Your Audiobook made FREE

I did it, you can too. After 23 years I revisited my book and made it into an audiobook.

Your Audiobook made FREE

I did it, you can too. After 23 years I revisited my book “Rigby’s Roads” and found it needing some tweaking here and there, so I decided to rewrite it and thought what if I make it into an audiobook instead.
(FREE - Direct link below)

I needed a new challenge in life and wanted to attempt something very complicated that I had zero experience with, and so the research began.

After finding the cost to have someone do it for me, $2000 - $6000+ with various degrees of professionalism, I decided why couldn’t I do it? I sampled a few minutes of audiobooks and was surprised by the perfect readings of some, and a few that made me drowsy in seconds, but it was the effort of those who were unafraid to self-narrate their own books that drove me on further.

I didn’t want my audiobook to follow the norm. I wanted this adventure to be my own, without copying any style already done. I wanted to do all the voices in the book, express emotion at the right times, and not just read it in one monotone. I wanted mine to be peppier, more entertaining and I wanted to break the “you-must-do-it-this-way” guidelines and add my own personality to it, even if it broke all the rules, and happily it does.

Where do I start?
My choices according to YouTube “experts” were varied. There were over 50 audio and video tools to choose from, and I narrowed them down: 14 free, 19 paid, 18 beginner and 15 advanced. Some were “freemium” that were free but with paid upgrades, and others were monthly fees ranging from $20.99/month to one-time fees of $299, and one was $599 a year.

The world of sound, Part 1.
First thing on the list is you need a good microphone, and you can’t use the computer itself to capture the sound because the clarity and quality is just not good enough. Research showed one internet favorite was the Blue Yeti with a USB connection to my MacBook Air. Now I had to pause for learning something new: sound engineering. The Blue Yeti microphone was a quick learn with four adjustment knobs: Gain (controls microphone sensitivity), Pattern Selector (captures sound from one, two, three or all four directions simultaneously, mute button and volume knob. These adjustments were easily learned by experimenting, and that was the easy part.

Then came the precautions and preparation. You need a quiet room in the back of the house or in the basement away from the fridge, the TV, the air-conditioning, the street noise, the neighbors barking dog, lawnmowers on the next block, and not in the flight paths of planes. You would be surprised after listening to the playback on headphones how many of these are always there and you never gave them a second thought. (Yes, I had them all). These invading sounds can be partially controlled by the Gain knob on the mic. I had the grandkids over and set the room up for a fun discussion of “what do you want to be when you grow up,” and while I was recording, I adjusted the gain and pickup patterns to learn the effects of my room’s sound.

The world of sound, Part 2.
My recording app is Audacity, a free YouTube favorite that has over 40 different adjustment options for recording your voice and making modifications as needed. Audacity creates the finished recording as an audio .aup3 file.

On my practice run, I read Chapter One into the mic, then replayed it on headphones so I could hear every little detail, and what I heard was exactly that… every little detail. I heard a distant plane, the dishwasher on the other side of the house, the vent noise when the AC came on, and yes, the neighbor’s dog two houses away. This is when I researched the cost of a recording studio, from basic $25-$40 an hour up to $60-$100 an hour with a sound engineer. Back to YouTube research, where the importance of a good soundproof room is clearly stated. Creative suggestions by others included hanging blankets over the windows and other areas to make the room quieter. Some built a PVC tent frame draped in blankets around their desk. My solution was simple. I recorded at 3 AM when the house and the surrounding world was asleep. The downside of this meant 8 PM bedtime to get 7 hours of sleep.

