Placing the Audio Book

I faced some initial difficulty with burning my audio to CD. I tried this around 4 times before I realised it needed to be set up for CD players. After watching some tutorials I then successfully burned onto the discs.

I contacted Reads of Nassau Street to see about getting CD stickers printed. I felt as though putting a regular CD at the back of the book would look less professional. They informed my that this could be done, so I set up my CD document for print and sent them the PDF. Setting up a document for stickers started at €15 which was quite a fair bit to pay for a couple of stickers, but I felt like it would make a huge difference to the look and feel of the book.

The next step was to find pockets for the CD’s to put at the back of the book. I thought that this would of been an easy thing to do. I went to several different office supply stores and couldn’t find them anywhere. Workers informed me that they are not in demand enough to supply anymore. I looked up numbers for different office supply stores in Dublin and rang around. I eventually got talking to a woman who ran a store in Malahide village who had a pack left in stock. After putting them on hold, I went to collect them and they were exactly what I had in mind. They were perfect. I made some small changes to each envelope for the reader to be able to access the CD as easy as possible. I cut off the flap and made a small cut-out where the finger will be able to remove the CD.

The next step was deciding what to stick them in with. I was thinking that glue might be too messy, especially on the paper  back books. I was also concerned that double sided tape would be easy to remove and could perhaps fall out, especially in the hands of a child. I then got in contact with a friend who owns a blinds company to see if they had high quality double-sided tape that I could borrow. They allowed me to use the tape and I was delighted with the outcome.

Audio Book

The last addition of the book which I decided upon, was that of making an accompanying audio CD. I thought that this would be a really nice touch and bring the book to life for the reader.

Examples of some excellent audio books for my target audience:

I began by looking for a reader. I sourced various different audio books both online and in the library and found that majority of the readers were either a man or woman generally of the age of mature age. After testing out 4 different readers, I settled on my chose voice.

Reaper Editing:

I used the software Reaper to edit my audio. I used various different background sounds and noises to enhance it. I got a lot of these sounds from sound bible and several others from YouTube videos and other audio websites. I used a total of 15 sounds altogether. This includes the narration, the day and night background sounds (garden sounds /thunderstorm and rain), woman gasping, Gonzo crying, a cat screeching, a warning sound that was narrowed down from several selections, purring, flapping wings and a couple more. I had not used reaper in over a year, so this was a good learning experience for me with regards to revising the software.