Category Archives: walker papers

Guest Blogger: Gabra Zackman!

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Over the years I’ve had lots and lots of people tell me how much they love Gabra Zackman, the reader for most of the Walker Papers audio books. Gabra emailed me around a year ago and we’ve chatted back and forth in email (and in Skype, recently! SO COOL!) a bit, and I thought, hey! I should ask if she’d do a guest blog sometime!

So I did, and she said yes! And so in honor of the audio version of RAVEN CALLS being released today, I’m posting the blog she sent. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

The Life of an Audiobook Narrator

I’ve had the privilege over the years of recording some extraordinary books, and it occurred to me a few years back to contact some of the people who write them. It was with great excitement and awe that I first contacted Catie to say how much I loved her work, and it was with the same great excitement that I responded to her request for an entry for her newsletter.

I’m currently in the midst of prepping RAVEN CALLS, the seventh book in the Walker Series. I adore it. It’s not fair or nice to play favorites, but… this is one of my favorites. The whole series has been an absolute gift to me. But this one has had me laughing even more (if possible!) and has made my imagination and my heart dance around with joy.

I’ve had three series I’ve done that have meant a great deal to me, and I’ve made contact with all of the authors. In the midst of one, I had lunch with the author at a pivotal moment: I had been through a really rough time in life, and wanted to thank her for her work. In that dark stretch, I got to spend days in a booth with her characters, and it brought me such comfort. To my great surprise, she confessed that she had written the first book of the series while going through a divorce… that she had written the characters to bring HER comfort!!! It was amazing to know that a book she had written to bring happiness into her life affected me in the same way, and I hoped it was the same salve to many other women who listened to it. I feel the same with Joanne Walker… she’s the inner shaman/ goof/ klutz/ kick ass chick who I wish I were on the inside, and her antics can always make me laugh on a rainy day.

I got into audiobooks through something of a fluke. The well-known reader Jonathan Davis has been a dear friend of mine since we did a play together, and he invited me to send an audition to a company he worked for. This company happened to have an opening—a reader with a similar voice had just left—and I was the lucky recipient of the best job I’d ever had. Here’s another way to tell the same story: I have the privilege of working a lot as an actress, but it wasn’t always that way. For a long time I waited tables and catered, and I had gotten to the point of no return. So I decided to have a frank conversation with God. “God,” I said, while wearing a tuxedo and serving canapés, “I can’t imagine this is my greatest good on this earth. If you want me to keep being an actress, you need to give me a way to live. If not, I’m throwing in the towel. You choose.” Shortly thereafter I got a call, and my life profoundly changed. Somewhere between God and Jonathan Davis was my salvation.

From the company I initially started with, I made contacts that went off and formed their own companies… and wound up doing this wonderful work in several different studios. I was one of the first people called when Audible started their own production company, and they are still one of my greatest employers today. One of my early books was THUNDERBIRD FALLS, the second in the Walker series, and I fell in love with it immediately. I was so excited for this book… it appealed so deeply to my love of language, folklore, and funny, powerful women. But there was a catch… another reader read the first book, and this is never a fun situation to go into.

Listeners are loyal. It’s something I’ve learned. And to switch horses on them midstream… pisses them off. So it was no surprise that there was much controversy about this. I read the book with great love and passion, but I was a fairly new narrator at the time, and a bit nervous. The listener reviews nearly killed me… there were all these comparisons to the first reader’s take on it, and it was really hard for me to deal with that. Besides which, I thought she was wonderful, and couldn’t understand the change either… my guess is that she moved or something, because they never switch readers on a series if they can avoid it.

So the whole thing was a source of great paranoia to me at first… and there were a ton of reviews that preferred one or the other of us. To be honest, my terror was selfish… it was less about my work, which I was beginning to be confident about, and more about the series… would they take it away from me? If there were more books, would I get them, or not? I was so relieved when I got the next one, and the next one, and the one after that, five in all for me to read over the years. I feel like these characters have become old friends, and I so look forward to taking them with me into the booth again. At the same time, it’s an interesting thing, having read for so long… there are early choices I made, particularly character’s voices, which I wouldn’t choose now [Catie's note: That's okay, as I told Gabra, 'cause if I'd known where they were going, there are some choices I'd have made differently for characters early on, too!]. But what can I do? I’m sorta stuck with them! I tried in one series to switch the voices mid-way, and that was like cooking a stew then deciding to make a consommé. It’s invariably better to stick with the stew.

