Cleaning Things Up

Because the last few years have been hell, I have neglected my business. This past few weeks I have been busy updating and/or creating paperback versions of my books, backing up files, cleaning up my website, and so forth. Paperbacks are now done. *crowd cheers*

There’s some effery afoot at Spotify/Findaway Voices which I’m surprised more narrators and authors aren’t talking about, and to be honest, I’m not sure I understand all of it. The gist of it is, Spotify bought Findaway Voices and now the guys who owned Findaway have bought it back from Spotify and will separate their distribution. Findaway will now use InAudio or something and you’ll have to create a new and separate account for Spotify. Anyway, I don’t like this and will be ending my relationship with Findaway and move all of my audio over to Author’s Republic. I’m happy to say, I’m almost done.

**ETA**

Right after I posted this, Amazon KDP released a bulletin to all authors that the royalty rate for paperbacks would be going down if your book price is under $9.99 and if you don’t raise the price of your books, you may not get any royalty at all. Most of my paperbacks are priced well below that as they’re short. Last night, I posted on bluesky that I wasn’t going to raise my prices, but when I went to Draft2Digital, which is an aggregator site for other online bookstores, I saw that my paperback prices were already much higher than Amazon’s. In that case, I didn’t have a choice in my pricing, which bothered me because I want to make things affordable for everyone. Since I don’t sell much of anything on Amazon like I do other places, I may just leave my prices alone there for now.

Coming April 15th!

Feral : a love story

It’s about my cats.

After chasing a peaches and cream feral cat, with a mourning dove dangling from its mouth, through the yard, everything changes for Laura DiNunno.

Mourning the recent loss of her soul dog, and moving to upstate New York, she can’t seem to shake off the grief of pet loss and this little cat becomes a much-needed distraction.

What begins as innocently as throwing scraps of food out to a starving, and very pregnant, feral cat turns into feeding a small family of felines. But when tragedy strikes and two of the kittens die, the mother and her remaining babies are more vulnerable than ever. Now the broken-hearted human, who never cared for cats, finds herself in a “wild” relationship with them.

Filled with heart, this is the story of the ups and downs of a feral mom and her kittens, and the human they adopted, as they go from wild and struggling in an unforgiving landscape to mostly tame and living their best life inside.

The Leopold and Loeb Files by Nina Barrett, a review

I don’t consider myself a true crime buff, but there have been a few cases that have stuck with me over the years. Like who the hell is Jack the Ripper? Lizzie Borden? Girrrrrl, whut? Another crime was that of William Edward Hickman. He suffered from schizophrenia and during his arrest he asked if he was going to be as famous as Leopold and Loeb. This was the days before the internet so for years I was left wondering who this Leopold and Loeb was. Eventually, I found a book by Hal Higdon called The Crime of the Century and read through it quickly. Since then, I have been intrigued by these two guys.

Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, two extremely wealthy, and highly intelligent, older teens from Chicago kidnapped and murdered a boy in 1924. I’m not going to go into the details of the crime as it has been sensationalized, mythologized, and even fetishized unnecessarily. The crime itself was horrific enough that it didn’t need that kind of publicity, but ya gotta sell them papers, yeah? And books. Through the years, authors have taken many liberties and fictionalized certain aspects of the dynamics of these two and far too many readers gobble it up, thinking it is the truth.

If you’re more of a just the facts, ma’am kind of person like I am then I can’t recommend The Leopold and Loeb Files : an intimate look at one of America’s most famous crimes, by Nina Barrett enough.

From the back cover:

In The Leopold and Loeb Files, author Nina Barrett returns to the primary sources—confessions, interrogation transcripts, psychological reports, and more—the kind of rare, pre-computer court documents that were usually destroyed as a matter of course. Until now, these documents have not been part of the murder’s central narrative. This first-of-its-kind approach allows readers to view the case through a keyhole and look past all of the stories that have been spun in the last 90 years to focus on the heart of the crime.

