Outsourcing: The Beauty of Not
When I was young and foolish and bought a 2020 planner so I could keep my goals and schedule intact, I thought I would have an amazingly productive year.
I laugh when I look back on how naive I was.
Somewhere around April, I started only using pencil in my planner.
In May, I learned that I really needed to stop being so hard on myself when outside forces prevented me from achieving my goals.
June had rolled around when I decided to embrace the concept of outsourcing.
In publishing, I do most of the work myself. Or, for technical things like building this lovely website, I enlist my computer-savvy husband. I do hire cover artists, beta readers, editors...all those lovely types. But things I can do myself, I've never wanted to hand off.
But then...audiobooks.
The absolute bane of my existence. Since I am an actor by training and trade, the general opinion has been that I should record the books myself. Which is a great thought, but recording is a massive undertaking. Engineering the files is a whole other beast, and I currently have eighteen published books. That's a minimum of one-hundred-and-seventeen hours of audio. Minimum.
Back in April when I was young and hopeful, I thought I'd spend my lockdown time recording and bust through a bunch of audiobooks.
But recording audiobooks means not having the time or mental capacity to write books. And writing my books is the one thing that can truly be done by me and only me.
So the record all the audio plan got scrapped. I decided to focus my actual recording energy on the Ena of Ilbrea series. Trying to do anything other than that would just result in my releasing books that are below the standard of what I want to give my readers.
And that, my friends, is when I discovered the beauty of outsourcing.
I posted an audition notice through ACX, and all of a sudden, narrators were coming to me, asking to do the work I literally could not get done even if I gave up sleeping. Some of them got a little pushy about wanting to narrate for me (I did get a few nasty emails), but that's beside the point. I found two lovely narrators who could record The Tethering series and the Girl of Glass series for me.
Like...I type new books while they record my backlist. I record Ena while they record my backlist. I edit, write blogs, record A Book and A Dream, compose newsletters, manage my social media accounts while they record my backlist for me!
And then they send me completed files. All I have to do is proof them and request any changes. Then they just upload new files, and everything's ready to go.
It's like magic.
It's the most beautiful concept in the world.
I can't do this work without losing my mind, so I'm going to have someone else do it for me.
Mind blown.
There is so much exciting audio coming your way, and all because I just decided to not do it myself.
Also, I don't know about you, but I've been making a dent in my TBR pile. If the same goes for you, here are links to two collections of reads that are free for a limited time!
