Episode 147 - Writing for Audio with Kelly Simmons
August 16, 2022
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Kelly Simmons discusses WRITING FOR AUDIO. She talks about considerations for episodic content; defining goals for an audio project and measuring results against those goals; whether authors should narrate their own work; the physical and emotional costs of recording; and the fact that you don’t need to be a sound engineer to produce great audio content.
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Kelly Simmons is a former journalist, an advertising creative director, and the author of the novels Standing Still, The Bird House, One More Day, The Fifth of July, Where She Went, and Not My Boy. She teaches in the Drexel University MFA program, and is a member of Women Fiction Writers Association, Tall Poppy Writers, and The Liars Club, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping fledgling novelists. Additionally, she co-helms the weekly writers podcast “Liars Club Oddcast.” And she was born the same day as Dorothy Parker. Coincidence? She thinks not.
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"Having done a lot of it myself, I think that certain authors could certainly do this very same thing themselves and release it as their own serial podcast. I just want to tell people, if I can record in GarageBand, you can record in GarageBand. I am certainly not a computer girl. So honest to God if I can do it, and it sounded good in my home, with my microphone, I really think that anyone can. I really do." —Kelly Simmons
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Links
Kelly's Links:
kellysimmonsbooks.com
instagram.com/kellyasimmons
twitter.com/kellysimmons
Episode 028 - Writing the Killer Query with Kelly Simmons
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
kellysimmonsbooks.com
instagram.com/kellyasimmons
twitter.com/kellysimmons
Episode 028 - Writing the Killer Query with Kelly Simmons
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Kelly Simmons. Hey Kelly, how are you doing?
[00:00:04] Kelly: Hi, how are you?
[00:00:06] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Kelly Simmons is a former journalist and advertising creative director and the author of the novels "Standing Still," "The Birdhouse," "One More Day," "The Fifth of July," "Where She Went," and "Not My Boy."
She teaches in the Drexel University MFA program and is a member of the Women in Fiction Writers Association, Tall Poppy Writers, and The Liars Club, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping fledgling novelists. Additionally, she co-helms the weekly writers podcast, Liars Club Oddcast. And she was born on the same day as Dorothy Parker. Coincidence? She thinks not. And Kelly had also joined me way back in episode 28, "Writing the Killer Query."
The Innovative Way to Share Content
[00:00:46] Matty: And so I had come upon a new project that Kelly's working on and I'm going to frame this conversation up as innovative ways of sharing your content, although perhaps by the time we get done, there will be a different title for the episode that will occur to me. But it is an audio series. And so Kelly, I'm just going to turn it over to you and ask you to describe this innovative way you found to share content.
[00:01:09] Kelly: Okay. Well, it's such kind of a new field that the language for what it is, is not super clear. Like depending on what your frame of reference is and where you live, you might call it a different thing. In Hollywood, they're calling it an audio drama. And I don't think of it that way at all. I started calling it a serial fiction podcast because that is what it is. It's a miniature podcast, and it tells a serial story, and it's fiction. It's not true crime.
You know, depending on your listening habits, your familiarity with this might be complete, or it might be like, what? But it's basically, instead of a true story that spills out in a serial way across a podcast, which I think everyone is familiar with, it is a fiction story, chopped up in a serial way. But this is a very short one. So the episodes are extremely short. You can really buzz through them super quickly in a quick walk. That part of it is different.
It definitely was a challenge for sure. And it was new territory for me and for a lot of people. There aren't a lot of versions of what I did, and I guess I should tell you the title, it's called "Open the Window" and it's on Speak.Studio. There you go.
[00:02:28] Matty: Is "Open the Window" something that you wrote right from the get-go with the idea that it would be not an audio drama.
Why Doesn't She Like “Audio Drama”?
[00:02:33] Matty: First of all, tell me why you don't like audio drama.
I think it's highfalutin, and it makes it seem like it is longer and grander and bigger in scope than what I did was. Because it is like a podcast. It is a podcast. You subscribe to it, it drops every week, like a podcast. It's not the same as a Netflix video drama, in that it's not full of actors. Or it could be, but mine isn't. I felt like it had more in common with the podcast than with a video drama.
Was Podcast the Intended Format from the Start?
[00:03:09] Matty: So with that background, did you go into this knowing that that's how you wanted to share that content?
[00:03:15] Kelly: Yeah, I did not have content that I adapted for it. I worked with the studio and pitched them an idea that was written for the type of thing that it was and created for that reason. I didn't take a short story or a novella and adapt it. Although a person certainly could do that, certainly could do that if they paid attention and put their mind to it, but I did not do that. I wrote it specifically to be listened to in short bursts for that network in the way that they intended to drop it.
How Did the Idea Come About?
And did you approach them with the idea first? Is it something that you had a connection and you were in conversation with them? How did that come about?
[00:03:56] Kelly: The way that it came about was that Tall Poppy Writers, the author group I'm part of, had a partnership with this production company / studio, Speak.Studio, and they had a vision, for a podcasting network that would be eventually more like Netflix than just like a very narrow, oh, we have lots of shows specializing in writers, or we have lots of shows specializing in this. So they had a broader vision, and they were accepting pitches from our group.
So I came up with the idea and the type, you know, short, something that a busy person could get through super quickly and pitched it to them and they really liked it. And then I wrote a sample and then they really, really liked it. And then the serious discussions began. That's how it came about.
But having gone through the whole thing now, my takeaway was, anybody could do this, right? Anybody could figure this out and do this and create content and share it that way and have it enjoyed that way.
The "Open the Window" Pitch
[00:05:00] Matty: I'm going to ask you to describe how you pitched it, and also as a way of sharing with the viewers and listeners, what "Open the Window" was about. So how did you pitch it to Speak.Studio?
Well, what I had observed was that the other types of fiction podcasts that I had listened to and experienced were all in slightly different genres than what I write in. I write women's fiction with suspense. And most of the podcasts that I had experienced were more science fiction or more magical or true crime or crime mystery, like really crime stories, which is darker and deeper usually than what I write. And they tended to be large scale productions with lots of sound effects and music and actors involved. So they were truly more of an audio drama.
[00:05:54] Kelly: What I had in mind was something more akin to women's fiction suspense novels that I read and that I write, which tend to be oftentimes in first person, unreliable narrator, really narrow, really narrow and really intimate, because it was one person talking to you rather than this full-scale audio play with all of these different actors.
So I envisioned something very narrow and very small and that I knew that I could write. So that's what I pitched to them, a story about one woman who has had a very disturbing incident from her past that comes back to haunt her in her young adult life. And it unspools into a crime that may or may not have been committed and that she may or may not be able to solve.
And I envisioned it as being super sound specific and it being a true sound story written for an environment where you take it in via sound. Her memory from childhood and the trauma from childhood is all about sound, and the way that she goes about trying to solve it is also through sound.
[00:07:05] Kelly: So to me, that was what made it appropriate for the podcast format rather than a novel, an adapted novel, which is so visual and also multisensory in many ways, but not necessarily as cognizant of sound.
The Specifications for "Open the Window"
[00:07:20] Matty: When you were formulating the story, did the studio provide you with specs like, we want it to be X number of episodes, and each should be a certain length of time, or did you come up with that?
I had a vision that I talked to them about, and we agreed to do a certain number of episodes and that they would be around 10 minutes in length. So they agreed with that concept, and we locked in on 10 episodes. So yes, I had those parameters and that was part of the challenge, for sure. Although they also said they didn't care if you go over 10 or you go under 10, as long as it's around 10, we just wanted them to be short. It's very hard to really nail the exact time. So yes, I had the parameters and that was part of the challenge for sure.
