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Brief History of Audio Books

Todd with the third draft of Volume Two of the Healing Weintraub Adventures, several more drafts to go

As I gleefully reported in my previous post, the audio book of Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub has debuted along with the handsome paperback. Hurray!

Several readers have inquired about downloading the audio book without having to join Audible. You can! The audio book is also available through Apple Books.

These inquiries got me thinking about the history of audio books.

In the beginning there were no audio books or any books for that matter, or even much paper. People told stories to each other for thousands of years. That was the state of the technology until someone, possibly a woman named Myra, came up with the idea of memorizing stories. Humans had memorized songs, some of them really long songs about hunting antelopes, for thousands of years, so why not stories?

Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were preserved for generations as memorized texts until some brilliant person, possibly a man named Demetrius, got the idea of writing those scintillating adventures down, in ancient Greek no less.

Fast forward to the invention of LPs, otherwise known as long-playing records. Plays by Shakespeare came out on vinyl and were used ineffectively in public schools. And, of course, many of us grew up listening to the multi-record rendition of Winnie-the-Pooh with an accompanying illustrated book. We knew to turn the page when Winnie sang Rum-tum-tiddle-liddle, rum-tum-tum.

Then came the invention of cassette tape players. A few hundred mega-bestselling books came out in multi-cassette audio book editions. This development ushered in the era of people listening to audio books while driving.

Then came CDs. It still required several CDs to hold several hours of someone narrating a book, and only hugely popular books became audio books. People, while driving, would search desperately through piles of CDs for the one with the best sex scene in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, causing accidents and needless deaths.

Now we are in The Age of Digital Audio Books. At the outset of this age there were several audio book companies. Soon thereafter Amazon/Audible bought all the other audio book companies (except for Apple) and became the primary source for audio books and requires people to join Audible to download audio books. Not so Apple Books.

In related news: E-book editions of Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub are coming out even as I post this.

Happy Holidaze!

todd

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Healing Speaks!

Joyful news! The audio book of Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub is now available from Audible and Apple Books and other audio book purveyors.

I’m especially excited about this audio book because it is my first narration of one of my books in thirteen years and I had SO much fun playing all the characters in the Healing Saga.

When Peter Temple and I listened to my first rendering of Chapter One in Peter’s studio, the dialogue sounded good to me, but the narration felt wrong. So I read the chapter again with a little more gusto, we listened again, and the narrator’s voice still wasn’t quite right.

And then it struck me that the voice I was using for the narrator was not the voice I’d heard speaking the words when I wrote them down to create the book. That voice had a mild British accent. It took hearing Todd reading the story, after working on the opus for fourteen months, before I realized that the Third Person narrator of The Adventures of Healing Weintraub is none other than Healing Weintraub himself!

So I read the first chapter again in Healing’s voice, we listened again, and voila, there was the voice from whence the story sprang.

You can listen to an enticing five-minute sample from the first chapter of the audio book on the book’s Audible page and see if you want to hear more.

Handsome paperback copies of the opus are orderable from your favorite actual bookstores, and available online from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and Amazon.

Now back to rewriting Volume Two of the saga.

Cheerio!

Todd

P.S. E-book editions coming soon.

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The Healing Novel

Dear Friends

I have wonderful news for those of you who enjoy the Healing Weintraub stories. The first twenty-six stories have been transformed into the novel Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub.

The goodly tome is now orderable from your favorite actual bookstores and gettable online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Bookshop. Alibris, and Powell’s will soon have the book, too. In a few weeks, the various E-book editions will debut, as well as the audio book narrated by yours truly.

I thought you might like to hear a little about the process of creating the novel and making the audio edition, endeavors that took the better part of a year while I was simultaneously writing the next twenty-six chapters of the Healing saga, those twenty-six chapters to appear in 2024 as Volume Two of the saga.

The first thing I did was to assemble the stories into a single document and eliminate the many re-introductions of characters and place that were written when the stories were intended to stand alone.

I then printed out the manuscript and thoroughly rewrote the book, entered my changes, printed out the manuscript again, and rewrote it again.

Marcia then carefully read each chapter and made notes about anything she found problematic. We discussed her notes at length, and I did two more drafts of the novel.

I then printed out the manuscript and waited three months for Peter Temple to have studio time for me to narrate the book. I wanted to narrate the audio book before I published the book because in the process of narrating four other books of mine that were already published works, I would inevitably find sentences and names and words I wished were otherwise. So this time I decided to use the narration process as a final editing step.

What fun it was to play all those different characters with the myriad accents and personalities! And what a great help Peter was in getting things just right, including the piano snippets I improvised for the end of each chapter.

I hope you’ll get the book in one form or another and enjoy the reading and/or listening experience.

Blessings and Thanks

Todd