Things have been coming along. More places have all three versions (paperback, ebook, and audiobook) up for sale, but I've been holding off on advertising those until I'm more sure of them. Each retailer handles things differently, and in an effort to avoid a repeat of my heinous experience with ACX, I'm finding that I have to check each and every distributor to make sure things look (and sound) like I want them to. If not, I start the process of getting them taken back down.
One example is Scribd, who screwed up both the ebook and the audiobook. The ebook's formatting was all wrong, taking out all of the gaps between scenes, so everything just looked like one continous block of text without any breaks. And their version of the audiobook also sucked, partly because of their player's navigation (or lack thereof), particularly the absence of chapter titles. (Technically, Book One doesn't have chapters, but I still had to split the files up, so each date's worth of narrative gets its own pseudo-title. Books Two and Three will have actual chapters.) They also, like many other retailers so far, converted the audio to mono, which isn't a big deal when it comes to spoken word, but it makes a difference when it comes to the music. The musicians and I worked hard to make it sound like we wanted, and it sucks to hear it dumbed down like that. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to leave the remaining mono ones up or not; some of them are okay for every other reason except that. More on this as it develops.
The main reason I decided to post today was to share the following sample from Young Blood. There is already a shorter sample (which is from Part One of the book) on the Where to Buy page, the same one that appears on at least some of the other retailer's pages where they're selling the audiobook. (Some of them choose to create their own sample instead, which I have no control over.) This longer scene, from Part Two, is one of my favorites because it was fun to write and to perform. In a short span of time, a wide range of emotions are covered: ordinary, funny, scary. I also get to do lots of voices. And a bit of profanity. (Once again, this is a book with children in it, but it's not a children's book.) So here, have a listen: