2023 In Review. It Was a Very Good Year. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

A couple of weeks ago, I began my new audiobook on Google Play. It’s been a long year.

My attention was wandering, and I basically saved it as a draft. I’d probably had enough, at that point. I went off and did other things for a couple of weeks. I was grabbing free, public domain short stories from the internet, finding images, publishing them, putting in links and posting them all over. At some point my eyes were rolling back into my head. I couldn’t focus for the life of me…I’d probably had enough, by that point.

I'm back at it now, no rush, no hurry, no worries. My Criminal Memoir will be available as an audiobook within a day or two.

So, 2023 was fairly productive, after a hiatus of some years. It took me three winters, to write a mystery novel, A Stranger In Paris, the ninth of the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series. That was three winters where I wrote about 20,000 words, and long periods in between when I didn’t write a damned thing except the very occasional blog post. Publishing that on Smashwords, Kobo, Amazon, and finally, Google Play, I saw the notice. Click here to publish your book as an audiobook narrated by AI.

People are scared shitless by AI, and no one can blame them. They know themselves best. They are at a distinct disadvantage, one has to presume.

I thought, why not, why not learn how to use the fucking thing. I have all these books and all these stories. A series of assets, and it’s all about tending that little garden. I spent the next five months, producing what turned out to be around one hundred and thirty audiobooks in terms of full-length books and short stories. I have five different pen names, writing in any number of genres. I now have 285 titles up on Google Play. This does not account for paperbacks in two different sizes, or a number of different ebook formats available from Smashwords, just to clarify. Where I failed, was in getting that up as an approximately 4x7 paperback on Lulu (dot) com, where I have sold exactly three books since 2011, and I will never see a penny from that website…so far, I haven’t even attempted to produce a paperback of that book on Amazon. I was completely used to making paperbacks through Createspace, which was purchased by Amazon and is now a dead portal. I suppose it’s time to learn a new trick—

Having done all of that, all within a few months, I started looking around, and I had this story, The Black Orb, which had originally been published by New Myths. It had been hanging around in a folder on my desktop, the big hurdle there was the question of a cover image and a half-decent book cover.

I bit down hard on the bullet, and found a free, black and white, public domain image and produced a book cover, got an ISBN number, wrote some kind of half-assed blurb and published that as an ebook on various platforms, and as an audiobook on Google Play. I found the material and published One Million Words of Crap. I didn't even have to write it, only collect it, format it, and publish it in the usual fashion.

All of this is free to do, incidentally.

When I went to publish my new ebook on Lulu (dot) com, they wanted $4.99 to publish an ebook. They claim two million authors, (all of whom are happy and successful), that part is credible enough. It is also a drop in the bucket compared to some other platforms, and the truth is, I have sold exactly three books there since I joined the platform fifteen or more years ago. Why in the hell would I ever want to do that.

By this time, it was October, I was looking at a long, boring winter square in the eye. I had been thinking of writing my memoirs, I had some other ideas, but I just started writing. I wrote down a heading, and then just said what I thought. Whatever I could recall, from a certain period of my life. I didn’t even have to lie, to write fiction…that one’s about 54,000 words. A bit short for a novel, but this one is non-fiction. 

Publishing that, chapter by chapter, on my blog, was a motivating factor. People expect you to follow through and to finish that thing.

So did I.

That is exactly what I did.

At the present time, I need to go back, publish two paperbacks through Amazon’s KDP portal, assuming I can trim and fine-tune the book covers for A Stranger In Paris, and My Criminal Memoir.

I have three ebooks hung up due to formatting issues at Smashwords, in terms of wider distribution through iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, etc. Basically, I just got tired and parked it for a while. If I could trouble-shoot all of that, I would be just about caught up for 2023, and that would be that.

In that sense, it was a very good year.

I have no idea of what I might do next.

No promises, okay.

#Louis

 

END

 

A Stranger In Paris. Amazon.

One Million Words of Crap.

My Criminal Memoir. Google Play, (Audiobook).

The Black Orb.

Louis Shalako on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading or listening, whichever the case may be.

 

#Louis