Reading audiobooks is a strange skill, and a strange experience. I love it, but it’s not for everyone. I typically read about 4-6 hours at a stretch, and it is an extraordinary combination of patience (you can’t move around a lot), stamina (I call it “strapping my Nikes to my vocal chords”) and creativity (we want to hear the characters, but don’t do TOO much!) Usually it’s just me and an engineer, and at this point, we’re all pretty dear friends. It’s an intimate situation, reading a book to someone, and we have all worked together for years. So you can imagine that between long takes, and lots of tea, there are wonderful conversations, all of which occur on either side of insulated glass. Pretty strange? Yes. And pretty awesome. Especially for some of the more graphic romances I’ve read… those tend to be pretty funny nights. Please imagine a bunch of women in their 30s reading graphic romances to mostly male engineers in their 20s! It’s wonderfully fun. I think you need a great sense of humor to be an audiobook narrator. You need to be able to laugh at yourself, and intuitively find the humor of the piece you’re working on, both in equal measure.

There’s often a lot of prep that goes into it as well, depending on the material. For RAVEN CALLS, I’m planning to ask Catie if she knows how to pronounce all the Gaelic words she’s put in there, and if she can help me with it! We often have to ask the authors things like that, particularly if you’re working on sci-fi. I recently completed a sci-fi book that had something like 5 pages of pronunciations, all of which were directly from the author… when you have an entirely self-created world, it’s often like that. But it has cropped up all over the place… I once read a romance that was set in Japan, and had to consult a native speaker about the phrases. And once I read a non-fiction book about an indigenous culture in Alaska and had to make my way through Inuit words. That was a picnic! Again, we all have a good laugh over it, and try our best to do the kind of work we are proud of. At this point, I have recorded over 200 books, so there’s very little that can truly surprise me.

So here I sit, about to prep more of RAVEN CALLS, and I get to look forward to some time with Joanne and her adventures in a dark booth. Likely, an attractive young male friend of mine will be sitting across the glass, and in between Joanne’s tangles with her past and present, my friend and I will talk about our lives. I’ll occasionally say a wrong word, and we’ll laugh. I’ll have to say the Gaelic phrases several times until I’m happy with how they sound. And we’ll drink tea and coffee and listen, together, to all the places this story will go, to all the paths Joanne will walk down, to her irreverent and witty self-effacement. And, frankly, we’ll thank God that this is “one of the good ones” and that we can truly enjoy the evening.

So this is for you, the listeners, who will soon have a chance to read or hear this great new installment… I hope you have as much fun listening to it as I plan to have reading it. Cheers to that!

-Gabra Zackman

On Running A Kickstarter Campaign

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I have SO MUCH to write about what I’ve learned from running the Kickstarter campaign that I’ve basically been unable to move forward on it, you know? Too much information and not enough mental capacity to break it down. Fortunately for me, a friend who is looking at running some crowdfunding had a list of questions to put to me, and that’s giving me some badly-needed structure. So I’m gonna hit this thing over a series of blog posts, and will do my best to include further questions asked in comments and the like as well as break out my own personal experiences.

…all of this stuff basically assumes you’re a writer running crowdfunding, but I imagine that after the fact a lot of it might be helpful to other people. I hope so, anyway.

What would be a reasonable amount to set as initial goal? (I understand the part where if you don’t make goal, you get zero.)

For me, this depends on anticipated wordcount, but the “if you don’t make goal” bit is the kicker.

For “No Dominion”, which I planned as a novella, I set my initial goal at $4000. I chose that number because I’ve sold 3 novellas in the past, and was paid approximately $3K, $3500 and $4K for them. So I’d been going to split it down the middle for “No Dominion” and ask for $3500, but then I jumped the gun and got Kyle Cassidy to do the cover art photo shoot, so I went ahead and rolled the cost of that into the campaign, thus setting the dollar amount at $4K, and setting the novella price point as a whole for the campaign at $4K.

