After about two months of work, Battle Officer Wolf is finally available as an audiobook on Amazon. This was the test case for using their artificial voice system, and I plan on putting additional books through the process.
My wife raised the specter of AI and suggested I was somehow depriving starving voice actors of work, but this is basically a text-reader level of technology, and people have been able to change the voices of their navigator/phone assistance for years. One has to go through and ensure that it reads the text correctly, particularly names and technical terms, but other than that, it is pretty straightforward.
A side benefit of going through the process is that it adds and additional layer of copy editing, which was badly needed. Over the years, I’ve refined that process, and I typically read a book aloud to someone in the final stages of publication, but Battle Officer Wolf was my first book, and did not benefit from that practice. This is why the conversion took so long. Instead of just listening to it and noting mispronunciation, I had to open up the text document and make corrections, then reload it to the platform and make the same edits again since they did not carry over.
The plus side is that the written text is much improved.
My writing strategy has been to generally ignore commercial needs in favor of getting the work done. I have a day job that pays the bills, and with finite time and energy, I felt I needed to write while I still could and leave marketing for later.
“Later” has now arrived, and while I’m very much feeling my creative juices flowing after a long pause, I’m not yet ready to put anything down, so updating the back catalog and buffing up the marketing side of the enterprise makes sense. This dovetails with the ongoing revision to Conqueror: Fields of Victory.
It’s basically the authorial equivalent of a deep spring cleaning, a comprehensive effort to clear out the clutter that has collected over many years and get things in shape.
It’s something of a chore, but it needs to be done.
Chateau Lloyd 
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