Considerations for Episodic Content
[00:08:07] Matty: And how did you find that writing within those parameters that you had largely come up with was the same or different from writing within a novel format, like in terms of the pacing of the story or having cliff hangers where you wanted to have cliff hangers?
Yep, it was wildly different and much closer to my other career in advertising where you always have parameters, but they're very short. They're 60 seconds, 30 seconds, 15 seconds, 7 seconds. And sometimes you go to 90 seconds, but those are crafted that way to be very tight and very individualized. I think I had some experience from doing that, but I've certainly never written in the 10-minute space. And it took some doing, because I didn't write it all the way through and then break it up. I wrote it piece by piece, which is also different. It's like writing connected short stories, I would guess, which I had never done. And I would imagine if someone knew how to do that, they'd be very well suited to doing this.
[00:09:07] Matty: It is interesting to think about these kinds of serial things, because every time I start a show that I love, most of the time I'm watching it months, if not years after its run. And so if I start it and love it, I can blast right through. I just started "Black Bird" on Apple TV and remembered after I got through the two episodes that were already out there, I remembered why I usually wait, because I wanted to see the third episode and now, I had to wait a week.
When you were thinking through how people would be consuming this, did you think through both the experience of someone who was going to listen to an episode and then have to wait a week and the person who is going back to it, and binging through all of them, and if you weighed those, how did you weigh them?
[00:09:48] Kelly: Well, the answer to your question is yes, I had to think about both of those, but I also knew that their intention was, and they weren't a hundred percent sure if they were going to drop one a week or two a week, but they definitely wanted to have a dribble. And I also knew that a lot of people prefer to binge. So when I was marketing, I would occasionally say, oh, next episode drops, or you can subscribe and then wait to binge them all. Because I know that's how people are. And I know that sometimes you get angry when you have a cliff hanger, which is what drives you to the next one or drives you to want to wait. They don't want to wait. They don't want to wait a week. But I can't help that, that's the way the world works. So I just addressed the topic when I spoke to people about it. You had mentioned about how you would tell people, if you want to binge subscribe and then you can binge later. I don't think that this was the case for this series, but I can imagine it could be that someone can wait and listen to them as they come out or pay for listening to them all at once. It wasn't that case with “Open the Window," correct?
Goals of the Audio Project
[00:10:49] Kelly: No, no. The whole thing is free, but I know human behavior, right? The whole point of doing this wasn't to make money obviously, for me, anyway. I wasn't paid to do it. It was all done on spec, and anything that comes of it will be in the future. It was done for the challenge and for the fun of it and to write something different and to have something else for my readers to enjoy in between books. So it was no different to me psychologically than writing an essay or writing an article or a short story, to put up for free on Amazon, the other things that writers do to keep their readers happy and engaged and to interact. It was that type of thing for me, but a lot more work, a lot more work.
[00:11:39] Matty: So from a business point of view, were you mainly hoping that this would lead people to your novels?
Yes and no. I did understand that it was possible but unlikely, because it's a completely different mindset, and people who love, love, love, love, love podcasts, there's a lot of people who do, doesn't always completely overlap with people that love fiction. There is some overlap, there are definitely women that are in book clubs and that love both and are big audio listeners. And I have plenty of audio books to offer those people, too. So I knew there was some overlap. But there's also a lot of people that really don't read books, that love podcasts.
And the studio was somewhat understanding of that desire. It's not like there was a lot of promotion that led people to my novels. Do you know what I mean? Somebody'd have to want to look right? There wasn't a lot of cross-promotion between that world and this world.
But it was more to pick up some new people and to please the people that are already reading, to think, oh, oh gosh, that was good. I haven't read, I haven't read all of her novels, I forgot, like it was more of that type of thing. And eventually, to potentially do another one to build a little audience, and to get some feelers out, frankly, on the West Coast. It's a West Coast company, it's a Hollywood production studio, with a lot of different contacts and any eyeballs on their site towards me is not a bad thing. That was part of the calculus also.
The Production and Narration
[00:13:11] Matty: So talk a little bit about the production because you not only wrote it, you narrated it and you have a lovely voice and a lovely ability to portray it. Not just a straight read, a reasonable amount of acting clearly went into it. So was that something that you knew from the start you were going to be narrating? Was that something that you negotiated with the studio?
[00:13:31] Kelly: Well, let's put it this way. I thank you for complimenting me, but it was interesting because at the beginning I thought that there might be a single actor involved. I wanted to keep it very small and very doable for them, because they were still growing and starting out and even though they were extremely enthusiastic and extremely into it at every juncture, it took a long time to happen. And sometimes things that cost money take even longer to happen than things that don't cost money. So I thought perhaps the production elements might be an impediment, and I did offer that I could potentially narrate it. It was an either-or situation.
And I think, although they were way too nice to say this because they are really nice people, that they didn't believe that I could do it. And most people don't. I mean, just sitting here, listening to me talk to you, I think that I'm very, very casual and very offhand and pay no attention to what I sound like when I'm talking to a person. I don't think that I come across to anyone who knows me or even doesn't know me as someone capable of narrating something.
But when I do narrate something, which I have some experience with from working in advertising and I actually was in the union and did voiceovers. When I am paying attention and I know what I've written and I've written it myself, I turn into a different person. So I think that the studio was shocked.
Should Authors Narrate Their Own Works?
First, I wrote the first chapter after the pitch, and they loved the words on the page. And then all the discussion about how we might do it unfolded, and then time elapsed. And then, when I offered to record one for them, I think they were very relieved. I think they wanted an audition, honestly. Because they'd been talking to me on Google Hangouts, and I'm just like, you know, I’m just myself, like with my stupid Midwestern twang. I didn't think for one second that they thought I would be any good at it. And it's not that I'm great at it, but I'm better than anyone thinks I would be.
[00:15:33] Matty: Well, I think that people have a different expectation when a non-actor author is reading their own work, because I think the attraction there is you're hearing it exactly the way the author heard it in his or her mind, as opposed to a performance. I think that when people are listening to an audiobook, let's say that's narrated by a professional narrator and that's what they do, then what they're looking for is a performance would like the different accents and whole nine yards. But I think that the expectation, at least I have, when the author is narrating, it is a little bit different. I'm listening for the authenticity of the story, not the performance of the story.
[00:16:10] Kelly: Right. Well, that's a nice way to put it too. But we've all as authors who've had our audiobooks, even though we get to choose the people that narrate and we get to cast them, you still are like this when you listen, because you're like, they're going to read something wrong. They're going to emphasize something in a different way than the author heard it or intended. So at least when you are reading, you are in control of what you emphasize and the point you want to make, the intention is there. And I think that's the real difference.
But we've also all heard authors at readings really mangle their own work or not give it maybe even mangle. Isn't the right word, but really not give their words, justice. Some people are not good at it. And some very famous authors are not good at it. They don't read their own work well. So it was fraught in a number of ways. But one thing I knew it would be successful at was my intention would be clear, regardless of what the production value sounded like, or if my Midwestern twang did not appeal to someone. I knew that my intention would be right.
[00:17:15] Matty: Do you think the fact that it's in first person influenced the appropriateness of you as the author reading it either way? Might you have written it in third person if another narrator had read it or did the fact that it was in first person encourage you to press for you reading it?
[00:17:32] Kelly: I think that I would never have pitched it or had the faith that I could maybe do it if it had not been in first person. Because I think that it locked it in terms of making sense. I think third person is loftier and a little more removed and a little, just a little elevated dramatically, generally, in a way that I'm not sure I could have pulled off. I would have to write around my voice, which is another point of view. I knew how to write around what I was capable of, and several times I had to stop myself and rewrite because I missed a few spots. It's like, okay, somebody else could have handled that sentence, but not me. I accidentally found myself in a few tongue twisters in places like that.
