A Covid-19 Success Story: Speak Softly My Love, an Audiobook. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako


 

To fall in love is to be young again. To count the cost is to die a little bit inside. In Speak Softly My Love, Inspector Gilles Maintenon goes out for a litre of milk and stumbles across a dead man. The trouble is, when the dead get up and walk away. They have one too many missing-person reports, too many wives, girlfriends and other mysterious blondes.

Louis Shalako has released his first audiobook, Speak Softly My Love, an Inspector Gilles Maintenon murder mystery. Read by Mike Manz, it’s available through Audible, Amazon and iTunes.

“Mike was looking to build his portfolio as a voice actor. I had published it five or six years ago. There’s nothing to lose. Audiobooks are big right now. You have to get that first one out, to do the work and to learn the lessons.” It’s all uphill from there.

Choosing his first audiobook was a no-brainer.

“I liked the cover with the sultry blonde. With a series, building readership is easier. If they like one, they like them all. The Maintenon stories are set in Paris, in the twenties and thirties. The world is in ferment. Recent history hasn’t been written yet. The writer, and the readers, get to play in that world.” There is a certain dark humour.

“Inspector Maintenon, a WW I veteran and a middle-aged widower, just wants to get the right guy. The price of a mistake is to send an innocent person to the guillotine.” He’s very French, but not a parody.

Louis hopes to produce further titles in the series. He studied Radio, Television and Journalism Arts at Lambton College.

 “I wanted someone to teach me how to write. That was my dream. I’ve put over thirty years into it. You get out of it what you put into it.”

“When I really started, on the internet for the first time, a famous and successful author said, a professional writer can write anything.” The real challenge is our expectations.

“I can write and edit a sixty-thousand word novel in a hundred and fifty to two hundred hours. You just put your head down and do the work. It’s not hard—it just takes some patience.”

“I’ve gotten three-quarters into writing a book, and I still didn’t know how it ended.” It’s actually better to have the gag first, to go back in time, and then write towards that end point.

To take it from text both adds something, and possibly takes something away.

“It is to create a completely different work of art. In terms of the experience, there was a book that I wrote six years ago. I hadn’t read it since, and then it was being read back to me by a talented voice actor.” All you can is to sit there and just listen.

“When it’s published, you sit there and wait to see if anyone will buy it.”

Louis has given away 150,000 ebooks in ten years just by setting the price at zero. All ebook titles are currently free for the duration, on Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and other platforms.

“It’s not really about money. It’s not about me. It’s about love. I know it sounds mad. But. You want people to enjoy your book.”

With Mike Manz living in Hangzhou, China, under lockdown and having lost a teaching job, there were some obvious challenges. Paying jobs had to come first, ahead of the more chancy royalty-sharing agreement.

“The point is, Mike got it done, which shows character. I am very happy with the results.”

The audiobook is available from Audible, Amazon and on iTunes.

It's also free to listen to with an Audible trial membership.



END



Check out Louis' drawings on Fine Art America.

Thank you for reading, and listening.

From the Mundane to the Sublime. Exercise, and Dreams. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako



In a video, the young lady does the piriformis stretches for thirty seconds. Or something like that.


I do two or three for four seconds. Another one or two for six or seven seconds, and one, holding it for ten seconds. I do that for each side. When I pull the first one on the left side, as often as not something goes 'clunk' in the lower back. Also noted that rolling to the right to get up off the floor caused a bit of pain as well. 

(Solution: get up to the left side.)

This is why, as a sixty year-old man with back injuries, I design my own routine. Some thirty-five year-old trainer, bristling with energy, would probably set the bar too high and I would inevitably injure myself. I might go for a walk. I did get on a bike, and over a year or two built up so I could do fifteen or twenty k without too much pain. I am never going to run, ladies and gentlemen. The impact on joints and vertebra is simply too great for someone way out of shape.

If I had an actual bar-bell, I would stick with forty pounds. Oh, if you get stronger, simply add reps—not weight. Some asshole bench-pressing five hundred pounds is not a good model for what I am attempting to achieve. I don't expect to be Mr. Universe. How about Mr. Reduced Level of Pain??? That sounds good to me.

#exercise

Louis Shalako We're about two months in, and really only just starting to feel the results. As for losing weight, or changing my appearance in the mirror, that is a much longer-term project.

***

My dream from a few nights ago was nuts. Just nuts. I was in one of those maze-like cities that just don't make any sense. I was popping wheelies and cat-walking through intersections on a road racing bike. I was wearing cycle shorts, and them odd-ball shoes...a jersey (which I couldn't read upside down), and a helmet. Everyone was dressed for Carnival...kind of a mix of Venetian masks, and Cats, and Birds of Prey. People are covered in glitter and make-up and having one hell of a good time.

Not impressed, I'm looking around with a kind of amused contempt.

At some point I'm lining up behind some other guys in cycle garb. The guy ahead of me is waving a business card at some baldy-headed guy in a back office. Disappointed, he turns away. I'm towering above them all, chest rippling with muscles, (which is one way of knowing that this is indeed a dream). I wish I had that kind of confidence in real life, but the guy takes one look and says 'You'll do."

