| Besides also being the month that plays host to National Donut Day, June is audiobook month, a campaign that was originally created by the Audio Publishers Association to make more readers aware of the joy of listening to audiobooks. A number organizations have joined in on the campaign to reach a broader reaching audience with narrated books. But do we really need to raise awareness of audio? In an interview last week with Amazon’s audiobook creation platform ACX, vice president Jason Ojalvo shared a staggering statistic, that only around five percent of “professionally” published books ever even make it to the audiobook market. At the same time, some reports indicate that as many as one in five households consumes audiobooks. If both of those statistics are accurate, that demonstrates an under-appreciation for the industry as a whole. Check out some of the organizations below and their offerings for the month of June: Spoken Freely and Going Public are sharing a month-long offering of audio works. Lightspeed magazine and Skyboat Media are hosting a daily series of podcasts of audio narration from authors such as Hugh Howey and Karen Joy Howler. Big Happy Family Audio has a comprehensive list of ways to celebrate the month, including ways to spread the news. Additionally, June 17th through 21st has been designated as Audiobook Week, which will contain its own events and promotions to spread the news about voice-over reading. Visit the Audiobook Publishers Association website for news on various aspects of the campaign.
How Will you Celebrate Audiobook Month? is a post from: E-Reader News |
Saturday, June 8, 2013
How Will you Celebrate Audiobook Month?
Amazon Storyteller Offers Tools to Screenplay Writers
| In an effort to be an all-encompassing option for writers of any type of media, Amazon Studios announced the beta launch of its new application, Amazon Storyteller. Aimed at screenwriters, Storyteller lets the writer create panels of storyboards, complete with characters, props, background settings, and more. The tool works on two levels, the first affording the writer the ability to see the material played out complete with camera pans and zooms. The second feature is the opportunity to publish something tangible and professional-looking to present to studios, presumably Amazon’s own program. “Amazon Storyteller is a new application from Amazon Studios that lets you turn a movie script into a storyboard,” explained the company’s website. “You choose the backgrounds, characters, and props to visually tell a story. A successful storyboard can tell the full story of a script, or capture its essence in short form, like a trailer. Either approach can be a great way to build an audience for your story and see how people respond to it.” As part of the agreement for using Amazon Storyteller, only scripts that have been made available exclusively through Amazon Studios are eligible to use the Storyteller feature, and while others can create the storyboards for a given script, only the owner of the script can give the permission to publish the completed storyboards on Amazon. One of the limitations that will hopefully evolve as Storyteller undergoes a full launch later on is the single-user aspect. As of right now, only one user can work on a storyboard, meaning collaboration isn’t possible yet. Amazon didn’t indicate when that collaboration will be possible, if ever, but as screenplays are often a partnership, that could potentially be a source of frustration for screenwriters. A complete explanation and lengthy list of FAQs can be found HERE.
Amazon Storyteller Offers Tools to Screenplay Writers is a post from: E-Reader News |
