Amazon adds audiobook of my dad's Korean War memoir, 'Candy'

I am a big fan of audiobooks. For years, when I had a daily commute to work and traveled a lot as a newspaper reporter, I would stock up on books on tape and listen to them in the car. They made the drive more interesting and productive, while giving me another way to catch up on favorite authors. (I believe I listened to all of David McCullough's fabulous books in this fashion.)

Recently, through a new feature on Amazon, I began to offer readers an audiobook of my father's autobiography, "CANDY: True Tales of a 1st Cavalry Soldier in the Korean War and Occupied Japan," which I co-wrote and published in 2015, only three years after he died. The audiobook mirrors the eBook and print text, and comes in at about four and a half hours.

I created the audiobook using Amazon's "beta" publishing tool that translates texts from the eBook version into computer-generated speech.

You can listen to a sample at Amazon's audiobook listing for "Candy," or one at Audible.com. The virtual narration is not as good as listening to a favorite audiobook narrator, but it's not bad. It's certainly better than the mechanical voices in past computer-generated speech.

My key problem with Amazon's "virtual voice narration," as the company calls it, is that it lacks the nuanced delivery of a human, the ability to inject surprise or sadness into the reading, or to precisely alter the pacing for dramatic purposes. Even more jarring, Amazon's default narration messes up a lot of pronunciations, particularly names and places. It even has trouble with words like "read" and "recreation" that are pronounced differently based on usage.

Amazon's audiobook creator does have some rudimentary tools that allowed me to add short, medium, or long pauses. I could also speed or slow the pronunciation of words, although the result often sounded distorted. And it offered the option to add a phonetic pronunciation. (It took me quite a while to figure out how to get it to properly say "Gouverneur.") After tweaking the entire audiobook this way, the result is something that at times makes you forget you are listening to a virtual voice.

However, at the time I write this, Amazon offers only eight narration choices--four male, four female--all of which sound like people from 30 to 40 years old. It would have been much better, for a book told by a man in his 80s, to have a more mature voice. Someday, if Amazon does offer that option, I hope they allow the switch to it with a simple click.

In any case, for anyone who decides to buy the audiobook version of "Candy," it won't cost a lot, just $6.99. And if they already have the eBook version, it's just $1.99 as an add-on.

'Morbid: A True Crime Podcast' examines Katy Hawelka murder

If you've never listened to the "Morbid: A True Crime Podcast," now might be a good time. The two enchanting hosts just posted the first of a two part episode looking back at the 1986 murder of Katy Hawelka at Clarkson University and the current efforts by her family and friends to fight efforts by her killer to win parole.

The hosts Alaina Urquhart and Ashleigh "Ash" Kelley offer a very cogent and empathetic examination of the case, and have some very nice things to say about my book, A STRANGER KILLED KATY. In Part One, the hosts gave me goosebumps as I listened to their touching reactions to the book's account of how Katy's father heroically saved his wife and kids from a house fire in the 1970s. Morbid deserves its rabid following, which reportedly has made it among the top 10 most popular podcasts in the United States.

The impact of this episode about Katy has been immediate: Just since this weekend when the podcast was posted with a link to the family's longstanding petition opposing Brian McCarthy's parole, the number of signatures climbed by more than 3,000 to a total of about 12,000. You can find the petition here: https://www.gopetition.com/.../petiton-to-deny-parole-for...

The book has also moved up in various Amazon best-seller lists, where the downloadable audio version alone was just ranked No. 22 among all true-crime audio books.

Numerous platforms, including Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts, offer Morbid. Below, I've placed a link to the podcast posted on YouTube.

Looking forward to Part Two, probably arriving this week.

EDIT. May 15, 2022: Part Two is now available at the same sites as Part One. (And this one's commentary, which draws upon a few creative slang phrases new to me, is as good as Part One.)

A STRANGER KILLED KATY is now on audio

This past spring, I received an email from Tantor Media, a leading independent publisher of audiobooks. The company offered to publish an unabridged audio version of my true-crime book, A STRANGER KILLED KATY, which went on sale in January 2021 in hardcover, paperback and e-book.

Now, just four months after I got that email, readers can download the audiobook from numerous online sites, including Audible.com and AudioBooks.com. It has a retail price of $19.99, although you can find it discounted, or even free if you sign up for a trial subscription to one of these services.

If you’re a fan of audiobooks, you will recognize the name Tantor, as they have published more than 5,000 titles, including ones written by some big-name authors, including Allen Eskens, Marie Kondo and W. Bruce Cameron.

Small publishers like me also love Tantor because the company saves us the hard work of creating an audiobook while giving the same quality production that an author would receive from a traditional publisher. As part of my contract with Tantor, I was also given a chance to weigh in on the design of the cover, as well its choice of narrator.

How fortunate I am that Tantor chose award-winning narrator David Marantz, whose plain-spoken delivery nicely complements the serious prose of A STRANGER KILLED KATY. So far, he’s narrated more than 130 books through Tantor alone. David won an AutoFile Earphones Award for “The Mind Club” and was nominated for an Audie Award for contribution to “Rip-Off!”, a short story collection. David is a careful narrator. More than once in the past few months, through a Tantor representative, David asked me for guidance on the correct way to pronounce a person or place. David is also a New York City-based actor who has performed on stage, film and television. (You might have seen him in small roles on “Law & Order” and the science series “Nova.”)

I first fell in love with audiobooks in the 1990s when I spent a lot of time on the road visiting my family in Northern New York or going on assignment as a reporter for The Post-Standard. I remember many times I would become so enthralled with the story-telling that I’d almost find myself wishing the trip lasted a bit longer. These days, I mostly enjoy audiobooks at home, particularly in the evening, when they give me a chance to rest my weary eyes and get swallowed up by interesting storytelling.