Audiobook Production Setback: Lost my voice!!!!

For Startup author Andreas Ramos and I agreed on a contract that would give me a little over a month and a half to produce the book, which I thought would be plenty of time. I had a couple projects brewing, but on paper I had enough time to record edit and delivery right before my 2 week vacation to Florida the last week of February and before my other contracts hit in mid-March. Ah, the best laid plans…..

Like everyone else I get the occasional cold, and every year a flu or two catches up with me. The last time I was really sick was when I had the chicken pox at 14 years of age. When I get sick I usually bounce back quite quickly, and I don’t remember ever having laryngitis. Well, this winter there was an especially nasty flu that’s still traveling back and forth across North America. I was laid out in bed for 3 weeks. It was directly on my voice box! Completely lost my voice. Talk about bad timing! I had been generous with the schedule so I thought I could still deliver on time after the flu passed, but even after I felt good enough to return to the land of the living my voice was still extremely weak. Every few days or so I sent Andreas the sad update that I didn’t have my voice back. So he’d know i truly lost my voice, I’d send him apologetic voice messages on Whatsapp. I expected him to be really upset and disappointed, but to my relief, he was very understanding.

As my Florida trip drew closer, I tried to record a chapter, but I sounded tired and my voice was noticeably weak. So Andreas and I agreed to record it when I returned from Florida. I wondered how ACX would respond to me missing the deadline on my first Audiobook. They encourage you to be in regular contact with your author. They explain that so long as you are accessible to your author and he/she understands what’s going one, you’re likely to be able to finish the audiobook to everyone’s satisfaction. Andreas and I exchanged an email within the ACX platform officially extending the deadline.

After a week and a half in the warm Florida air, my voice started to recover. Upon my return I started by recording 2 chapters. But when I compared the voice quality with the first few chapters I realized that even though more than a month had passed my voice still wasn’t 100%. After another week and a half my voice was 90% and I was able to start recording again. Even a healthy voice has limits, so there was only so much I could do each day. Narrators usually only work a few hours a day reading, and the rest of the time is spent editing.

And then things started to collide. The original due date was February 28th, so I had scheduled a video project for mid-March. Now I was juggling being a mom, recording the audiobook and this project. On top of that, the brick was scheduled to be replaced on our building starting April 1st. My voiceover booth is really good, but I wasn’t sure it would be able to block out banging that close in proximity. Sound is sneaky. It finds a way to get through even very thick walls. To make a space truly sound proof, you almost have to dynamite a cave in a mountain. As April approached, I had to at least get the recording done. I could edit through the banging.

In conversation, a dear friend of mine found out what I was up against. She and her husband came over for a long weekend. Her husband and mine entertained my son, and she sat on the floor of my little 7 foot long 4 foot wide booth with me for hours while I read the last few chapters of the book. That’s a true friend. If it weren’t for her it would have taken me another week or 2 to finish the book. When you’re up against a deadline, and you’re tired, you start stumbling over sentences you would normally read with ease. Then you start thinking about how you’re going to have to edit out all those flubs, and you want to give up. But she was there for me, cheering me on, telling me that despite the flubs, it sounded great. It also helped with the delivery, because I was actually reading to a real live human, rather than the coffee bean burlap diffusion panels on the walls of my booth.

I got the recording done that weekend and even went back and re-recorded 2 chapters that stood out as being weak. Now came the editing. As expected it was a pain to edit all those flubs out, but in the end no one knows you flubbed. They only hear the flawless edited version and my sincere enthusiasm for a well-written book, written by a passionate expert and teacher, who believes that your Silicon Valley Startup just might have a chance.