[00:18:16] Matty: So I found this myself as I'm listening to, well, I mainly do this by having Siri read my books back to me as a final edit, but early on, I read them myself and there were a couple of tongue twisters, which I didn't worry about because at the time I wasn't focused on audio. And then later I realized that a tongue twister out loud can also kind of be a tongue twister visually too, if that makes sense.
[00:18:41] Kelly: Yeah, you don't see them coming the same way when you're not reading. Yeah. When you're writing, it doesn't appear the same way.
Is it Worth Reading Your Work Out Loud?
Are you working on something now, a piece of fiction that you would apply that more audio filter to?
[00:18:56] Kelly: Well, I know some authors read all of their work out loud and that's one of the final steps of the editing process for them because they catch errors, and they catch like rhythm changes. And I think that's a really interesting thing to do, but that is a really time consuming thing to do.
However, I think from all my years of writing radio commercials and all of that, I think I'm just a little bit naturally better at that, and I don't necessarily have to do it, but having done this now and having caught myself, it was a little scary. But yeah, I don't do that because of time, but I think that it's helpful for a lot of authors to do that for sure.
The Technical Approach and Mechanics
[00:19:32] Matty: And can you talk a little bit about the technical approach, the time it took, just the mechanics of it a bit?
[00:19:39] Kelly: Yeah, I already knew from my other podcast and from other recordings that I had to do for clients during the pandemic, when I had to do some voiceovers or do a few other things, I knew the best place in my house to do the recording and it was a surprising place. I knew the quietest place and the best place to do it. And again, it was done in the pandemic, so I couldn't go to a recording studio. I have friends who have them in their homes, I couldn't borrow something. I couldn't barter. So I knew the right space.
And for those that don't know, the right space is usually pretty protected, like sometimes in the core of the house, not always on an outside wall, because of the outside noises. Windows can be a problem; you need a lot of soft things in the space. Drapes, carpet. People record in their closets sometimes because there's a lot of soft things around them, and sometimes those closets are in the interior of a home. I had a space like that, but I also bought an expensive microphone. And that was my only concession to technology, was the microphone.
What was the microphone that you got?
I don't know the brand, but the studio recommended it to me, and I ponied up the money and bought the microphone. And of course, am I using it now? Do I ever use it? No, no, I use it when I record for the podcast, that's it.
[00:20:57] Matty: Yeah, and how long did it take you? Let's say for every 10-minute episode, how long did you spend recording and whatever other work you had to do on it?
The Physical and Emotional Cost of Recording
I did it in three recording sessions, but I had to perfectly time each one because I didn't want it to happen when there was any possible distraction from the neighborhood. There was construction going on in the neighborhood, so I had to wait almost 10 days. I had a whole half a day blocked off to do it with stops and starts. For each one third chunk, I had a half a day blocked off. No appointments, unplugged the phone, made sure that no one was going to be coming to the house that I knew of.
[00:21:41] Kelly: But honestly, even a FedEx and a knock at the door to let you know that your package is there, it can get picked up. You just don't know. Your neighbor can have a bulldozer coming over to plant a tree. And I had a situation like that, and I found out from the neighbor that somebody was going to be there for 10 more days. So I had to move one of the recording sessions, went over there in a mask, like, hey, how long are you going to be working here? So there were some unexpected things. But the primary thing that I did not anticipate was how emotionally hard it was going to be, how mentally draining and how physically, we talked a little bit earlier before you started recording, about your chair and making noises and how when you do record, you're super aware of your earrings and your jewelry and like all the spaces in the room. I was so terrified of moving off mic, I wanted to be at the right exact distance from the mic, because I could hear the distance when I moved side to side. I wanted to stay steady and just stay in the zone, that my body would physically be so hunched and stiff. The opposite of moving and being dramatic and whatever, I was terrified of the sound differences.
So by the end of each session, I was sweating, and I was like in pain, like I was hunched like, like Guy Fieri eating his sandwich. I just had this posture situation going on. Like I just, instead of moving the mic up and leaning back, it was very physically difficult for me.
[00:23:18] Kelly: And I also was so nervous about it because I'm not a pro and it doesn't come naturally. So that took some doing too. So I didn't look forward to doing it. Once I did that and it happened, I was like, I don't even want to do the next pitch. I want to hire somebody.
Would She Consider Doing It Again?
So would you do it again? If you had an opportunity with that studio, it sounds like you had a good experience with them, would you do another one?
[00:23:42] Kelly: Well, we have a meeting tentatively scheduled for next week to do a postmortem and talk about the numbers and how it went. And I anticipate they may ask me to do another one because they were aware that I had another one queued up if they wanted it. So we'll have to see. I probably would do it again if they wanted one. But it's going to be hard, I have to psych myself up for it. It's not come as naturally to me as I would like it to.
The Exigences of Recording
[00:24:09] Matty: Well, I was going to say, if you did all 10 episodes in three half days, that's pretty impressive. Yeah. I would've guessed longer.
[00:24:18] Kelly: And it didn't, one of the last times didn't take, you know, I had an editor, right? So I had an editor and a small production team that I knew were editing it for me and allegedly, taking out the breaths and moving things around. But even then, even they did not do things exactly as I would've liked. When you work in advertising, you're very meticulous about that. I have a very sensitive ear, so I hear every breath that I wish had been edited out. I hear every pause that doesn't feel right, every place that needs another pause.
And again, part of this was the pandemic and the haste and the small team versus going back and forth, we weren't able to do.
Maybe the next time I would be more particular and take fewer breaks or take more breaks, and not rely on his editing so much. I could maybe be more meticulous in the chunks that I gave him to put together. I would probably do it slightly differently just to make it a little more smooth.
[00:25:18] Kelly: But yeah, most people said, oh, I imagined you doing them one at a time, like recording one, sending it off, recording one, sending them off. And I just felt like if I did that, my voice would not sound the same. And if someone was bingeing them, and I think you can tell a difference. I can tell the difference. I hear all the flaws. Like I can tell the difference between the sessions. Even though I did them in the same room, the same time of day so that my voice had the same quality, because I sound different at night. Like I sound terrible in the afternoon. They had to be all done in the morning. But if you do them all the same day, like within the same hour, that would be best.
I mean, you could never do that with a long podcast. You could never do it. if they were all half an hour, you could never do that. But because they're only 10 minutes, theoretically, 10 times 10, it should be doable, but I couldn't emotionally face that. That's just too much.
My voice would become so croaky after even one or two episodes. I think that I would have to spread them out.
[00:26:19] Kelly: Yeah. I had to drink a lot of water. I couldn't drink a lot of caffeine. I knew some of the tricks. But again, I'm not on Broadway. I don't know all the tricks and my voice isn't naturally mellifluous so it needs all the help that it can get.
Technology for Recording
[00:26:31] Matty: I think that even if those things are impediments to some people doing that kind of thing now, I think that the technology is getting such that it's going to take care of a lot of that for us. So I use Descript for editing my podcast, the audio and video of the podcast, and also creating the transcript, and they have a lot of really nice like automatic pause shortenings and taking out filler words and things like that.
[00:26:55] Kelly: They may have used those things too. I don't even know what they used, because they're an actual production company, so I imagine they had all kinds of stuff going on. But they did set me up, I recorded them all in GarageBand, but they worked with me to set all of the levels and everything. We did tests, and they prefixed a lot of my issues and tendencies by what they adjusted in those settings, in those recording settings. So there was some of that, but you're right, there are apps and techniques and all kinds of things to help the average person for sure.
