audiobooks – Ridley Park

Should You Make an Audiobook?

November 2, 2025November 2, 2025Posted in Audiobook, Book, Propensity, WritingTagged Audiobook, audiobooks, author reflections, book review, books, creative process, digital media, ebook, falstaff books, fiction, format, john hartness, kindle limitations, literature and technology, media ecology, medium, music analogy, print, pro tools, Propensity, publishing, reading, Ridley Park, storytelling, WritingLeave a comment

1–2 minutes

John Hartness, from Falstaff Books, recently noted that not all books translate well to audio. He’s right, and this isn’t a fan letter, just a nod to the truth of it. Every format has its own physics. Some stories bend beautifully. Others snap.

Video: John Hartness discusses the ins and outs of audiobooks.

Propensity is one of the snappers. It doesn’t behave on Kindle, either. That’s less a fault of the text than the medium. Its structure and typography do a lot of the storytelling, and when those are flattened to fit an algorithmic page template, something human is lost. I include the visual material as a PDF for the curious, but the audiobook can only gesture at what’s missing. No amount of verbal description replaces the architecture of the page.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

I listen to audiobooks constantly – commuting used to be my second job – but there’s a difference between hearing a story and parsing a spreadsheet by ear. Nonfiction especially suffers: tables, diagrams, anything spatially meaningful. Description isn’t substitution; it’s triage.

Musicians met this problem decades ago. When the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, it wasn’t vanity; it was liberation. They no longer had to replicate their studio work on stage. Garbage later flipped that logic: they engineered songs to survive live. The same divide holds for writers. Some build books that breathe on paper. Others craft ones that perform well through speakers. Neither camp is wrong.

When I produced records, my job was to capture the best possible experience – not the most ‘authentic’ performance. Now, with digital tools, some artists never play their own songs from start to finish until tour rehearsals. The copy-paste perfection of ProTools turns spontaneity into ornament. E-books and AI summaries do the same for text—efficient, portable, bloodless.

So, yes, formats matter. They always have. Paper isn’t just nostalgia; it’s part of the meaning. And while I’m happy to share Propensity however readers find it, I know where it breathes best: between real pages, under real light, in the one format that doesn’t pretend to be frictionless.

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Ridley Park

Not a People Person

June 26, 2025June 26, 2025Posted in Book, Character, WritingTagged anti-morality, audiobooks, author voice, book review, books, character development, character tropes, Donald Maass, emotional craft, fiction, fiction writing, Jonathan Haidt, metanarrative, moral non-cognitivism, moral psychology, moral subversion, philosophical fiction, Ridley Park, Writing, writing philosophy, writing process, writing tips1 Comment

Person writing at a desh, on the wall behind him, scales of justice, drama masks, and a red heart

I Don’t Do People

I don’t write character-based fiction. I’m not a “people person” – not in the lived world, and certainly not on the page. I prefer people at arm’s length, ideally shrink-wrapped and on mute, where I can manage the terms of engagement.

Yes, my work features characters. I flesh them out just enough to spare readers the Ayn Rand experience, those one-dimensional ideological mannequins masquerading as protagonists. But character isn’t the centrepiece. I write to explore worldviews, metanarratives, and environmental interactions. I’m less interested in what a person feels and more in what their presence means within a broader system.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.

Audible Irony

At the fitness centre (the irony isn’t lost on me), I listen to audiobooks. Today’s pick: The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass. I’ve just cracked Chapter Four, and already I’ve panned a few glittering nuggets for future consideration.

That said, I found myself wondering: why am I even listening to a book so obsessed with the deep inner life of characters?

Simple. Because it’s still useful – even if I only dose it homeopathically. Just because I don’t write bleeding-heart confessions doesn’t mean I can’t exploit emotional undercurrents when it serves a structural or rhetorical purpose.