Tim Pratt set a $6K goal for his novel-length Kickstarter. I suspect I would do around the same, probably topping out around $7500 for an anticipated, say, 80K novel, because the *idea* here is to get the cash in the door, so it’s counter-productive to aim super high and not make it. It’s a question of what’s the minimum bearable to make for your work, but one of the positive sides about crowdfunding is it frees you to do something you really want to do, and that may be worth taking a little less cash in hand.

How long does one run this thing?

Kickstarter itself suggests 30 days, because there’s pretty inevitably a trough in the middle. I ran “No Dominion” for 45 days and will do that for any other Kickstarters I run, because 45 days is pretty likely to mean everybody who might want to buy in is going to have a paycheck in that time. 30 days can miss out on people who only get paid monthly, and that can make a difference.

What’s with this video one does?

I think the video is God’s way of being cruel to writers. Honestly, for mine, I wrote a 45 second speech, practiced it a bunch of times, then set up my phone to record me and recorded it about twenty times until I had one where I hadn’t embarrassed myself stumbling over the words. I was very proud of myself for managing to put a fade out at the beginning and maybe the end. Regardless of the approach, keep it short, because people lose interest fast. Under 60 seconds is genuinely fine.

Assuming it makes the goal, when does payment come in, all at once or in chunks?

All at once. Amazon takes approximately 2 weeks to process it, and then it’s all yours. This is a totally bizarre concept for writers: the entire advance up front. This is also why you’d better be pretty goddamned sure you’re going to do the project.

And how does one disseminate the rewards?

For writers, your major reward is of course your novel/short stories/etc, which you would *think* Kickstarter would allow you to attach to the patron email lists they automatically create for you. For some bizarre reason they don’t allow epub/mobi/pdf/doc attachments, though I’ve suggested it to them (and if, say, everybody reading this would like to go suggest it to them too, Kickstarter’s contact link is at the bottom of any given page).

I do not yet know if you can attach such files to the finalized mailing list that they suggest you create, because I haven’t gotten that far yet. At the moment, I’m providing links to a password-protected Tumblr page for rewards, and have taken their Excel files to create a mailing list which I’ll end up using at the end of it all if I can’t attach an e-pub file of some sort.

Other rewards of a physical nature are sent to addresses which you can collect via the above-mentioned finalized mailing list they suggest doing shortly before you’re ready to send everything out.

Except for international patrons, shipping appears to be assumed to be included in the patronage reward level, so bear that in mind when setting reward levels.

Are there deadlines for writing/producing these?

Only those you set yourself. Probably adding an extra month to any deadline you think you might actually make is smart. She said, having not done that. :)

The Numbers Game

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Readers often ask me where they should buy books from, whether I get the same cut from an audio or e-book as a physical copy, and when they should buy a book, because they are concerned with giving me the best deal, and sometimes with what it might take to push me into bestseller numbers. So I asked my editor about some things, such as:

There is a rumor that best-seller lists don’t count books that are sold early, only the ones that are sold in the official week of release. This is a question of some relevance, because my books are almost always on the shelves two weeks before release date. So: does it matter to the lists?

And the answer is yes and no. Almost everybody has to deal with the same soft release problem that I get (a hard release is like Harry Potter got: you were not gonna get that book before midnight the day it was supposed to come out). The NYT apparently aggregates the numbers/momentum over the first weeks of release, whereas USA Today evidently only counts books sold from the week of release (though if you buy it on the Sunday when it’s supposed to come out on Tuesday, that counts as the release week).

We looked at some of my numbers with some of the Walker Papers and concluded that there are enough early sales that it *could* affect my ability to get onto some lists. So ideally? Really, really ideally? My readers would torture themselves and not buy the book until the actual release day, and then everybody go out at once and buy it immediately. This, however, is asking a lot of readers, and I can’t corral everybody and release them all at once. :)

There is also a rumor that Amazon’s numbers don’t count toward any lists. That one is apparently more true than not, though apparently Amazon falls on and off in usage for the lists depending on how willing they are to release their numbers, which varies.

B&N.com, however, *does* count toward list numbers.

