Over the past few years, I have posted a few select projects to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as blogged or distributed Press Releases. Not everything we do is post-worthy, so I have tried to keep the posts to interesting subject matter, great scripts, super production values, that sort of thing.

The intent is to simply remain visible in this sea of data. Stay in someone’s mind in case a project comes up that might require my voice. Not really selling anything specific, just a little social networking.

Well, all that changed yesterday, when I got the email from ACX that my first audio book is ready for people to actually buy on audible.com. “Death of an Obnoxious Tourist” by Maria Hudgins. Now I need to promote it – and ask people to buy it and listen to it. And when they do, they get to comment and rate the result.

And I am scared to death.

The ability to quickly click on a star to rate the performance has me chewing my cuticles. What if people don’t like it!

I learned a lot about the process of recording an 8 and a half hour book. Overall, I enjoyed studying the book to learn about the various characters. I enjoyed the actual reading of every single word – which is something that I discovered I don’t actually do when reading a book to myself. I skip a lot of stuff – skim through passages.

But when reading an audio book aloud, you need to read every word.

It wasn’t easy. There were chapters where every sentence was a struggle to articulate. Was it the time of day? Was it what I had had to eat? Was it the way the words were juxtaposed on the page? And when the words come out in bits and spurts, you have to be even more careful in the editing to make sure that the end result is smooth.

I learned that I am super critical – but was I critical enough?

Will the people downloading and listening and then taking the time to rate – click 5 stars or 1 star – or somewhere in between? Will my various accents stand up to the scrutiny of native speakers? The book includes several Italian, British and Canadian characters, as well as an “east coast” sound, and a slew of just normal North American. In retrospect, I could have given one of the main characters a slight southern accent, but I didn’t really think of that until far too late in the process. Oh, well. Lesson learned.

Recording an audio book is a labor of love. Do I love it? Well, with the first one under my belt, I am interested in doing it again to see if I actually learned those lessons!

So, here goes – out to the universe. Hit me with your best shot social media. And if the reviews come back mixed, I hope the comments are constructive, so that the next project will be significantly better!