[00:27:31] Matty: Well, I had tried recording one of my nonfiction books a couple of years ago and I finally gave up because none of the tips I could come up with got rid of the mouth noises. And it can't be that far away that there's just a filter you apply that removes mouth noises. And I think a couple of things like that will make the production process for people who want to be doing it themselves, and they don't have that kind of professional support that you did, feasible.
[00:27:57] Kelly: Especially when you're reading for days, there's millions of mouth noises. You're going to forgive one or two in a shorter thing, perhaps. And I'm a popper, I have sibilant Ss, I know this from doing voiceovers and having all those little things on the microphone to stop me. But again, I also had the value of an editor fixing every single thing, every word. I have a friend who recorded her own memoir over like seven or eight days. Just the thought of it reading all day, honestly. I think that the breath thing is interesting because when I was working on this audio book, I asked the question about breath noises in a Facebook group of narrators, and some of them said, yeah, you definitely want to take those out. But others of them said, if I'm listening to something and if I don't hear a breath noise, at some point I start getting worried and I'm like waiting, I'm waiting to a breath noise because if people were really tuned into it, especially if that's your profession, they almost started getting worried about the narrator. Like it's been four pages and she hasn't taken a breath.
She hasn't blinked.
Yeah, she hasn't blinked, exactly. Yeah, they obviously had a more naturalistic view of the editing process than I did, because they did leave some of that humanity in. And they did some things, they pulled some tricks that I didn't think that they could do. I was like, oh my God, that's gone, how did they do that? But again, it wasn't like I was shoulder to shoulder with this guy in LA, telling him do that, do this, do that. Ooh, that sounds terrible, use a different take. Yeah, it’s also interesting, in at least one of the recent episodes, I talked about Cristi, who's the guy who helps me with the podcast. Hi Cristi, because he's going to edit this.
Thank you for everything you do!
[00:29:40] Matty: And we've had lots of conversations about how much to clean up the audio and the video, because there was one episode in particular where the person was kind of struggling with figuring out how they wanted to word something and there were longer pauses, and he said, oh, I can clean all that up. And I was like, yeah, but if you clean it all up, then it's a smooth listening experience but it's not an engaging, listening experience because to me, the experience of having the person pause to think, and then maybe take different approaches to how they wanted to approach the topic, that was all part of the personality that I didn't want to lose.
[00:30:17] Kelly: And so I did that too. I did that a minute ago and I'm like, oh my God, Kelly, you are really grappling for a simple word right now. But the other thing that happened when I was recording, I would say, Stop, starting over. Like every time that I wanted to re-do something. So he had to listen for all of those throughout, edit them, and makes sure that it matched. And I'd send him a note, like, if it didn't match, let me know, and I'll rerecord.
But it always matched, and he caught every one. I was terrified sometimes that he wouldn't hear one. And when I would listen back, I would hear, Stop, start again. You know what I mean? So, you obviously have a rapport with the person that you're working with, and I didn't always have 24/7 access to talk to him.
Did the Experience Match the Goals?
When we've touched on what your goals were for this, to an extent introducing people to your books, but maybe not a huge amount of overlap, the West Coast connection. Now that you've had a little time that this has been out there, how do you feel the results that you're actually achieving match up? This is good pre-thinking for your postmortem that you're going to be holding with Speak.Studio.
[00:31:21] Kelly: Yeah, I am very curious to hear what they say in terms of how they feel about it and what they think next steps are. But my expectations were pretty reasonable, pretty low. And what I have gotten is a lot of positive feedback from people. I don't know if they're just being nice, but they're like, I can't imagine anyone other than you reading it, and it really felt real to me. That's what everyone said. It felt real. It felt like it was actually happening. It did not even feel like fiction.
So I got a lot of positive feedback from people who have listened to it, which is gratifying because you know how it is. You publish a book a year or a book every year and a half. And then you get reviews and whatever, but in the middle, in that long dark sea of working, it's not like somebody saying, hey, you're a good writer or hey, I love that. Or you don't get those little hits of confidence from people. So it was nice to get positive feedback from people. So that was something I hadn't anticipated.
And the other thing I realized too, with more time, is that I really just wanted to do something new. I really wanted to try something different that sounded like fun. And from that standpoint, I feel like I really achieved my goal 100%, because it was different, it was difficult, but it was fun. Like, if you've never written a play or a screenplay, and you try it for the first time, just because you want to think it sounds like fun, and then it is.
So there was a looseness and a playfulness that I brought to it that I was like, there aren't that many things that can surprise you after you've been writing for a long time, and not many new things that seem like fun. A lot of new things sound like someone just wants something free out of you. There's a lot of ways to take advantage of writers and to wring content out of them. But this sounded like fun and doable and yet not easy, so I think I wanted the challenge. So that's a side goal.
How Did She Assess the Partnership with the Studio?
[00:33:22] Matty: And how did you decide that Speak.Studio was not on the bad side of wringing content out of an author? Like how did you weigh that? How did you assess that partnership?
I got to know the people behind it, and one of them was very well known to a close friend of mine. So they were vetted in terms of their intentions. And they have a very wonderful vision, and I was in on the ground floor, so they needed content. They wanted a partnership with writers to help provide the content. But they were being very discerning, because they got a lot of pitches that they turned down. There's a lot of podcasts out there. And you think, when you're coming up with ideas for them, a lot of them have been done, and a lot of them have been done well.
I felt like it was an opportunity for me as well as for them, it felt mutual. But I also know that as they grow and as more eyes are upon them, that could only be good for me. It didn't feel anything but mutual to me. And some of their other podcasts are also really well done, so I feel like I'm in good company, and we’ll see. But again, my expectations: low, low, low, low, low, low, low. And that helps, you know, if you want to be happy, lower your expectations is a great piece of advice.
Self-produced Audio is Not Only for Engineers
[00:34:44] Matty: Well, that's a great entree to the last question I want to ask, which is that if listeners and viewers of The Indy Author Podcast are intrigued by this, what would be a couple of tips you would say, if this is something you want to pursue, these are things to keep in mind, or if this is something to pursue, these are pitfalls you want to avoid?
As I said earlier, I really thought at the end that having done a lot of it myself and relying on them to some degree, but also doing a lot of it myself, I did think that certain authors could certainly do this very same thing themselves and release it as their own serial podcast. Because so many authors, they have some of the recording devices already. A lot of people have a microphone, right? A lot of people have a very great laptop and they're familiar with software, and they're computer savvy. So anyone with all of those things, some people already have a podcast, so they know what it takes to upload it and to share it.
[00:35:40] Kelly: And again, even if you don't, there are services that do that for you for very little money, honestly. The partners to find are it's pretty easy. And if you have those items already, I just want to tell people, if I can record in Garage Band, you can record in Garage Band. I'm more tech savvy than most people my age, but I am certainly not a computer girl. So honest to God, if I can do it, and it sounded good in my home, with my microphone, I really think that anyone can. I really do.
I know other author friends who do all the editing. I'm involved in another podcast and there's three of the writers in that podcast who can edit those podcasts, not just the engineer. I just don't want to do it because I'm lazy, because I'm lazy, and because I have very high standards, having worked with other editors all these years. I know it's doable. Even adding things in, music and soundtracks. If you can work an iMovie, and a lot of us can, I can do all that stuff. I could have done it if I really wanted to, and I'm an idiot. So honestly, that’s my takeaway. If I can do even half of it, you can do half of it.
[00:36:48] Kelly: And then my caveat would be to make sure, while you're writing, whatever you're doing, that the first word in your head is sound. Because you're painting pictures through sound. You're not taking your short story or novel and divvying it up and hoping for the best, because 9 times out of 10, you don't have sound at the forefront. So that would be my advice.
