rolanni | Third Question Answered (Reply)

The question, please!

I know this is after your deadline, but the question didn’t appear in my attention sphere until yesterday. In some of the audio books, scenes shift mid-chapter without any indication. It’s as if the reader didn’t notice the scene change markers or didn’t find the need to include them in the story. It takes me a bit to sort out what happened and is confusing for the person encountering the story for the first time. I realize you can’t change what is already one. Is there anything that can be done about this for future audio books ?

Short answer: Nope; not a thing we can do about audiobook production; that's 'way above our pay grade.

Long answer: But! We think we figured out why this problem occurs, so at least you can know why this happens.

So far as we can figure it, this has to do with how the books are put together technically. When we, the authors, turn in a book, we denote breaks within the same scene with the Venerable Single Hatch Mark, like this:

This is not a writer's tool, it is a typesetting tool. The hatch mark tells the typesetter that there's a scene-break right here, and the typesetter, according to the traditions of her clan, removes the hatch mark and replaces it with two blank lines. This is how scene breaks appear in finished paper novels.

Now, what happens is that the readers get the typeset edition of the book, not the author's manuscript (this is a good thing; the typeset edition has also been copy edited, line edited, and in general made better than the manuscript, because authors do crazy things in manuscripts, I can't even tell you).

But, wait, there's more! Not only do the readers get the typeset edition, they get an electronic version of the typeset edition. Which they import into their Ipads, for ease of use (and absence of rustling pages) in the recording booth.

And what we think happens is that -- between the conversions those double spaces denoting screen breaks -- get lost.

So, yeah, you're right; it's just like the readers don't see that there's a new scene starting, because, well, the marker isn't there for them to see.

Here ends the answer to the third question.

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