The Wide Awake Loons is now an Audio Book

The Wide Awake Loons is now an audio book at Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.

Promo codes are available for the free book at Audible. To obtain one, go to the Wide Awake Loons Facebook page, please like it, and press the Send Message button. There you can ask for the promo code.   

Here is a handy link that takes you to the book and a sample of it at Audible.

 

I had to wonder why I chose The Wide Awake Loons as my first audio book. It was a favorite book to write but it did have an unusual spectrum of voices. At ACX where books can be turned into audiobooks, I was surprised to receive more auditions the first week than expected. It was hard to choose between them.

I felt very fortunate to have Aven Shore as narrator since she has more than sixty audio books to her credit. She lives in Canada where loons can be as familiar as they are in Maine and Minnesota. At her blog  , she gives useful information about the narration process. While working on The Wide Awake Loons, she wrote:

“It’s a delightful dual POV story, of a little girl at her parents’ cottage, trying to get her canoe permissions extended, and the loon couple raising their loonlings on the lake in the wildlife community. Sometimes, their stories intersect! Dramatic, sensitive, well-written, FUNNY, and realistic. This author knows her loons.

I’m having a ball voicing all the characters - the dramatis persona includes the regal and superior loons, Chip Chap the chipmunk, Spotted Croak the mink toad, the gulls, the pine siskins, and more.”

An audio book seems like quite a challenge for performance stamina. As a flute player, I know the difference between playing Bach solo and playing flute parts in an ensemble. Take a deep breath because there are few breaks. I am impressed at the ability it requires to change voice between different characters and the narrator's. It seems similar to a ventriloquist's talent. Anyway, I would not attempt narration of my own books.

I began to read after listening to Peter Rabbit repeatedly and eventually pointing at the words as they were said. Teachers and students read aloud as listeners follow text. But when it comes to longer stories, chapter books, and novels, children have to leap into reading all alone. At school, teachers might read aloud a longer book but it has to please the crowd. An audio book can be a personal choice and it can also be a reading method where progress does not feel intimidating.

When I think of the advent of the children's novel, I visualize a hearth and family members sitting around it, the way they sat around a television later on, one of them reading aloud. This would account for the difficulty of the 19th century juvenile novel and the fine plotting that made it family entertainment. If a child didn't understand a word, they could ask. Discussion probably aided comprehension. With an audio book, a child can follow an e-book or paperback, read along or dip in and out. To me, this all provides an enjoyable learning experience, and one with options. Or there is just the enhancement of the dramatic voice enlivening the story.