Character, Morality, and My Problem with Haidt

One section rubbed me the wrong way: the bit about character morality. Maass references Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral psychology—yes, that Jonathan Haidt, patron saint of middlebrow centrism and moral-sentiment handwaving.

I’m familiar with Haidt. Not a fan. His notion of “moral elevation”—the idea that stories with virtuous themes inspire moral behaviour—strikes me as both quaint and quaintly manipulative. In a sense, I agree with him: morality is curated. But that’s where our Venn diagram becomes a shrug.

I’m a moral non-cognitivist. I won’t bore you here (though feel free to tumble down that rabbit hole over on my philosophical blog). In short, I don’t believe morals are objective truths handed down from Olympus or Enlightenment think-tanks. They’re socio-emotional artefacts – human constructs born from gut feelings, tempered by culture, and ossified into norms. Different contexts yield different values. That’s why I delight in yanking characters out of time and place, disorienting them – and you – to expose just how contingent it all is.

So yes, I understand moral tropes. I even deploy them. But I do so to subvert them – not to reinforce a collective bedtime story about “goodness” or “redemption.” Those are the myths we tell ourselves to stay sane. I’m here to loosen your grip.

Why I Create Audiobooks for All My Books

June 12, 2025June 12, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Audible, Audiobook, Book, ElevenLabs, ElevenLabs, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, Propensity, Software, Sustenance, Temporal Babel, WritingTagged AI narration, Audiobook, audiobook editing, audiobook production, audiobooks, author lessons, books, editing, ElevenLabs, first-person narrative, hemo sapiens, indie author workflow, manuscript editing, novel, present tense writing, print proofing, proofreading tips, publishing process, self-publishing, typos in books, WritingLeave a comment

This isn’t a promotional post. I’ve recently discovered the hidden value of audiobooks—and it has nothing to do with selling them.

Back in 2024, when I released Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, I must have read the manuscript a thousand times. I even recorded an audiobook, using an AI voice from ElevenLabs. At the time, Audible wouldn’t accept AI narration. The rules have since changed. It’s now available—though still not on Audible (and therefore not on Amazon).

I’d hired a few proofreaders and beta readers. They helped. The book improved. And yet, even after all that, I still found typos. Those bastards are insidious.

The real revelation came when I started listening.

Since I’d already created the audiobook, I began proofreading by ear. That’s when it hit me: hearing the story is nothing like reading it. Sentences that looked fine on the page fell flat aloud. So I rewrote passages—not for grammar, but for cadence, clarity, flow.

Then came the second benefit: catching mistakes. Typos. Tense slips. I favour first-person, present-tense, limited point of view—it’s immersive, intimate, synchronised with the protagonist’s thoughts. But sometimes, I slip. Listening helped catch those lapses, especially the subtle ones a skim-reading brain politely ignores.

For Sustenance, the audiobook was an afterthought. I submitted the print files, requested a proof copy, and while I waited, I rendered the audio. When the proof arrived, I listened instead of reading. I found errors. Again. Thanks to that timing, I could fix them before production. Of course, fixing the manuscript meant updating the audiobook. A pain—but worth it.

I hadn’t planned to make an audiobook for Propensity—some of the prose is too stylistic, too internal—but I did anyway, because of what I’d learned from Sustenance. And again, I found too many errors. Maybe I need better proofreaders. Or maybe this is just the fallback system now.

I’ve had Temporal Babel, a novelette, on hold for months. I won’t release it until I do the same: make an audiobook, listen, reconcile with the page.

Lesson learned.

I’ve got several more manuscripts waiting in the wings—some have been loitering there for over a year. Their release has been deprioritised for various reasons, but when they go out, they’ll have audio versions too. Not for the sake of listeners. For me.

Honestly, I should do this for my blog posts as well. But editing on the web is easier. The stakes are lower. Mistakes don’t print themselves in ink.