Amazon also *always* ships early unless it’s a hard release date. I don’t know if B&N does, but I gather B&N aggregates the numbers shipped anyway and lists them on release day/week. So–without biting a hand that feeds me–it’s probably of more use (not just me, but to any author you like) for readers to pre-order through B&N.com instead of Amazon*.

Now, all that aside, here’s the other vicious truth: I’d really need literally everybody who buys my books to buy them in the first week/month of release in order to have any hope of making seriously big numbers. I have wonderful, loyal readers who have given me an amazing career and have kept my books on the shelves for a long life, which is hugely, hugely important to continuing to do this for a living, but if I want to level up to the best seller lists**, something has to change.

Possibly what has to change is I have to write something different which catches fire, but that’s very hard to predict. :) In the meantime, though, the best I can probably do is hope to get something going that leads into a big splash for the final book of the Walker Papers.

Because we’re on the downward slope here, guys. There are nine books planned for the series, and the timeline is pretty much hell bent for leather from the start of SPIRIT DANCES all the way through to the end of book 9. It’s probably too late to rack up some kind of magic momentum for RAVEN CALLS, since it’s out in four weeks, but I (we, if I assume you’re in this with me) have two books after that to try to hit it out of the park.

*This is not a statement intended to make people with Kindles feel bad. If you have a Kindle, for heaven’s sake, buy a Kindle book. I get the *royalties* the same no matter what; this post is just about whether there’s hope for me to reach a bestseller status over the next few years. :)

**And I do. I have always been in this game to–for lack of a better phrase–win it, and my personal definition of “win” is not “beat the other guy” but “get onto the national bestseller lists”. There is nothing wrong with being a mid-list writer and I’ll take it if that’s what I forever land at, but my completely-out-of-my-hands goal is to have that awkward first name “New York Times Bestselling Author” preceding the already-on-the-covers “CE Murphy”. :)

RAVEN CALLS arrives!

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This part never gets old. :)

This part never gets old. :)

A particularly handsome model displays the new book. :)

Mama's New Book!

I’ll pick 3 random commenters to send a copy of RAVEN CALLS to. That’s 3 on mizkit.com & 3 on mizkit.livejournal.com, just so that’s clear. :) And hell, I’ll be doing this on cemurphy.net, Twitter, Facebook and G+, too, so if you’re very thorough you can have up to 6 chances to win a book, I suppose. :)

And oh, the spot varnish on this one is AWESOME. AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME!

RAVEN CALLS teaser posted!

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RAVEN CALLS, book 7 of the Walker Papers, is due out in March! I’ve finally posted a lil’ teaser for it, so here you go! Enjoy!

-Catie

Raven Calls front cover SUNDAY, MARCH 19, 9:53 A.M.

The werewolf bite on my forearm itched.

Itching was wrong. It wasn’t old enough to itch. It should hurt like the dickens, because I’d obtained it maybe six hours earlier. Instead it itched like it was a two-week-old injury, well on the way to healing.

Only I was quite sure it wasn’t healing. For one thing, I kept peeking at it, and it was still a big nasty slashy bite that oozed blood when the bandages were loosened. For another thing, my stock in trade was healing. Fourteen months, two weeks and three days ago—but who was counting—I had been stabbed through the chest. A smart-ass coyote—kinda my spirit guide—had given me a choice between dying or becoming a shaman. Even for someone with no use for the esoteric, like I’d been, it hadn’t been much of a choice. So now, nearly fifteen months on, a bite on my forearm was something I really should be able to deal with.

And it wasn’t that I hadn’t tried healing it, because I had. Magic slid off like oil and water, or possibly more like oil and gashed flesh, if oil slid off gashed flesh, which I assumed it did but didn’t want to actually find out. Either way, the magic wasn’t working. Normally that would be a bad sign, but my talent had taken both a beating and a boosting in the past twenty-four hours, and wasn’t behaving. It reacted explosively when I tried using it, and I didn’t want to explode my arm. So I was getting on a plane with absolutely no notice and flying to Ireland, because I’d had a vision of the woman who had turned werewolves from slavering beasties 100% of the time into part-time monsters, and in my vision, she’d been in Ireland. I figured if anybody could keep me human, it had to be the woman who’d bound the wolves to the moon’s cycle.