With my environmental sound now in check, my headphones let me discern a bigger problem… and that was me. I was a professional producer of “Plosives” (harsh P, B, T and “K” sounds. One syllable words sounded like two syllables = the word “Back” sounded like Back-ka. Say it slowly and you’ll see what I mean). These plosives stood out while listening on the headphones, and I realized that this is how I talk. The second thing I noticed, I was breathing. Yes, I am alive and breathing, but sometimes it sounded like I was coming up for air from an underwater swim, catching my breath. And finally, I was a maker of clicks… mouth clicks to be specific. These are caused by both dry mouth and excess saliva that can cause smacking and clicking sounds. Solutions suggested staying hydrated, avoiding dairy, coffee and chocolate as they increase mucus and mouth noise. Another point was the mic was too close to my mouth, and I didn’t have my “pop filter,” set up correctly. The pop filter is a screen the size of a small plate with a fully adjustable arm, and it “helps” reduce plosives and background noise but not all the way. Would I have to retrain myself to speak in a more professional manner? No, to my surprise there were more technical solutions to these issues.

The world of sound Part 3.
Further research led me down the new path of cleaning up recorded audio that involves the surgical removal of plosives, breaths, clicks and background noise. But there was a better way by tweaking and adjusting specific sound parameters that can be fine-tuned before you start ,but they were quite bewildering to me. There is a default setting, but each person speaks with various idiosyncrasies, and the settings can be tweaked to correct your specific speaking issues. It started with compression curve settings including Threshold dB (decibles), Make-up gain dB, Knee width dB, Ratio, Lookahead milliseconds, Attack milliseconds, Release milliseconds and Filter curve EQ. Looking up each one of those adjustments took me awhile to learn how to find my sweet spot of the settings that were offered.

Ok I heard you... what the hell is knee width? Knee width is the transition between the uncompressed and compressed state of an audio signal. A hard knee applies compression sharply once the signal crosses the threshold, while a soft knee applies compression gradually. Okay now in English… this adjustment compresses the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of your recording to even out the high and low decibels. (For recording my audiobook, it would be 5.0) Don’t ask about the other adjustments, we would be here all day.

Those adjustments surprisingly removed breaths, clicks, outside noise and plosives to some degree. I quickly learned that repeated cleansing of those sounds also starts to strip away the bright frequencies that make your voice clear, while excessive compression, click removal or noise gating causes “digital swishing” and can make your syllables sound like a robot speaking. Over-editing too many times makes the narration feel robotic, or choppy, and can make your voice sound muddy, nasally, or thin.

After learning what not to do and setting the correct technical parameters to make my recording sound more professional, I record Chapter One again. I now have a good narrator voice and a cleaned-up version that sounded pretty good. Now this is where I start to wonder about “what-ifs.” What if I added a soundtrack like in the movies playing mood music to underscore the mood of the scenes. What if I added sound effects that accompany the story. But I was getting way ahead of myself, and I decided to record all the chapters first and then think about adding additional sound tracks later.

Chapter One was a breeze, but while recording Chapter Two (“The Line on the Table,” the real meaning of life explained) something strange happened… my first back and forth dialogue between two main characters approached and an unexpected character voice came out of me that I wasn’t prepared for. I read through the chapter without pausing and I was having an uninterrupted dialogue with myself, without thinking about it. It was weird, and as new characters came into the story more surprising voices just showed up, some with accents. (This became the most asked question by listeners, “who are all those people who recorded with you?”) … Thank you, thank you very much.

After recording the entire book into separate chapters as separate files and removing obvious pauses of dead air between sentences using cut and splice tools and adjusting my technical parameters for a cleaner crisper sound, I explored the world of adding sound effects. They were simple to gather but adding them with split second timing to the pre-recorded audio was another lesson in sound engineering 101.

I chose the highly recommended Pixabay.com that offers over 100,000 royalty-free sound effects. They also offer photos, illustrations, music, and other categories. The free sounds have various degrees of quality, and their sampling allows you to give the better ones a higher ranking with a “like button.”

Using their word search for the word “car” listed 2,576 free sound effects and at the same time offers you subcategories to get more specific sounds. The choices varied from 1 second sounds (car horn, car lock), to 16 seconds (car passing by), to several minutes (rain sound from inside a car). Although they are royalty-free, donations via PayPal to the sound artists as well as recognition are suggested, but not required, and there are specific licensing rules of what you can’t do with the sound bites.