Proof Positive

January 9, 2024Posted in Art, Awakening, Book, Cover Art, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, Ridley Park, Status Update, WritingTagged audiobooks, editing, hemo sapiens, lessons learned, patience, proofreading, Proofs, tips and tricks, writing tipsLeave a comment

Mates, the proofing process was Hell. I even count the number of times I reviewed my book, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening. Then I sent it out to a couple of Beta readers, one of whom went over and above and did some proofreading, which I appreciated. I made some amends, and I ordered a proof.

The proof arrived relatively quickly—even without expedited shipping, which would have been more than twice the price of the book.

Lessons Learnt

Get a proof copy of your book
Don’t skip this step. It’s inexpensive and is key to assessing formatting issues. It is also an opportunity for last-minute proofreading. I discovered probably 4-dozen nits that slipped through the cracks.
- Layout
  In one case, I had an indefinite article (a) orphaned at the end of a line. I entered a soft return to get it to start on the next line to enhance readability.
- Cover Art
  Silly me. I designed and composited the cover, and I didn’t hide the bounding rectangles I used to reference how my cover, back, and spine present. My proof copy has these rectangles in place. It’s not a huge issue, but it is an aesthetic flaw that I corrected.
- Major Misses
  This is not as likely to happen to most authors, but this books began its life as four or five short stories that were in the same universe on a shared timeline, so I decided to add connective tissue and create a novel. The problem is that the short stories were set in Bristol, London, and Manchester, but I needed to set the novel in a single location, and I chose Manchester. A beta reader noticed that I even though the story was in Manchester, I left a scene having a character reflecting on the Thames, which is a feature of London. I changed it. Unfortunately, there where two instances. I was lazy, and I changed the instance they pointed out to a generic ‘river’, but I left another instance as ‘the Thames’. Oopsie.
- References
  Another issue I caught is again fairly unique. I wrote out a male character and offloaded his scenes to a female character. I decided that I didn’t have enough material and differentiation for the two characters. It sounded good at the start, but he didn’t make the final cut. The problem is that I missed a few ‘his’ to ‘her’ pronoun swaps. Oops.
- Punctuation
  Man, I missed a lot of question marks and a few commas. Nothing major, but it matters.
- Spelling
  OK. Not too many here, but I had swapped a wonder for a wander that I missed the first hundred times through.
- Spacing
  Again, minor formatting issue. The biggest offender was rogue spaces between en-dashes and trailing commas: – , instead of –,. It’s a little thing.
- Tenses and POV
  This book was written in third-person, present, limited, deep point of view. Or that was the goal. All too often, I would slip into past tense. In some cases, it might have been OK, but I edited a lot back into present tense.
  
  I also switched several times out of limited into omniscient. To be honest, I left some of this alone.
  
  I was also guilty of some incidental head-hopping. Sue me. It happens.
- Create Your Audiobook First
  OMG. I thought I was done, but I found so many small issues when I was forced to micro-focus for the audio version. It helped so much. I have been told to read your book out loud—advice I follow—, but I still uncovered a treasure trove of mistakes in the audio version. Moreover, some things that didn’t sound awkward earlier, now did, so I had the opportunity to change it up.
- Last Minute Amends
  As it happens—in line with the audio version advice—, feel free to make more substantial content amends. My favourite one. When I heard this line during an audio review—I was literally listening in bed—, I got up and changed it immediately.
  - Before: When they arrive at the compound all is quiet except for the crickets that pause to listen.
  - After: When they arrive at the compound all is quiet except for the occasional cricket.
- Obviously, crickets pausing to listen are also quiet, so…
Give yourself time enough time to do a thorough review
I set a 1 March release date, so I left myself plenty of runway to take off.
Be patient
Even though I gave myself plenty of time for review and amends, I rushed the process and approved a book that wasn’t ready for approval and had to do late revisions.

I”ve probably not mentioned some, but I had the opportunity to fix each of these mistakes, so I’ll bookmark this page and my next book will be that much easier to publish.