The coming revolution in audiobooks

In November, Amazon opened a beta program for Kindle Direct Publishing authors called Virtual Voice. It may be the biggest upheaval to independent publishing since Amazon launched KDP over a decade ago.

Virtual Voice uses synthetic (i.e., computer) voice technology to produce audiobooks. On first blush, that sounds like a pretty crappy experience—who wants to listen to a robot narrate a book? Know that automated voice technology has advanced tremendously in recent years, to the point that people have trouble distinguishing between it and a human voice.

The AI software that’s in the news so often these days is much of the reason for the improvement. In 2018, Google demonstrated an AI that could order food and make reservations over the phone without the person on the other end knowing it was not a human speaking. More recently, a study shows that 78% of people think they can tell the difference between an AI voice and a human, but only 2% were accurate. (If you’re skeptical, this Google Forms test gives you the chance to listen to recordings of celebrities and AI impersonations and see how well you can tell the difference. You’ll have to admit it’s not easy.)

It’s tempting to go into my thought process over the pros and cons of synthetic voice audiobooks. At this moment, I’ll just say I find the possibility alluring.

I’ve done audio in the past. I recorded Everywhere Man at Fantasy Studios, a dreamy, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that was quite expensive and exhausting. A few years ago, I made a concerted effort to hire a voice actor to record Bridge Daughter. I was put off by the terms dictated by every actor who responded to my call for bids. Both experiences impressed on me the risks of producing my own audiobooks, risks of both cost and rights.

Synthetic voice audiobooks eliminate a lot of the question marks. If I’m reading the Amazon announcement correctly, a KDP author chooses a voice from a catalog of voices, previews a sample, and names a sale price. My guess is, the final audiobook will be ready in a few hours. Audiobooks created with synthetic voices are labeled as such on the Amazon market and may be previewed, so the buyer knows what they’re getting.

It sounds like a no-cost, risk-free offer for independent authors. I’m more than curious. Unless Amazon botches the roll-out—a possibility, they’ve botched things before—I predict we’re going to see a Cambrian explosion of audiobooks on the Amazon market soon enough.

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Interview at Queen’s Book Asylum

In My Memory Locked by Jim Nelson

Over at Queen’s Book Asylum is a new interview discussing my cyber-noir thriller In My Memory Locked.

A sampling of the discussion:

What draws you to science fiction?
I’m drawn to the “what-if” element of science fiction. Storytelling is a kind of controlled experiment, a chance to live another life or in another time without the use of exotic technologies. Novels are rather like the Myst linking books transporting you to another age. J. Hillis Miller calls books “portable dreamweavers,” and speculative fiction is perhaps the purest distillation of that idea. That’s why I turn to science fiction time and again.

And:

While taking inspiration from those giants of the genre, how does your book both honor and freshen up cyber-noir?

In most mystery novels, the detective is not deeply involved in the mystery he’s solving. For In My Memory Locked, Naroy is absolutely at the center of the crime—and he’s not sure why. He’s even uncertain he’s not the perpetrator. I couldn’t tell the kind of detective story I wanted to tell without science fiction.

The discussion also touches on my Bridge Daughter series, the differences between San Francisco and Tokyo, and how we’re already living in a cyberpunk world, even if we don’t have quarter-inch stereo jacks in our heads.

Read the full interview here. Thanks to Arina at Queen’s Book Asylum for having me!

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Interview with Reading and Writing Podcast

Posted this week is my interview with Jeff Rutherford at the Reading and Writing Podcast.

During our talk, I discuss my cyber-noir mystery In My Memory Locked, as well as a little on my Bridge Daughter series. It was a great time with Jeff, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

Check out the interview at podpage.com or YouTube.

The double-edged sword

Ally Sheedy as Allison Reynolds

In The Breakfast Club, introverted Allison dares rich-girl Claire to say if she’s a virgin. When Claire demurs, Allison says,

It’s kind of a double-edged sword isn’t it? … If you say you haven’t [had sex], you’re a prude. If you say you have, you’re a slut. It’s a trap.

This is how I feel when the question comes up about the distinction between literary and genre fiction. If you write literary novels, you’re a prude. If you write genre books, you’re a slut.

Is it really that simple? Nothing in this world is so simple. Yet, here are some true-life examples from my own experiences:

Prude

While shopping around my first novel, I got a tip that a prestigious national imprint had a new editor seeking fresh manuscripts. I sent mine along, hopeful but also realistic about my chances.

The rejection slip I received was fairly scathing. The editor claimed my book read of a desperate MFA student who doesn’t understand the “real world.” It was fairly derogatory (and oddly personal, considering this editor and I shared a mutual friend). A simple “thanks, no thanks” would have sufficed, but this editor decided it was my turn in the barrel.

