Listening To Your Own Audibooks

Reader GA. asks:

“How does it feel to hear your own books? Do you get a deep satisfaction or are you self critical , feeling that something could have been written slightly differently?”

Actually, I enjoy it quite a bit. I know some writers hate listening to their own books, but that’s not me. I listen to them and admire my own cleverness. 🙂

The exception is when I listen to my self-published books for approval before they go live for sale. But I’m not really listening to the book, I’m listening for any potential problems – duplicated sentences, weird noises in the background, missing sentences, chapters in the wrong order, that’s sort of thing. Given that it can take an audiobook a couple of weeks to get through ACX approval and onto Audible, it’s a pain to restart the process if the ACX quality review spots a missing chapter or something, so it’s better to catch anything like that first.

But! Once the QA review is done, I do enjoy listening to my own books. I also enjoy listening to the interpretation a narrator brings to various characters, since it will sometimes reveal facets of the character or the story I hadn’t considered before.

The only thing that I don’t enjoy is that prior to 2018, I never gave any thought to audiobooks whatsoever. So sometimes I have a sentence that sounds weird or a name that is a bit cumbersome when spoken aloud, and every time I hear it, I think I should have written that differently. But that’s a minor thing.

-JM