Although I have read a few other books about Leopold and Loeb and knew the case well enough, I took my time and combed through this one slowly, mainly focusing on the mind of Richard Loeb. All those tiny post-its you see in the photo above are mostly in reference to his psychological profile. What I wouldn’t give to fall down that rabbit hole a little more. Clearly, this guy wasn’t dealing with reality and had a psychosis of some sort that the early days of psychiatry couldn’t understand like we can today or, in this case, didn’t care to understand because they confessed and the prosecution was seeking the death penalty.

To purchase the book, you can buy it from Nina Barrett’s bookstore, Bookends & Beginnings
The Leopold and Loeb Files

The Lacey Stocking Mysteries Playlist

If you’re hankering for some short detective stories inspired by the radio shows of the 40s, here’s the playlist on YouTube for the Lacey Stocking mysteries. They’re fun. You should watch / listen to them. You can listen to them on a plane. You can listen to them on a train. You can listen to them in your car. Although, you can’t listen to them at the bar.

Please enjoy. Like. Comment. Subscribe.

Lacey Stocking Mysteries Playlist

A. I. Statement

I’m a human author. I write (and have written) the words you see on the page.
I’m a human audiobook narrator and voice actor. What you hear when listening to any of the books I’ve narrated and any of the radio plays I’ve recorded is my real voice.
I have not used, and will not use, Generative AI for anything I’ve done. For good or bad, everything I’ve done is authentically me.

Signed,
A Real Human named Laura

When Things Don’t Go According to Plan

This year has been all over the map. After my cat died, I decided to give myself some space to heal and do things at my leisure. Well…life will do what it does.

I had just finished the last book I could convert to audio — it’s out now — and had written another Lacey Stocking mystery script as well as starting a kids’ book about the origin story of my feral cats when, after four years of being paranoid and careful, I caught Covid. It was the worst sore throat I ever had. My throat looked like raw hamburger and felt like I was swallowing fire. After a trip to the ER, I’m over the worst of it but still struggling with energy levels. Of course, as hot as it is right now, it’s hard to say what is the cause of my fatigue. Anyway, I’m getting back to life slowly, listening to my body and taking it easy if needed. I can’t do anything about the heat — it is really bad right now — but I can work on getting healthy and doing little things when I have the energy. Those little things add up.

Update

Life has been very lifey for me over the past year. My senior cat developed cystitis or feline lower urinary tract disease or whatever and I was under the impression that this could clear up, but his case was unmanageable. It became too hard to fight for the both of us and I finally had to let go of my cat Butters. He was 16.

Because I have been in the role of caretaker for the past year, my mental health has suffered a lot. I had good intentions and a lot of plans that I just didn’t have the mental energy to start let alone even think about. Right now, I’m grieving for my little butterball and I’m trying to remember what it was like not to worry. I’m taking it one day at a time, but I do have things going on in the background. I have to learn to breathe in and actually exhale this time.

Stay tuned.

Findaway / Spotify updates to TOU

Victoria Strauss says it way better than I ever could, but Findaway Voices, (now owned by Spotify) the plaform I use for the distribution of my audiobooks, has changed their Terms of Use (which sounded like an egregious rights grab) and has since walked back and modified the language in the contract after backlash.

Here’s the link: Outrage Over New Terms of Use at Findaway Voices Forces Change

For right now, I’m leaving my audiobooks alone, but I’ll probably end up moving to Author’s Republic as a distributor. When Spotify bought Findaway, I braced myself for what was inevitably to come. The little changes that have gone on since, I haven’t really liked.

“I’m an author, not a brand.”

I’m going to leave this here for now as my life is consumed with keeping my cat alive at the moment, but I have a lot of thoughts on this. I love Michelle Schusterman. She’s wise and personable and her thoughts are good and they just happen to align with mine a lot of the time.

Here is the link to the Vox article mentioned in the video: https://www.vox.com/culture/2024/2/1/24056883/tiktok-self-promotion-artist-career-how-to-build-following