[00:37:14] Matty: Excellent. Well, Kelly, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. And as an appreciative listener of "Open the Window," it's so much fun to hear the backstory. And of course I recommend everybody go find it if they haven't already, and now you can binge through it because it's complete.
[00:37:27] Kelly: Yes, it's all there.
[00:37:29] Matty: Well, please let people know where they can find that and all you do online.
The podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. It's "Open the Window" from Speak.Studio and it's also on their website. I think it's Speak.Studio.com. There's another studio called Speak Studio, it's not that one. It's Speak.Studio. I hope you enjoy it if you do, and I hope it inspires other people to try new content because you know, it was fun. It honestly was fun. And I think it'll be fun for anybody, not just for a crazy person like me.
[00:37:58] Matty: Great. Thank you very much.
[00:38:00] Kelly: Thank you.
[00:00:04] Kelly: Hi, how are you?
[00:00:06] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Kelly Simmons is a former journalist and advertising creative director and the author of the novels "Standing Still," "The Birdhouse," "One More Day," "The Fifth of July," "Where She Went," and "Not My Boy."
She teaches in the Drexel University MFA program and is a member of the Women in Fiction Writers Association, Tall Poppy Writers, and The Liars Club, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping fledgling novelists. Additionally, she co-helms the weekly writers podcast, Liars Club Oddcast. And she was born on the same day as Dorothy Parker. Coincidence? She thinks not. And Kelly had also joined me way back in episode 28, "Writing the Killer Query."
The Innovative Way to Share Content
[00:00:46] Matty: And so I had come upon a new project that Kelly's working on and I'm going to frame this conversation up as innovative ways of sharing your content, although perhaps by the time we get done, there will be a different title for the episode that will occur to me. But it is an audio series. And so Kelly, I'm just going to turn it over to you and ask you to describe this innovative way you found to share content.
[00:01:09] Kelly: Okay. Well, it's such kind of a new field that the language for what it is, is not super clear. Like depending on what your frame of reference is and where you live, you might call it a different thing. In Hollywood, they're calling it an audio drama. And I don't think of it that way at all. I started calling it a serial fiction podcast because that is what it is. It's a miniature podcast, and it tells a serial story, and it's fiction. It's not true crime.
You know, depending on your listening habits, your familiarity with this might be complete, or it might be like, what? But it's basically, instead of a true story that spills out in a serial way across a podcast, which I think everyone is familiar with, it is a fiction story, chopped up in a serial way. But this is a very short one. So the episodes are extremely short. You can really buzz through them super quickly in a quick walk. That part of it is different.
It definitely was a challenge for sure. And it was new territory for me and for a lot of people. There aren't a lot of versions of what I did, and I guess I should tell you the title, it's called "Open the Window" and it's on Speak.Studio. There you go.
[00:02:28] Matty: Is "Open the Window" something that you wrote right from the get-go with the idea that it would be not an audio drama.
Why Doesn't She Like “Audio Drama”?
[00:02:33] Matty: First of all, tell me why you don't like audio drama.
I think it's highfalutin, and it makes it seem like it is longer and grander and bigger in scope than what I did was. Because it is like a podcast. It is a podcast. You subscribe to it, it drops every week, like a podcast. It's not the same as a Netflix video drama, in that it's not full of actors. Or it could be, but mine isn't. I felt like it had more in common with the podcast than with a video drama.
Was Podcast the Intended Format from the Start?
[00:03:09] Matty: So with that background, did you go into this knowing that that's how you wanted to share that content?
[00:03:15] Kelly: Yeah, I did not have content that I adapted for it. I worked with the studio and pitched them an idea that was written for the type of thing that it was and created for that reason. I didn't take a short story or a novella and adapt it. Although a person certainly could do that, certainly could do that if they paid attention and put their mind to it, but I did not do that. I wrote it specifically to be listened to in short bursts for that network in the way that they intended to drop it.
How Did the Idea Come About?
And did you approach them with the idea first? Is it something that you had a connection and you were in conversation with them? How did that come about?
[00:03:56] Kelly: The way that it came about was that Tall Poppy Writers, the author group I'm part of, had a partnership with this production company / studio, Speak.Studio, and they had a vision, for a podcasting network that would be eventually more like Netflix than just like a very narrow, oh, we have lots of shows specializing in writers, or we have lots of shows specializing in this. So they had a broader vision, and they were accepting pitches from our group.
So I came up with the idea and the type, you know, short, something that a busy person could get through super quickly and pitched it to them and they really liked it. And then I wrote a sample and then they really, really liked it. And then the serious discussions began. That's how it came about.
But having gone through the whole thing now, my takeaway was, anybody could do this, right? Anybody could figure this out and do this and create content and share it that way and have it enjoyed that way.
The "Open the Window" Pitch
[00:05:00] Matty: I'm going to ask you to describe how you pitched it, and also as a way of sharing with the viewers and listeners, what "Open the Window" was about. So how did you pitch it to Speak.Studio?
Well, what I had observed was that the other types of fiction podcasts that I had listened to and experienced were all in slightly different genres than what I write in. I write women's fiction with suspense. And most of the podcasts that I had experienced were more science fiction or more magical or true crime or crime mystery, like really crime stories, which is darker and deeper usually than what I write. And they tended to be large scale productions with lots of sound effects and music and actors involved. So they were truly more of an audio drama.
[00:05:54] Kelly: What I had in mind was something more akin to women's fiction suspense novels that I read and that I write, which tend to be oftentimes in first person, unreliable narrator, really narrow, really narrow and really intimate, because it was one person talking to you rather than this full-scale audio play with all of these different actors.
So I envisioned something very narrow and very small and that I knew that I could write. So that's what I pitched to them, a story about one woman who has had a very disturbing incident from her past that comes back to haunt her in her young adult life. And it unspools into a crime that may or may not have been committed and that she may or may not be able to solve.
And I envisioned it as being super sound specific and it being a true sound story written for an environment where you take it in via sound. Her memory from childhood and the trauma from childhood is all about sound, and the way that she goes about trying to solve it is also through sound.
[00:07:05] Kelly: So to me, that was what made it appropriate for the podcast format rather than a novel, an adapted novel, which is so visual and also multisensory in many ways, but not necessarily as cognizant of sound.
The Specifications for "Open the Window"
[00:07:20] Matty: When you were formulating the story, did the studio provide you with specs like, we want it to be X number of episodes, and each should be a certain length of time, or did you come up with that?
I had a vision that I talked to them about, and we agreed to do a certain number of episodes and that they would be around 10 minutes in length. So they agreed with that concept, and we locked in on 10 episodes. So yes, I had those parameters and that was part of the challenge, for sure. Although they also said they didn't care if you go over 10 or you go under 10, as long as it's around 10, we just wanted them to be short. It's very hard to really nail the exact time. So yes, I had the parameters and that was part of the challenge for sure.
Considerations for Episodic Content
[00:08:07] Matty: And how did you find that writing within those parameters that you had largely come up with was the same or different from writing within a novel format, like in terms of the pacing of the story or having cliff hangers where you wanted to have cliff hangers?
Yep, it was wildly different and much closer to my other career in advertising where you always have parameters, but they're very short. They're 60 seconds, 30 seconds, 15 seconds, 7 seconds. And sometimes you go to 90 seconds, but those are crafted that way to be very tight and very individualized. I think I had some experience from doing that, but I've certainly never written in the 10-minute space. And it took some doing, because I didn't write it all the way through and then break it up. I wrote it piece by piece, which is also different. It's like writing connected short stories, I would guess, which I had never done. And I would imagine if someone knew how to do that, they'd be very well suited to doing this.