After spending a day being amazed and going through hundreds of categories and thousands of sound bites, I was confident it had plenty of awesome bites I could use to add a second layer of support to make my audiobook more exciting. I added the sound effects because it added an additional layer to the story, was fun to experiment with, and as I mentioned earlier, I wanted my audiobook to be different and a little crazy, like me.

This is where I pivot.
You can upload your audiobook to many sites for free, but some require going through a distributor. Distributors take a cut anywhere from 20 – 60% of sales. Some of the free sites require you to sign an exclusive contract for up to 7 years. All sites, have specific technical requirements where your audiobook must be within certain ranges of sound constraints. You can set your own price for listeners to hear your book, but some sites may discount or bundle your book price with other books as part of their marketing.

My main reason for doing my audiobook was to leave my recorded voice for my grandchildren and their grandchildren to visit the past and hear what I sounded like, (although it made me rethink some of the language used in the book). Since this was my first self-made audiobook, and it was my experiment to help me learn the process, I decided to use YouTube as I wanted it to be free and no cost to the reader.

You can’t just upload an audiobook to YouTube. It requires an accompanying video component to all audiobook uploads, and some authors video themselves reading their book. No thanks, not for me, but option 2 allows still images from the book, or just the cover of the book. I chose to add my book cover. Audacity creates the .aup3 file, but YouTube requires the file to be an .mp4 file for upload. So now I needed another app, and fortunately iMovie comes with my Mac.

The iMovie app added the picture of my book cover and set the timing to run that picture with the audio. iMovie also sets the opening shot of the title and chapter name for the first few seconds and then changes it to the finished .mp4 file that YouTube requires for upload.

YouTube… we’re almost done…. Well not quite.
First, YouTube requires you to create your personal channel (your site) for your recordings, but you must have a google account (Google owns YouTube so that explains that). Your channel needs a name, a profile picture, and a channel description. Now you customize your Layout, upload a banner image, add contact email, and any links. You then create a thumbnail that becomes your mini billboard to catch the reader’s attention when they search for audiobooks, (or you can let the system create one for you). Next you choose your audience, for kids or not, and set visibility (Public, Unlisted, or Private). This is where I set all my chapters to Private, using that as a holding place until I listened to the whole book online, and verified the final sound was free of glitches. There were many other decisions to make: keywords/tags for those searching for your book, allow others to create short videos using your content, and an experimental beta version of automatic concepts that helps viewers learn more about unfamiliar terms in your audiobook without leaving.

Each chapter is listed on my channel along with narrated poems. But the best way to listen is in the Playlists section which will automatically jump to the next chapter within seconds making listening much easier and will remember where you left off if you sign into YouTube.

Overall experience…
Spending the money for a more multifaceted sound app would have made things so much easier, but I enjoyed the challenge of learning the intricacies of something so complicated.

Shout out to all audiobook narrators and sound engineers… “respect.”

I saved $6000 (always think the highest savings to boost your ego.)

Reviews:
“The voices, the sound effects, great job, I love it.” D.S.

“Your first chapter in setting the story was great, and then the sound effects hit me, and jumped up another level.” L.C.

“I wish all audiobooks sounded like this.” V.S.

And here it is… Listen to the first 3 chapters and get hooked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAQROzxB6ow&list=PL8eJT6MpCTmJoUx0_Bf5-InKdP5Kog...

Enjoy… Michael Charles Messineo

RIGBY’S ROADS, a FREE FULL AUDIOBOOK on YouTube.
Rigby’s Roads is about starting your life over, how you can change your life, and discover new roads on your journey. This is a story of love, murder and restoration of life. An unexpected romance, biker gangs, the FBI, and National Security become interwoven into an adventure that leads to Sturgis, South Dakota, with a half-million bikers.