And that's how I made the team, which in this dream world is a full-contact cycling team, and I'm the enforcer. My specialty is body-checking them other bums out of our lead guy's way.

#dreams

The one girl-cat was clinging on to me something fierce. Kind of cute in a fetal-alcohol-syndrome sort of a way.

***

The only thing I can really recall about last night’s dream, is that I was in a canoe. It was very dark. Some guy in another canoe was chasing me across a lake, splashing madly away behind me. The shore was blackness, but the sky and the water were lighter. As I got closer, I remember thinking how nice and ‘hard’ the water was. A powerful paddler, the boat was very small. It was like it was on rails, or running in a groove or something…an island standing offshore becomes more distinct, and at that point, there is a bit of a swell. Not even waves, and at that point, the boat slows down, begins to wallow. Whoever is chasing me is catching up, and I’ve got water coming in over the sides.

That’s it. That’s about when I woke up.

They say dreams are our subconscious mind sorting and filing and making sense out of the day’s events. I get the impression my subconscious mind is so fucking bored, it’s just making shit up for its own amusement. Other than that, when you’re driving in a long, skinny car, on a road that’s just a bit too narrow, and you go to make a right turn, and the road goes about five feet and then just plummets…downwards at seventy or eighty degrees, just keep going. 

You don’t want to know where that one ends.

END

(Note: he's talked about his dreams before. If he can write down enough of them, he will have the world's first completely plot-less novel. - ed.)

Louis has all kinds of books and stories on Kobo.

Image: Louis

Thank you for reading.

Ten Years of Independent Publishing. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

It was January 1, 2010, New Year’s Day, when I announced to Facebook and the world that I would be editing and publishing my first two novels.

And eyes proceeded to roll, eyebrows proceeded to crawl upwards, inward shudders were sternly repressed, and the more polite ones proceeded to ignore me as best they could.

Who can blame them? Ebooks had only been around two or three years. No one had any real idea of what an ebook aggregator was. Amazon was just beginning to make some pretty heavy waves. Borders, second largest chain of physical bookstores in the U.S. was dead or in the throes of death.

Of course they hated us—

They hated me, and I knew it. But that's okay, ladies and gentlemen.

That was okay with me.

The real bestsellers were fairly secure in their contempt, but the mid-list authors, the ones who were being dropped or in danger of being dropped due to indifferent sales, hated us.

That was ten years ago. No matter what one might think of my writing, editing and publishing skills ten years ago, the fact is, I have persisted.

Writing and publishing is one of the most speculative ventures that I have ever encountered, although there are no doubt others. Here’s the thing. A person can get a job as a plumber’s helper, some twenty year-old, and after a few months, everyone accepts that this is indeed a plumber.

Ten years later, some guy on Facebook, mentioning no names, reared his ugly head. I have no doubt he was just a troll. Something about his story, the one about winning a writing contest with his very first attempt, sounded fishy. Follow up on the name, there was literally nothing there—he had no books, no stories, nothing for sale on Amazon.

Why was he there? He was trolling authors, the basic premise was that only he was capable of determining who had the right to call themselves a writer. A writer is one who writes, surely a plain and sensible definition, but no. No, ladies and gentlemen. Only those who had won awards, those who had million-dollar advances and New York Times best-selling status had the right. The rest of us were all shit, and he knew it. I saw all those other budding authors, all the people with one or two books, many of them independently published, all of the poets, many of them being published ‘for the love’, which is to say no pay. And I saw their comments, most of them trying to explain, or to justify, why they had the right to call themselves writers.

Suffice it to say that I dropped the creep, and have no regrets about that. Hopefully some of the other ones smarten up as well. Take away his victims and his audience, that one has nothing—nothing, ladies and gentlemen, except perhaps one or more bogus names on Facebook and a bad attitude that ain’t going to cure itself.

In ten years, I have published twenty-two novels under five different pen-names. With paperbacks in two different sizes, with numerous novellas and short stories, I have at least one-hundred and fifty-four titles. Each title comes in a half a dozen formats. That's a lot of products.

The funny thing is, I have never introduced myself as a writer. But then, I suppose I have never introduced myself as anything other than what I am.

I’ve done every kind of shit job, on a thousand different job-sites. Just for starters—

I’ve been on disability for over twenty-five years. I have a part-time job making pizza dough, and I have spent over thirty years in learning how to write a story.

I’ve learned a lot in ten years of independent publishing, but then I have put in the time, made the effort, made the sacrifices, and done the experiments. I have taken a few hits, and thrown the odd punch along the way—but then, who wouldn’t.

Who wouldn’t.

If nothing else, I can tell you what doesn’t work, if only one was prepared to listen—most are not and that’s fair enough.

I have nothing but confidence in my ability as a writer.

And I would actually like to thank that person, whoever they may have been.

Thank you for reminding me of why I came here in the first place.

We will be celebrating our tenth anniversary here at Shalako Publishing and Long Cool One Books, and to hell with the likes of you, sir.

END


Editor's Note.  Louis forgot to mention that he's been published in six or seven languages, sold stories here and there for real, actual money and stuff, and, this is the part they really hate, he's given away approximately 150,000 ebooks over the last ten years.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Louis has all kinds of books and stories on Kobo.

Image: borrowed

Thank you for reading.