[00:09:07] Matty: It is interesting to think about these kinds of serial things, because every time I start a show that I love, most of the time I'm watching it months, if not years after its run. And so if I start it and love it, I can blast right through. I just started "Black Bird" on Apple TV and remembered after I got through the two episodes that were already out there, I remembered why I usually wait, because I wanted to see the third episode and now, I had to wait a week.
When you were thinking through how people would be consuming this, did you think through both the experience of someone who was going to listen to an episode and then have to wait a week and the person who is going back to it, and binging through all of them, and if you weighed those, how did you weigh them?
[00:09:48] Kelly: Well, the answer to your question is yes, I had to think about both of those, but I also knew that their intention was, and they weren't a hundred percent sure if they were going to drop one a week or two a week, but they definitely wanted to have a dribble. And I also knew that a lot of people prefer to binge. So when I was marketing, I would occasionally say, oh, next episode drops, or you can subscribe and then wait to binge them all. Because I know that's how people are. And I know that sometimes you get angry when you have a cliff hanger, which is what drives you to the next one or drives you to want to wait. They don't want to wait. They don't want to wait a week. But I can't help that, that's the way the world works. So I just addressed the topic when I spoke to people about it. You had mentioned about how you would tell people, if you want to binge subscribe and then you can binge later. I don't think that this was the case for this series, but I can imagine it could be that someone can wait and listen to them as they come out or pay for listening to them all at once. It wasn't that case with “Open the Window," correct?
Goals of the Audio Project
[00:10:49] Kelly: No, no. The whole thing is free, but I know human behavior, right? The whole point of doing this wasn't to make money obviously, for me, anyway. I wasn't paid to do it. It was all done on spec, and anything that comes of it will be in the future. It was done for the challenge and for the fun of it and to write something different and to have something else for my readers to enjoy in between books. So it was no different to me psychologically than writing an essay or writing an article or a short story, to put up for free on Amazon, the other things that writers do to keep their readers happy and engaged and to interact. It was that type of thing for me, but a lot more work, a lot more work.
[00:11:39] Matty: So from a business point of view, were you mainly hoping that this would lead people to your novels?
Yes and no. I did understand that it was possible but unlikely, because it's a completely different mindset, and people who love, love, love, love, love podcasts, there's a lot of people who do, doesn't always completely overlap with people that love fiction. There is some overlap, there are definitely women that are in book clubs and that love both and are big audio listeners. And I have plenty of audio books to offer those people, too. So I knew there was some overlap. But there's also a lot of people that really don't read books, that love podcasts.
And the studio was somewhat understanding of that desire. It's not like there was a lot of promotion that led people to my novels. Do you know what I mean? Somebody'd have to want to look right? There wasn't a lot of cross-promotion between that world and this world.
But it was more to pick up some new people and to please the people that are already reading, to think, oh, oh gosh, that was good. I haven't read, I haven't read all of her novels, I forgot, like it was more of that type of thing. And eventually, to potentially do another one to build a little audience, and to get some feelers out, frankly, on the West Coast. It's a West Coast company, it's a Hollywood production studio, with a lot of different contacts and any eyeballs on their site towards me is not a bad thing. That was part of the calculus also.
The Production and Narration
[00:13:11] Matty: So talk a little bit about the production because you not only wrote it, you narrated it and you have a lovely voice and a lovely ability to portray it. Not just a straight read, a reasonable amount of acting clearly went into it. So was that something that you knew from the start you were going to be narrating? Was that something that you negotiated with the studio?
[00:13:31] Kelly: Well, let's put it this way. I thank you for complimenting me, but it was interesting because at the beginning I thought that there might be a single actor involved. I wanted to keep it very small and very doable for them, because they were still growing and starting out and even though they were extremely enthusiastic and extremely into it at every juncture, it took a long time to happen. And sometimes things that cost money take even longer to happen than things that don't cost money. So I thought perhaps the production elements might be an impediment, and I did offer that I could potentially narrate it. It was an either-or situation.
And I think, although they were way too nice to say this because they are really nice people, that they didn't believe that I could do it. And most people don't. I mean, just sitting here, listening to me talk to you, I think that I'm very, very casual and very offhand and pay no attention to what I sound like when I'm talking to a person. I don't think that I come across to anyone who knows me or even doesn't know me as someone capable of narrating something.
But when I do narrate something, which I have some experience with from working in advertising and I actually was in the union and did voiceovers. When I am paying attention and I know what I've written and I've written it myself, I turn into a different person. So I think that the studio was shocked.
Should Authors Narrate Their Own Works?
First, I wrote the first chapter after the pitch, and they loved the words on the page. And then all the discussion about how we might do it unfolded, and then time elapsed. And then, when I offered to record one for them, I think they were very relieved. I think they wanted an audition, honestly. Because they'd been talking to me on Google Hangouts, and I'm just like, you know, I’m just myself, like with my stupid Midwestern twang. I didn't think for one second that they thought I would be any good at it. And it's not that I'm great at it, but I'm better than anyone thinks I would be.
[00:15:33] Matty: Well, I think that people have a different expectation when a non-actor author is reading their own work, because I think the attraction there is you're hearing it exactly the way the author heard it in his or her mind, as opposed to a performance. I think that when people are listening to an audiobook, let's say that's narrated by a professional narrator and that's what they do, then what they're looking for is a performance would like the different accents and whole nine yards. But I think that the expectation, at least I have, when the author is narrating, it is a little bit different. I'm listening for the authenticity of the story, not the performance of the story.
[00:16:10] Kelly: Right. Well, that's a nice way to put it too. But we've all as authors who've had our audiobooks, even though we get to choose the people that narrate and we get to cast them, you still are like this when you listen, because you're like, they're going to read something wrong. They're going to emphasize something in a different way than the author heard it or intended. So at least when you are reading, you are in control of what you emphasize and the point you want to make, the intention is there. And I think that's the real difference.
But we've also all heard authors at readings really mangle their own work or not give it maybe even mangle. Isn't the right word, but really not give their words, justice. Some people are not good at it. And some very famous authors are not good at it. They don't read their own work well. So it was fraught in a number of ways. But one thing I knew it would be successful at was my intention would be clear, regardless of what the production value sounded like, or if my Midwestern twang did not appeal to someone. I knew that my intention would be right.
[00:17:15] Matty: Do you think the fact that it's in first person influenced the appropriateness of you as the author reading it either way? Might you have written it in third person if another narrator had read it or did the fact that it was in first person encourage you to press for you reading it?
[00:17:32] Kelly: I think that I would never have pitched it or had the faith that I could maybe do it if it had not been in first person. Because I think that it locked it in terms of making sense. I think third person is loftier and a little more removed and a little, just a little elevated dramatically, generally, in a way that I'm not sure I could have pulled off. I would have to write around my voice, which is another point of view. I knew how to write around what I was capable of, and several times I had to stop myself and rewrite because I missed a few spots. It's like, okay, somebody else could have handled that sentence, but not me. I accidentally found myself in a few tongue twisters in places like that.
[00:18:16] Matty: So I found this myself as I'm listening to, well, I mainly do this by having Siri read my books back to me as a final edit, but early on, I read them myself and there were a couple of tongue twisters, which I didn't worry about because at the time I wasn't focused on audio. And then later I realized that a tongue twister out loud can also kind of be a tongue twister visually too, if that makes sense.
[00:18:41] Kelly: Yeah, you don't see them coming the same way when you're not reading. Yeah. When you're writing, it doesn't appear the same way.
Is it Worth Reading Your Work Out Loud?
Are you working on something now, a piece of fiction that you would apply that more audio filter to?
[00:18:56] Kelly: Well, I know some authors read all of their work out loud and that's one of the final steps of the editing process for them because they catch errors, and they catch like rhythm changes. And I think that's a really interesting thing to do, but that is a really time consuming thing to do.
