New Books, Audio, and the Helpful Role of Mosquitos

My copies of Rearview Mirror have arrived—yay! If you are a blogger who previously signed up to review it and haven’t yet sent your snail mail address to emailstephanieblack (at) gmail (dot) com, please do so. Thanks! I hear reports from my spies that the book is starting to show up in stores. Online, the book is now in stock at Deseret Book. Seagull doesn't have it yet, and Amazon has the Kindle version, and I'm hoping that within a few weeks it will be everywhere! Everywhere! Spreading all over the place so you can't so much as go buy a burger without tripping over stacks of Rearview Mirror!

Well, I gotta dream, right? 

Seeing a new book for the first time is always a thrill. It’s here! A book! I wrote a book! It has a cover, a cool, shiny, creepy cover! And pages! Real pages! Pages with my own words on them! Yay! I like to repeatedly pick a new book up and flip through the pages. And I was delighted to add the book to my shelf of Novels With My Name on Them. Okay, it’s not exactly a shelf of books. It’s a shelf with a few books and most of the space taken up by Halloween decorations, but it’s exciting to have a new book next to the orange ceramic plate with the bat on it.

One thing I like to do when my books are first released is to listen to the audio version. My publisher, Covenant, does audio versions for many of their fiction titles, and I’m delighted that they’ve done my books in audio. I’m doubly delighted that they no longer do abridged audio. Say the words “abridged audio” to any of my author colleagues and watch them shrivel, shrieking in pain. Abridged audio had a very limited word count—for my first book I had to cut out more than half the book for the audio version. Ouch and ouch. But abridged audio is gone—all the audio books Covenant does now are unabridged.

I love that word. Unabridged! Unabridged! Yaaaay!

It’s a fun, fascinating experience to listen to your story read by a professional actress or actor, and the readers for my books have done a great job. Luone Ingram is the reader for Rearview Mirror—she did Methods of Madness and Cold as Ice as well—and she’s awesome. It takes incredible skill and talent to read a book for audio. I wouldn’t have a clue how to bring a suspense novel to life for a listener, so I’m very grateful for the talented readers that do our audio versions. I’m having a ton of fun listening to my book. I wonder what will happen next!

Just kidding. I’m not that spacey; I do remember how it ends.

This morning, I saw the following on my sister’s Life as an Adverb blog:

" . . . last night we caught up on our backlogged DVR.  We laughed at some lame sitcom jokes.  Then David laughed a little too knowingly at a post-baby-body joke.  Afterwards he made eyes at me in a way that made me think he was going to tell me I was beautiful and that he loves me just the way I am.  

He said, "Let's go to bed and read." 

But, considering I had the latest release from award-winning author Stephanie Black in my hands, it wasn't too bad of a deal.  Besides, it was funny when I screamed as a mosquito buzzed  right in my ear canal and scared the bejeebers out of David, who was several chapters ahead of me in the same book.  Good one, Steph.  Got him right as the floor was creaking ominously above the heroine.”

That made my day.