the book I decided to go along with my instict and try to create janus' world using sounds that you can't get it on the spot where they come from. You may find it irritating, you may find it intriguing.

In case you recognise those sounds... high five from me! You know where I am getting at :)

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----> ..... So I decided to self publish it on amazon. Still keeping a long story short, being there for more than a year, free on kindle unlimited and has hardly sold any copy or anyone borrowing it. I could tell you about the cover (a generic one, yet a perfect match for that genre, hideous for books worms of romance, YA etc and it's ok since it's a different genre), about the numbers of copies I sent for free in exchange for a review and no review ever came back (I guess that it would be a bad one, so they didn't want to post anything bad, or they simply gave up on reading it).

So Janus by every possible measure was the rock bottom of every story that I had ever written. (I am 40 years old and I have been writing stories for as long as I can remember me, so do the maths about how many stories I may be talking about). But Janus had something different. Janus demanded that I wouldn't give up on her story. So I didn't.

I packed my things, traveled many hours by car, I picked up the friend who narrated this story for me on his birthday and drove to another place to meet our sound engineer. He took us to a friend of his who's a singer and we used her recording equipment to record it in total amount of time... less than 24 hours with the narrator reading it "a prima vista". He had no clue about the story. As every adventure like that, we had a storm out of the blue and then we had to stop recording and move the equipment to another place. There is no fun if you don't have crazy stories to tell after that but when they happen they aren't funny at all J

So my beloved narrator was reading for hours with a glass of water next to him and me trying to keep my mouth shut because if I started correcting him all the time we wouldn't finish it on time. I used to direct theatric plays so if I started to do it properly we would have only a part of it done and I decided to get it all done and then try to fix it as much as possible. Against all odds we managed to finish the reading on time for our departure and I got home with several hours of recording which were pretty bad as demos.

I started editing them, picking up the best parts, editing out irritating sounds till I had the chapters at an acceptable audio. That's when I uploaded the story for the first time. Listening to them later on was very difficult because of the bad audio sound so I asked for help from a friend of mine who's a professional sound engineer. He was kind enough to make the proper adjustments on the files and converted them from demos into masters.

Those files are the first version of Janus that's now on YouTube. Only the narration with as clear sound as possible, easy to the ear for the ones who enjoy this type of audio books. ------------->