However, I think from all my years of writing radio commercials and all of that, I think I'm just a little bit naturally better at that, and I don't necessarily have to do it, but having done this now and having caught myself, it was a little scary. But yeah, I don't do that because of time, but I think that it's helpful for a lot of authors to do that for sure.
The Technical Approach and Mechanics
[00:19:32] Matty: And can you talk a little bit about the technical approach, the time it took, just the mechanics of it a bit?
[00:19:39] Kelly: Yeah, I already knew from my other podcast and from other recordings that I had to do for clients during the pandemic, when I had to do some voiceovers or do a few other things, I knew the best place in my house to do the recording and it was a surprising place. I knew the quietest place and the best place to do it. And again, it was done in the pandemic, so I couldn't go to a recording studio. I have friends who have them in their homes, I couldn't borrow something. I couldn't barter. So I knew the right space.
And for those that don't know, the right space is usually pretty protected, like sometimes in the core of the house, not always on an outside wall, because of the outside noises. Windows can be a problem; you need a lot of soft things in the space. Drapes, carpet. People record in their closets sometimes because there's a lot of soft things around them, and sometimes those closets are in the interior of a home. I had a space like that, but I also bought an expensive microphone. And that was my only concession to technology, was the microphone.
What was the microphone that you got?
I don't know the brand, but the studio recommended it to me, and I ponied up the money and bought the microphone. And of course, am I using it now? Do I ever use it? No, no, I use it when I record for the podcast, that's it.
[00:20:57] Matty: Yeah, and how long did it take you? Let's say for every 10-minute episode, how long did you spend recording and whatever other work you had to do on it?
The Physical and Emotional Cost of Recording
I did it in three recording sessions, but I had to perfectly time each one because I didn't want it to happen when there was any possible distraction from the neighborhood. There was construction going on in the neighborhood, so I had to wait almost 10 days. I had a whole half a day blocked off to do it with stops and starts. For each one third chunk, I had a half a day blocked off. No appointments, unplugged the phone, made sure that no one was going to be coming to the house that I knew of.
[00:21:41] Kelly: But honestly, even a FedEx and a knock at the door to let you know that your package is there, it can get picked up. You just don't know. Your neighbor can have a bulldozer coming over to plant a tree. And I had a situation like that, and I found out from the neighbor that somebody was going to be there for 10 more days. So I had to move one of the recording sessions, went over there in a mask, like, hey, how long are you going to be working here? So there were some unexpected things. But the primary thing that I did not anticipate was how emotionally hard it was going to be, how mentally draining and how physically, we talked a little bit earlier before you started recording, about your chair and making noises and how when you do record, you're super aware of your earrings and your jewelry and like all the spaces in the room. I was so terrified of moving off mic, I wanted to be at the right exact distance from the mic, because I could hear the distance when I moved side to side. I wanted to stay steady and just stay in the zone, that my body would physically be so hunched and stiff. The opposite of moving and being dramatic and whatever, I was terrified of the sound differences.
So by the end of each session, I was sweating, and I was like in pain, like I was hunched like, like Guy Fieri eating his sandwich. I just had this posture situation going on. Like I just, instead of moving the mic up and leaning back, it was very physically difficult for me.
[00:23:18] Kelly: And I also was so nervous about it because I'm not a pro and it doesn't come naturally. So that took some doing too. So I didn't look forward to doing it. Once I did that and it happened, I was like, I don't even want to do the next pitch. I want to hire somebody.
Would She Consider Doing It Again?
So would you do it again? If you had an opportunity with that studio, it sounds like you had a good experience with them, would you do another one?
[00:23:42] Kelly: Well, we have a meeting tentatively scheduled for next week to do a postmortem and talk about the numbers and how it went. And I anticipate they may ask me to do another one because they were aware that I had another one queued up if they wanted it. So we'll have to see. I probably would do it again if they wanted one. But it's going to be hard, I have to psych myself up for it. It's not come as naturally to me as I would like it to.
The Exigences of Recording
[00:24:09] Matty: Well, I was going to say, if you did all 10 episodes in three half days, that's pretty impressive. Yeah. I would've guessed longer.
[00:24:18] Kelly: And it didn't, one of the last times didn't take, you know, I had an editor, right? So I had an editor and a small production team that I knew were editing it for me and allegedly, taking out the breaths and moving things around. But even then, even they did not do things exactly as I would've liked. When you work in advertising, you're very meticulous about that. I have a very sensitive ear, so I hear every breath that I wish had been edited out. I hear every pause that doesn't feel right, every place that needs another pause.
And again, part of this was the pandemic and the haste and the small team versus going back and forth, we weren't able to do.
Maybe the next time I would be more particular and take fewer breaks or take more breaks, and not rely on his editing so much. I could maybe be more meticulous in the chunks that I gave him to put together. I would probably do it slightly differently just to make it a little more smooth.
[00:25:18] Kelly: But yeah, most people said, oh, I imagined you doing them one at a time, like recording one, sending it off, recording one, sending them off. And I just felt like if I did that, my voice would not sound the same. And if someone was bingeing them, and I think you can tell a difference. I can tell the difference. I hear all the flaws. Like I can tell the difference between the sessions. Even though I did them in the same room, the same time of day so that my voice had the same quality, because I sound different at night. Like I sound terrible in the afternoon. They had to be all done in the morning. But if you do them all the same day, like within the same hour, that would be best.
I mean, you could never do that with a long podcast. You could never do it. if they were all half an hour, you could never do that. But because they're only 10 minutes, theoretically, 10 times 10, it should be doable, but I couldn't emotionally face that. That's just too much.
My voice would become so croaky after even one or two episodes. I think that I would have to spread them out.
[00:26:19] Kelly: Yeah. I had to drink a lot of water. I couldn't drink a lot of caffeine. I knew some of the tricks. But again, I'm not on Broadway. I don't know all the tricks and my voice isn't naturally mellifluous so it needs all the help that it can get.
Technology for Recording
[00:26:31] Matty: I think that even if those things are impediments to some people doing that kind of thing now, I think that the technology is getting such that it's going to take care of a lot of that for us. So I use Descript for editing my podcast, the audio and video of the podcast, and also creating the transcript, and they have a lot of really nice like automatic pause shortenings and taking out filler words and things like that.
[00:26:55] Kelly: They may have used those things too. I don't even know what they used, because they're an actual production company, so I imagine they had all kinds of stuff going on. But they did set me up, I recorded them all in GarageBand, but they worked with me to set all of the levels and everything. We did tests, and they prefixed a lot of my issues and tendencies by what they adjusted in those settings, in those recording settings. So there was some of that, but you're right, there are apps and techniques and all kinds of things to help the average person for sure.
[00:27:31] Matty: Well, I had tried recording one of my nonfiction books a couple of years ago and I finally gave up because none of the tips I could come up with got rid of the mouth noises. And it can't be that far away that there's just a filter you apply that removes mouth noises. And I think a couple of things like that will make the production process for people who want to be doing it themselves, and they don't have that kind of professional support that you did, feasible.
[00:27:57] Kelly: Especially when you're reading for days, there's millions of mouth noises. You're going to forgive one or two in a shorter thing, perhaps. And I'm a popper, I have sibilant Ss, I know this from doing voiceovers and having all those little things on the microphone to stop me. But again, I also had the value of an editor fixing every single thing, every word. I have a friend who recorded her own memoir over like seven or eight days. Just the thought of it reading all day, honestly. I think that the breath thing is interesting because when I was working on this audio book, I asked the question about breath noises in a Facebook group of narrators, and some of them said, yeah, you definitely want to take those out. But others of them said, if I'm listening to something and if I don't hear a breath noise, at some point I start getting worried and I'm like waiting, I'm waiting to a breath noise because if people were really tuned into it, especially if that's your profession, they almost started getting worried about the narrator. Like it's been four pages and she hasn't taken a breath.
