45 hours of recording time
to produce a 20-hour audiobook

Blazing Reader,

I've finished recording the audiobook version of Much Ado About Corona. It took about three weeks of studio recording. Three hours a day. Five days a week. About 45 hours of recording time to produce a 20-hour audiobook.

Now I'm slowly proofing all 113 chapters, finding all the spots where I misread a word or didn't like how something sounded. There's probably still another six to nine more hours of time behind the mic rerecording this growing list of corrections.

Despite having edited and re-read this 500-page novel twenty or more times, so many scenes in Much Ado About Corona still send shivers down my spine. There are moments I can't believe I wrote it.

And there are moments I can't believe the audiobook is almost done. I've been rehearsing for two years (the German songs it contains were the biggest stumbling block).

I included some clips and stories from the recording studio in the video I released last week. If you haven't seen it yet, you can watch it here. See my Winnie the Pooh technique for getting through three hours of recordings without burning out.

—John C.A. Manley

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.