That’s what I was telling myself, anyway, because it was slightly better than a full-on panic attack in the middle of the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

Read more!

Crowdfunding: “No Dominion”

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It’s that time of year again: The Rose & Bay Crowdfunding Award is open for nominations, and part of the process is making certain nominees have a landing page for people to go read about their crowdfunding efforts in 2011. I’ll be doing two landing pages for 2011: the “No Dominion” Kickstarter campaign, and the Old Races Short Story Project.

First up: “No Dominion”!

Project Proposal: I set out with a goal to raise $4000 through Kickstarter.com to fund the writing of a Walker Papers tie-in novella about Gary Muldoon, Joanne Walker’s septuagenarian sidekick:

NO DOMINION Recently widowed after nearly fifty years of marriage, Gary Muldoon had given up on adventure. Then shaman Joanne Walker climbed into the back seat of his cab, and since then, Gary has trifled with gods, met mystics, slain zombies and ridden with the Wild Hunt.

But now he must leave Joanne’s side to face a battle only he can win. Because as their long battle against a dark magic-user races toward its climax, it becomes clear that it was not illness that took Annie’s life, but their enemy’s long and deadly touch.

Though lovers be lost, love shall not…

     …AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION.

Project Conclusion: Over 500 patrons contributed over $20,500 to the “No Dominion” campaign, earning them the following:

3 novellas
5 short stories
3 chapters of a book that doesn’t exist
& 1 CE Murphy photographic calendar

…which, frankly, was rather more than I expected. :)

Proof of Fiction Committed: There are two pieces of free fiction associated with the “No Dominion” campaign. Neither is actually from the “No Dominion” novella, because that novella begins in the middle of RAVEN CALLS, the 7th book of the Walker Papers series, which isn’t due out until March 2012, and I didn’t want to spoil anything. Instead, I’m offering up the following:

Magic Hath An Element, the first chapters of URBAN SHAMAN, as seen through Gary’s eyes instead of Joanne’s, and Forgotten But By A Few, the first “No Dominion” campaign short story.

Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Happy New Year!

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Today is Gary Muldoon’s 80th birthday. Kyle Cassidy and “No Dominion” cover model Charles “The Hunk” Summerfield had such a great time with the “No Dominion” cover shoot that they stole off to get another couple pictures of Gary on Christmas Eve:

Happy New Year Gary!

Happy Birthday, Gary, and Happy New Year to the world!

“Easy Pickings” PDF for sale now!

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Most of a year ago Faith Hunter and I decided to write a crossover novella with our two main characters, Joanne Walker and Jane Yellowrock. We thought we’d have it done this past summer, but, um, we didn’t.

But now it’s done! And now it’s available here, on Amazon, and soon on B&N.com!

Easy Pickings Two heroines. Two magics.

One world.

There’s nowhere in America like the Big Easy. Just ask Jane Yellowrock, shapeshifting vampire killer, whose hunting grounds run the length and breadth of the Bayou.

Just ask Joanne Walker, whose shamanic magic has drawn her to the heart of American Weird.

But it’s not Joanne’s world, and it isn’t Jane’s either. In a New Orleans where Katrina never hit and supposedly-dead vampires stalk the streets, Jane and Jo have to find and defeat the magic that brought them there–or they just might find themselves…

EASY PICKINGS
fan fiction by the authors themselves!

Read the teaser and


PLEASE NOTE: You will be given the option to “return to open at mizkit dot com” once you’ve paid! Click through on that, because that’s what will bring you to the download page! So don’t skip out of Paypal until you do so through that link! Otherwise you won’t get your story, and I won’t know that! I’ll think you’re out there happy as a fish in water, reading all about Jane and Jo’s adventures, when instead you’ll be sniffling in your tea! Don’t let that happen!

Easy Pickings!

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We’re verging on finally releasing “Easy Pickings” into the wild! All we have to do is, um, learn how to upload it to Amazon and other places. Which actually I have zero idea of how to do. It can’t be that hard, can it? (…although it may be less intuitive than I think it should be. Um.)

Right. Anyway! We’re planning to release it on the 15th, and in the meantime, here’s the cover!

Easy Pickings