She hasn't blinked.
Yeah, she hasn't blinked, exactly. Yeah, they obviously had a more naturalistic view of the editing process than I did, because they did leave some of that humanity in. And they did some things, they pulled some tricks that I didn't think that they could do. I was like, oh my God, that's gone, how did they do that? But again, it wasn't like I was shoulder to shoulder with this guy in LA, telling him do that, do this, do that. Ooh, that sounds terrible, use a different take. Yeah, it’s also interesting, in at least one of the recent episodes, I talked about Cristi, who's the guy who helps me with the podcast. Hi Cristi, because he's going to edit this.
Thank you for everything you do!
[00:29:40] Matty: And we've had lots of conversations about how much to clean up the audio and the video, because there was one episode in particular where the person was kind of struggling with figuring out how they wanted to word something and there were longer pauses, and he said, oh, I can clean all that up. And I was like, yeah, but if you clean it all up, then it's a smooth listening experience but it's not an engaging, listening experience because to me, the experience of having the person pause to think, and then maybe take different approaches to how they wanted to approach the topic, that was all part of the personality that I didn't want to lose.
[00:30:17] Kelly: And so I did that too. I did that a minute ago and I'm like, oh my God, Kelly, you are really grappling for a simple word right now. But the other thing that happened when I was recording, I would say, Stop, starting over. Like every time that I wanted to re-do something. So he had to listen for all of those throughout, edit them, and makes sure that it matched. And I'd send him a note, like, if it didn't match, let me know, and I'll rerecord.
But it always matched, and he caught every one. I was terrified sometimes that he wouldn't hear one. And when I would listen back, I would hear, Stop, start again. You know what I mean? So, you obviously have a rapport with the person that you're working with, and I didn't always have 24/7 access to talk to him.
Did the Experience Match the Goals?
When we've touched on what your goals were for this, to an extent introducing people to your books, but maybe not a huge amount of overlap, the West Coast connection. Now that you've had a little time that this has been out there, how do you feel the results that you're actually achieving match up? This is good pre-thinking for your postmortem that you're going to be holding with Speak.Studio.
[00:31:21] Kelly: Yeah, I am very curious to hear what they say in terms of how they feel about it and what they think next steps are. But my expectations were pretty reasonable, pretty low. And what I have gotten is a lot of positive feedback from people. I don't know if they're just being nice, but they're like, I can't imagine anyone other than you reading it, and it really felt real to me. That's what everyone said. It felt real. It felt like it was actually happening. It did not even feel like fiction.
So I got a lot of positive feedback from people who have listened to it, which is gratifying because you know how it is. You publish a book a year or a book every year and a half. And then you get reviews and whatever, but in the middle, in that long dark sea of working, it's not like somebody saying, hey, you're a good writer or hey, I love that. Or you don't get those little hits of confidence from people. So it was nice to get positive feedback from people. So that was something I hadn't anticipated.
And the other thing I realized too, with more time, is that I really just wanted to do something new. I really wanted to try something different that sounded like fun. And from that standpoint, I feel like I really achieved my goal 100%, because it was different, it was difficult, but it was fun. Like, if you've never written a play or a screenplay, and you try it for the first time, just because you want to think it sounds like fun, and then it is.
So there was a looseness and a playfulness that I brought to it that I was like, there aren't that many things that can surprise you after you've been writing for a long time, and not many new things that seem like fun. A lot of new things sound like someone just wants something free out of you. There's a lot of ways to take advantage of writers and to wring content out of them. But this sounded like fun and doable and yet not easy, so I think I wanted the challenge. So that's a side goal.
How Did She Assess the Partnership with the Studio?
[00:33:22] Matty: And how did you decide that Speak.Studio was not on the bad side of wringing content out of an author? Like how did you weigh that? How did you assess that partnership?
I got to know the people behind it, and one of them was very well known to a close friend of mine. So they were vetted in terms of their intentions. And they have a very wonderful vision, and I was in on the ground floor, so they needed content. They wanted a partnership with writers to help provide the content. But they were being very discerning, because they got a lot of pitches that they turned down. There's a lot of podcasts out there. And you think, when you're coming up with ideas for them, a lot of them have been done, and a lot of them have been done well.
I felt like it was an opportunity for me as well as for them, it felt mutual. But I also know that as they grow and as more eyes are upon them, that could only be good for me. It didn't feel anything but mutual to me. And some of their other podcasts are also really well done, so I feel like I'm in good company, and we’ll see. But again, my expectations: low, low, low, low, low, low, low. And that helps, you know, if you want to be happy, lower your expectations is a great piece of advice.
Self-produced Audio is Not Only for Engineers
[00:34:44] Matty: Well, that's a great entree to the last question I want to ask, which is that if listeners and viewers of The Indy Author Podcast are intrigued by this, what would be a couple of tips you would say, if this is something you want to pursue, these are things to keep in mind, or if this is something to pursue, these are pitfalls you want to avoid?
As I said earlier, I really thought at the end that having done a lot of it myself and relying on them to some degree, but also doing a lot of it myself, I did think that certain authors could certainly do this very same thing themselves and release it as their own serial podcast. Because so many authors, they have some of the recording devices already. A lot of people have a microphone, right? A lot of people have a very great laptop and they're familiar with software, and they're computer savvy. So anyone with all of those things, some people already have a podcast, so they know what it takes to upload it and to share it.
[00:35:40] Kelly: And again, even if you don't, there are services that do that for you for very little money, honestly. The partners to find are it's pretty easy. And if you have those items already, I just want to tell people, if I can record in Garage Band, you can record in Garage Band. I'm more tech savvy than most people my age, but I am certainly not a computer girl. So honest to God, if I can do it, and it sounded good in my home, with my microphone, I really think that anyone can. I really do.
I know other author friends who do all the editing. I'm involved in another podcast and there's three of the writers in that podcast who can edit those podcasts, not just the engineer. I just don't want to do it because I'm lazy, because I'm lazy, and because I have very high standards, having worked with other editors all these years. I know it's doable. Even adding things in, music and soundtracks. If you can work an iMovie, and a lot of us can, I can do all that stuff. I could have done it if I really wanted to, and I'm an idiot. So honestly, that’s my takeaway. If I can do even half of it, you can do half of it.
[00:36:48] Kelly: And then my caveat would be to make sure, while you're writing, whatever you're doing, that the first word in your head is sound. Because you're painting pictures through sound. You're not taking your short story or novel and divvying it up and hoping for the best, because 9 times out of 10, you don't have sound at the forefront. So that would be my advice.
[00:37:14] Matty: Excellent. Well, Kelly, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. And as an appreciative listener of "Open the Window," it's so much fun to hear the backstory. And of course I recommend everybody go find it if they haven't already, and now you can binge through it because it's complete.
[00:37:27] Kelly: Yes, it's all there.
[00:37:29] Matty: Well, please let people know where they can find that and all you do online.
The podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. It's "Open the Window" from Speak.Studio and it's also on their website. I think it's Speak.Studio.com. There's another studio called Speak Studio, it's not that one. It's Speak.Studio. I hope you enjoy it if you do, and I hope it inspires other people to try new content because you know, it was fun. It honestly was fun. And I think it'll be fun for anybody, not just for a crazy person like me.
[00:37:58] Matty: Great. Thank you very much.
[00:38:00] Kelly: Thank you.
A question for you ...
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kelly! Is narrating and producing audio for your content something you’ve considered. If fear of the technology has stood in your way, did Kelly convince you to give it a try? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Please leave a comment on YouTube and let me know!
