2023: The Year of the Audiobook

I am one lucky motherfucker. And, yes, I know it.

For each of the last two years, I’ve had the privilege of focusing entirely on a single craft. 2022 was all about writing novels. Along with finishing my two big titles (“Punched, Drunk” and “Monster, Dick!”), I outlined a few other books and wrote sample chapters for lingering screenplays that need adaptation. The year was as successful as it was satisfying.

For 2023, I acknowledged a defining trait in my personality: creatively, I get bored when I do the same thing too many times. My biggest joy comes from figuring out how to do something and climbing that proverbial (creative) mountain. Despite a backlog of novel writing waiting to be realized, I wanted to turn my sights on audio production.

(This was motivated in no small part by my Audience of One, Matthew Horowitz, as a way to give him the opportunity to enjoy my books.)

Creatively, audiobooks tick a lot of boxes:

✅ Gear

✅ Performance

✅ Audio engineering

✅ Editing

✅ A proverbial mountain that demands conquering

And the most important box to tick: a creative work process that helps me slide immediately into that essential flow state, where the anxieties of my life are calmed, and my soul is soothed.

I bill myself as a jack-of-all-trades (and master of most) -- a one-person creative agency -- because hyperbole aside, that’s what I am. The upside: I’m a creative professional with over a decade of corporate experience and am paid accordingly. The downside: well, as I mentioned earlier, I get bored if I can’t explore new creative paths. Put it another way: I’ve already written the novel. A couple of them. What else am I trying to prove? While I crave a kind of creative variety, I’m also keenly aware that my lack of (intense) creative focus has held me back. (In totally superfluous but still bothersome ways.)

In the past, I unintentionally committed to a “season of focus” a handful of times.

From roughly 2009 to 2013, my love for the format of episodic television was the focus of my YouTube productions, primarily in the form of “Webcams” but also exemplified in a host of other shows like “Talking Heads” (the progenitor to Webcams), “Sexkittens,” “krumbinesBRAIN,” “Sexy Club,” “The Beanie Boy Show,” “Little Zombies,” and others.

In 2012, I focused on producing a feature film based on a screenplay I had already written. In January of 2013, I released “Caffeine” to deafening antipathy. Not that I’m upset by that -- I made a feature film entirely by myself. There aren’t a hell of a lot of people who get to wear that T-shirt.

Finally, after nurturing a love of comic strips since childhood and engaging in half-starts and other embarrassments since said childhood, in 2013, I focused all of my creative energy on a comic strip called “Jordan Krumbine’s Seminal Works.” At the end of the run, I created over 140 strips (a huge personal record) and experienced one of my life’s most singularly satisfying creative runs. (I’ve since attempted to dip my toes back into those waters, with my most successful return being “Motherfuzzers.” More to come in this department ... maybe.)

My point is that along with being incredibly lucky to have pursued and accomplished all these things ... a “season of focus” is a gift in and of itself.

And for 2023, I focused on audiobooks.

I produced the audio versions of both of my 2022 novels. I produced 8 audiobook shorts (writing new short stories, rewriting, and cleaning up old stories). And on the stupidest whim, I purchased the youtubebooks.com domain name and set up a secondary YouTube channel under the brand “TubeBooks.” Along with my originals, I also started packaging (with gentle edits) and releasing on the channel public domain audiobook classics like “Frankenstein,” “Sherlock Holmes,” “The Time Machine,” and more.

When I started this journey, recording “Punched, Drunk” in a kludged-together sound booth built from a discarded king-sized mattress, I was using a classic Blue Yeti microphone connected directly to Garageband. By the end of the year, I had upgraded to another classic: the Shure SM7B, audio interface plugged into Logic Pro, and repurposed my walk-in closet as a far more sensible sound booth.

Mountain: climbed.

Achievement: unlocked.

Bonus points: I learned a hell of a lot, which only benefited my professional career. When I find myself revising a corporate video I produced a year earlier, I cringe at the rapid pace of my voiceover, wondering why no one ever complained.

Additional tech points: totally unnecessary, but I invested in the latest iPad Pro and the mobile version of Final Cut to process my first round of audio edits. I work entirely with the pencil (no keyboard) and clip the raw audio down to just the takes I will use, cutting out all the dead air. On the Mac side, I assemble the audio and finish the production. The iPad, again, is totally unnecessary, but it’s fun. I over-edit my audio, cutting out nearly every breath and offending mouth noise that isn’t spoken word, and it is a process. A very long, very time-consuming process. An average hour of raw audio might cut down to 20 minutes or less. When you have that big of a mountain leering down at you, it helps to enjoy whatever little bits you can, and the iPad with Final Cut really helped.

2023 will go down in my personal history as the year of the audiobook. I’ve conquered that mountain. I’ve earned that T-shirt, and I wear it with pride.

Am I done producing audiobooks? Hell no. I have at least one lingering novella destined for the audio treatment (I’m more than halfway finished writing it, but it’s proven to be a slow, stubborn project). Plus, I’ll always be producing voiceover while in my corporate shoes. But I do know that audiobooks are not going to be my focus moving into 2024.

Because I’ve already done that.

And when I look back at all the things I’ve already crossed off The Big List (let’s go ahead and add documentarian, web designer, musician, children’s author, illustrator, and stop-motion animator to that list) ... I can honestly say that I’m not sure what I want to focus on in 2024.

Here’s what I do know: I’ve got a ukulele and a piano that I’ve always wanted to become some semblance of good at and have always (mostly) failed.

When focused on my “Seminal Works” comic strip, my philosophy was that whatever creative inspiration I had (“This might make a good novel!” “How about this for an episode of Webcams!”), I just put it into the comic. It was a very satisfying philosophy. And the art of the comic strip is immensely beautiful to me. As “Seminal Works” was auto-biographical, and “Motherfuzzers” didn’t have the legs I wanted for it, there’s a more mature, turtle-shaped idea knocking around my skull.

And while comic strips are possibly a perfect, personal creative expression, there’s still one mountain left on the horizon that I haven’t fully conquered: animation (the non-stop-motion kind).

Here’s to 2024.

Stay creative, motherfuckers.

Love,

Krumbine