About a week ago I received an email from one of my followers who suggested adding an audio podcast version of my blogs to my website. Firstly, I’d like to thank them for the suggestion as it’s a great way to help reach a larger audience. I’ve spoken with the people at Tellwell (my publisher) who have a team that also manage my website. And we’ve decided the best course of action is to take my blogs and turn them into vlogs, which I can post on my YouTube channel then embed them in my website.

Thus I’m here today to announce the launch of my new audio blogs, or technically vlogs I should say. They’re nothing overly elaborate just me reading what I post with some simple graphics being shown, thus you can listen to them from my website or if you prefer subscribe to my YouTube channel (don’t forget to click the notification button) and you can listen to them directly from there. The people managing my website told me this would be easier than uploading podcasts or videos directly onto my site as doing so would take up a lot of bandwidth. Thus over the next couple of months I’ll be re-uploading some of my previous blogs with the embedded video. Going forward I also intend to do the same for future blog entries. While I will try to maintain my schedule of posting once a month, this process will take some time, thus I apologize if I don’t have a new blog post per month like I usually do.

While I’ve looked into text-to-speech for my vlogs, I’ve decided to record myself reading my posting. Doing so, at least in my opinion, gives it a more natural sound and feel as opposed to the artificial recording of a computer algorithm. I did a test with one of my older posts and the voice sounded awkward, pausing at the wrong times or leaving too short a gap between sentences, making two sentences sound like one really long one. Also the problem is that since I write fiction and my posts mention various fictional characters and or locations, an algorithm doesn’t always get the pronunciation of the names accurate.

I should also note that this doesn’t mean I’ll no longer be writing blog posts anymore. I’ll still be writing them. Once I’ve finished I’ll then be making recordings of myself reading them. Since I currently write part time (a have a full time warehouse job) it will take some time to record and make simple video for my vlogs. As stated above, I will try to maintain my schedule of posting once a month but can’t guarantee that I will always have new posts each month or that they’ll be on a regular basis. I will do my best and again apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. I thank you all for your patience and for reading my postings. I hope you enjoy hearing me read my postings in the future.