Make no mistake: This hoity-toit imprint reeks of MFA aftershave. It’s not a punk-lit imprint. It’s not an edgy alt-lit imprint. It publishes high-minded literary fiction. The author list is upper-middle- to upper-class, blindingly white, and yes, many of them hold an MFA.

And I hold an MFA too, so perhaps the criticism is spot-on—except I wrote the bulk of novel before I set foot in grad school. I didn’t aim for it to be a literary masterpiece. I wanted to write a page-turner. It’s categorized as literary fiction because it’s not mystery, science-fiction, fantasy, romance, Western, thriller, or YA/New Adult. Write a story about a character and his family, and it’s not merely literary, you’re trying to “be literary.” Who knew?

In my novel, the main character has grown up in a town of physicists who design and perfect weapons of mass destruction—this is the actual childhood I experienced. I thought it would be a good read. (It is a good read.) My character is snarky, sarcastic, crude—and at times, he can be a right asshole. The technical background of the novel is, as they say, ripped from the headlines.

This seems pretty real-world to me. I thought I was writing a funny novel with an unusual setting and situation. This editor took it upon herself to declare I’m actually a Raymond Carver-esque hack penning quiet stories of bourgeois desperation. And that I should stop being that writer.

So, there’s the rejection slip telling me to quit being literary, even though that’s a categorization I never asked for. And it came from a literary publishing house. It’s kind of a double-edged sword, isn’t it?

Slut

After Amazon published my second novel, I began to sense a change in the attitudes of many of my writer friends. At first it was slight, like a shift in air movement when a door in the room is opened. Gradually, though, the emotional tension grew to the point it could not be denied.

I wondered if the problem was one of jealousy. My book had been picked up by a large company, but Amazon was not what you would call an A-list publisher (back then, at least—times have changed). And, they only published my book in digital Kindle format. I had to rely on CreateSpace to offer a paperback edition. The advance money was not huge, and the publicity not so widespread. It all seemed pretty modest to me, and I thought my friends would recognize it as such.

My novel is set in an alternate universe where human reproductive biology is tweaked in a rather significant way. This book is obviously science-fiction. Since the protagonist is a thirteen-year-old girl, it neatly fits into the YA slot as well.

And I’m comfortable with those categorizations. I grew up reading Asimov, Bradbury, Silverberg, and other science-fiction writers of the Golden and Silver Ages who laid so much groundwork for the genre. More importantly, I wanted to write another page-turner, a real unputdownable book. From the Amazon reviews, I think I succeeded.

The tip-off for the issue with my friends was when my wife asked one of them if she’d read my new book. The answer was a murmured, “I would never read a book like that.” This from a person I counted as a friend, and had known for ten years.

Before this, I’d heard her repeat the trope that all genre fiction is formula, as mindless as baking a cake from a box of mix. I always let it go, for the sake of harmony. Now it was being thrown in my face.

The funny thing is, one Amazon editor told me she felt in hindsight my science-fiction YA novel was not a good fit for their imprint. They were more interested in “accessible” genre fiction for their readers, and that my work was—yep—too literary. It’s a trap.

Tease

When Claire refuses to reveal if she’s a virgin, bad-boy Bender suspects she’s a tease:

Sex is your weapon. You said it yourself. You use it to get respect.

Between being a literary author and a genre writer, there’s a third way: The literary-genre writer. These are the teases. They write genre fiction, but make it literary to get respect. And, often they do.

Examples of teases are Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood. Much of their work is patently genre, but they are received and analyzed with the same awe and respect reserved for literary novelists.

The knee-jerk reaction is to say these writers prove it’s possible to write literary-genre fiction. I don’t think that’s true at all, though. It only proves that authors accepted into the literary realm get to have it both ways: They avoid the stigma of genre fiction while incorporating the high-stake dramatic possibilities genre fiction offers.

Consider another literary-genre writer: Kurt Vonnegut. He wrote science-fiction, but his books are rarely shelved in that section. Hell, he even wrote a diatribe about how bad science-fiction writing is (Eliot Rosewater’s drunken “science-fiction writers couldn’t write for sour apples” screed). Yet, Vonnegut is rarely, if ever, permitted into the same circle as Atwood or McCarthy. There’s something “common” about Vonnegut. Only at the end of his life was he cautiously allowed into the literary world. Some still say he doesn’t belong there.

I remain unconvinced it’s the sophistication of a novel itself that moves it into the upper literary tiers. I can point to plenty of books supposedly in the literary strata that are not exceedingly well-written or insightful. Something other than an airy quality is the deciding factor.

