From RadioNovel to Audible: Timothy M. Buchanan's The Apprentice

We love celebrating the people who use RadioNovel, and this is a big one.

Timothy M. Buchanan has published The Apprentice: The Courage to Seek, Book One of The Apprentice Trilogy, as an audiobook produced with RadioNovel. It is now live on Audible and Kobo, and it is the first book made with RadioNovel to get there.

Listen to it

• The Apprentice on Audible
• The Apprentice on Kobo

About the books

Timothy writes family-friendly books for tweens and teens. His trilogy is available in print from Amazon, IngramSpark, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and Bookshop.org, and libraries can order it through Ingram. You can browse the whole series at timothymbuchanan.com/author.

If you listen to the sample, a review on Audible or Kobo goes a long way for an indie author.

In his words

"RadioNovel was fast, fun to use, a powerful tool, and a real money saver from even self narrating an indie book."

Timothy M. Buchanan, author of The Apprentice Trilogy

Getting it ready for Audible

Timothy produced the narration with RadioNovel's voices, skipped the ambience, foley and music, and added his own theme music at the start and end of most chapters. Then came the part every audiobook author has to get through: meeting a distributor's technical requirements.

He ran into several problems and sent me careful notes on each one. Those notes turned into features within days:

• Studio room tone. AI voices don't have any, and perfectly silent gaps get files rejected. It took Timothy two days to figure out why. RadioNovel now adds room tone automatically, with adjustable silence at the start and end of each chapter (3 seconds by default).
• Distributor-ready audio. Finished audio now exports at 192 kbps constant bitrate, with presets for Authors Republic, ACX or your own custom settings. Normalization, peak limiting and control over long pauses are built in.
• Free opening and closing credits. Distributors need credits and a named narrator, and many authors get stuck on that. This was Timothy's idea. You can now generate opening credits, chapter introductions and closing credits from a short form, at no charge.
• Master Audio Settings. Adjust volume, pitch, EQ, echo and left-to-right placement for each character, the music, the ambience and the sound effects.

On October 12 he recompiled every chapter with the new tools, and the Authors Republic audio review passed. He told me the new process saved him hours, if not days, of work. The full review approved the book the next day, and retailers began picking it up. Audible and Kobo are the first two.

Why this matters

Audible holds audio to a high standard, so seeing a RadioNovel production live there is a milestone for us. It is also the reason RadioNovel exists. A full-cast audio drama has traditionally needed a studio, a director and a cast of voice actors, so budget decided whose stories got told this way. We want that door open to anyone who has written something worth hearing. With the distributor tools added, RadioNovel now takes an author from manuscript to market without needing to become an audio engineer along the way.

Congratulations, Timothy, and thank you for the feedback along the way. It made RadioNovel better for every author who comes after you.

Have you produced a book with RadioNovel? I'd love to hear about it and celebrate it here. Send me a note.