Push the Button, Max

 Love how editing makes you more confident with your book...but also, you want to set it on fire at the same time.

Kira Hawke

Lead us not into temptation... Yes, I think I've read that, somewhere. 

Kindle Direct Publishing, in an effort to be everything to everyone (because that increases sales, they said) has introduced a beta version of an AI-driven audible feature for qualifying books offered through their service. Wow, that's a lot to digest, huh?

Some readers need no introduction to the vices and virtues of having someone read you a book. I suppose there is something deeply psychological - back to those days when your twenty-something mom read bedtime stories at a time when (for most) life was an easy game. There is also something deeply convenient, of mowing the lawn, walking the dogs or doing laundry (right, dear?) listening to a book. 

The vice is how much the mind wanders in the process. It is an art, to know when to stay focused, when there are permitted lapses... Most of that is related to the ebb and flow of the reader - urgent words or inflections tells me to pay attention. Soft, meandering passages and I can half listen and half tell Joy she's a good girl for staying on the sidewalk.

Paying a professional voice actor seemed prohibitive, so I politely told people that, much as reading my own book into a recording device would cut down on costs, how many wanted to hear me winding my way through the intimate Adam/Karen passages we all know are there? The answer is usually "Eeewwww," which I interpret to mean no one.

Kindle's solution was worthy of a look, maybe a try. I wended my way through the requirements, uploaded a revised version (added a table of contents) of The Fort in the Harbor and waited. And, waited. Finally - I was in!

It seemed a snap. We chose a voice - female. Crisp diction, indistinct accent. There was a provision to review what the book would sound like and...

The first problem that appeared was one of venue. We were on a trip with our 12 year old grandson, sitting in a hotel room. It wasn't long before Karen was offering to rub, well you get the idea. Grandson was playing a game on the TV in his "den" but it is never obvious when kids are actually listening.

The second problem was one of pronunciation. Not all words were pronounced by my computer assistant as I intended. One - the name of an important character - had to be said a certain way for a later plot twist to make sense. My bold voice-in-a-box didn't know that. But, wait!

Never fear - there is a feature that lets me tell Ms. Big Voice how I want her to pronounce words. This is awesome, this is wonderful! I can even ask her to say it the same way ever time she encounters it. I'm in business!

And then, swiping the screen to save my work, and...

"Push the button, Max" is a line from the movie The Great Race. It is uttered almost exclusively by Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon) while commanding his assistant Max (Peter Falk) to engage something mechanical - always with disastrous effect. Bombs exploded, periscopes took on a life of their own. A rocket sled with them aboard, meant to cover the "Measured Mile" at extreme speed, flew ballistically...until it didn't.

The last brush of the screen pushed the publish button. "Congratulations!" the screen informed me. "Your Audible book is live."

Well, okay. Apparently nothing kept me from continuing to work my way through the manuscript. It was tedious - I've read this book already, know how it ends - but writing for publication can be tedious. And then...

The Audible book was missing a whole section. Karen sees video of the deceased, in life. Her heart... Well, that part, something I was very happy with, was missing. What the hell?

I'd revised and uploaded the wrong file. Great.

Here's where the wheels really come off. Kindle - this is a feature, not a flaw - lets the owner of a manuscript make revision to it even after publishing. You'd think fixing typos, small gaffs and the like would only help going forward, but in fact if a reader's device is connected to the internet it makes changes to all of them. There are hundreds of copies of Fort out there, and now all of them contain the older version of the story, the one I didn't intend to publish. Fuck.

It was easily fixed, but... Now, the older version is stuck on Audible (they are trying to figure out what to do). All right.

It was an experiment. I'd say, even now, it was 60% successful. One observation - KDP isn't (yet) sophisticated enough to make the fine distinctions between characters that voice actors make, so dialogue can sometimes be confusing. There is a way to write it better - dialogue tags more often in place of structural cues - but that's for later books. 

I'm going to ask you to wait. I'll let you know when it's fixed. It's kind of fun to listen to the story, and if you do it as part of your subscription to Audible I get paid per page. It's just that I pressed the wrong button, and now I'm playing catch up.

At least I didn't blow up the Eiffel Tower.