The success of a handful of literary-genre writers doesn’t open doors, it only creates a new double-edged trap. An author who pens a literary-style novel can claim it’s literary. See, he added his book to the “Literary Fiction” section on Amazon! But does it mean he’s a member of the literary world? Not at all. There’s something else holding him back.

The trap

The literary/genre distinction purports to explain every aspect of a story: Its relevance, its significance, its quality, its audience, even the goals of the writer when they sat down to write it. Nothing in this world is so simple.

There’s a smell about the literary/genre divide. It smells like class. Literary is upper-class, and pulpy genre is for the proletariat. This roughly corresponds to the highbrow/lowbrow classifications. We even have a gradation for the striving petty bourgeoisie, middlebrow.

(Even calling a novel “middlebrow” is treated with disdain—a lowbrow attempt to raise a genre book to a higher status. It’s easy to fall down the literary/genre ladder, but difficult to ascend.)

I definitely believe the Marxist notion of class exists, both abroad and here in the United States. What I don’t believe is that a work of fiction is “of a class.” Books are utilized as a marker of class—tools to express one’s status. Distinctions like literary vs. genre communicate to members of each class which books they should be utilizing…I mean, reading.

Amazon says new Kindle replicates experience of holding real book cover in public

This is not the most original thought, but is it really that simple? Nothing in this world is so simple. And I don’t want it to be simple. As with food, the best reading diet is varied, eclectic, and personal.

Note the real damage here. If a writer writes the books he or she wants to write, and puts their heart and soul into making it the highest-quality they can for their readers, all that hard work is instantly deflated by the literary/genre prude/slut highbrow/lowbrow labels.

And if a writer introduces genre conventions into their literary work, they’re a sell-out—a prude tarting it up for cheap attention. And if the author of a genre novel tries to achieve a kind of elegance with their prose and style, they’re overreaching—a slut putting on a church dress. You use it to get respect. We’re punishing people for being ambitious.

I’ve said it elsewhere: People will judge a book by its cover, its publisher, the author’s name, the number of pages, the title, the price, the infernal literary/genre label, its reviews, the number of stars on Amazon—everything but the words between the covers. You know, the stuff that matters.

Three specials for the new year

If you’re looking for new books to read this year, I’ve partnered with over 300 authors to offer specials on new books and boxed sets:

NEW MYSTERY & SUSPENSE – A collection of new mystery, crime, and suspense novels, many with a special price. Includes my novel of suspense and paranoia, Man in the Middle, on sale for 99¢.

KINDLE UNLIMITED BONANZA – Adventure, science-fiction, romance, and fantasy books, all available free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. Includes the Bridge Daughter Cycle boxed set and my cyber-noir In My Memory Locked. Voracious readers apply here.

SCI-FI & FANTASY GIVEAWAY – Hundreds of free science-fiction and fantasy e-books available free for a sign-up. Includes the first book in my Bridge Daughter series.

Too many books! All promotions end February 28. Please give these authors a try, or use this as an opportunity to pick up one of my reads.

Complete Series Binge Bundles Under $10

The Bridge Daughter Cycle: Books One to Three by Jim Nelson

If you’re looking for some post-holiday reading, my three-part family saga Bridge Daughter Cycle has been included in the Complete Series Binge Bundles Under $10 special. Over forty complete book series from various authors are available at reduced boxed set prices, including all three books of the Bridge Daughter Cycle for $4.99. The series includes science-fiction, mystery, suspense, and fantasy.

If you’re interested, check out the full listing here. This special ends January 11th, 2021, so check it out while you can.

Will there be a fourth book in the Bridge Daughter Cycle?

The Bridge Daughter Cycle

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: As mentioned briefly in my interview with GSMC Reading podcast, I do have plans for a fourth book in the Bridge Daughter series.

The question has been posed a few times to me, and so I thought I would answer it here.

I hate pre-announcing books, especially a book I’ve not started, but I do have a tentative outline for a fourth novel that looks, to my eye, a solid addition to the series.

What I don’t have is a solid time frame when it will be available, or for that matter, when I’ll start working on it. It’s not that I don’t have interest in writing it—quite the opposite—but I’ve been eager to develop other projects that I’ve grown excited about (Man in the Middle, my next book), and I wanted to strike while the iron was hot.

If you’ve not caught up on the Bridge Daughter series, there’s no time like the present to start. The third book in the series, Stranger Son, was released earlier this year. And if you’re looking for the full series up to now, the first three books of the Bridge Daughter Cycle are now available in a Kindle box set edition.