The Druid – Audiobook coming soon! I hadn’t planned it, but…

Yep, The Druid will be available this summer in audio form, which I know will make a few of you happy. The narrator is Nick Denton who recorded some of David Pilling’s novels and his reading of chapter 1 of The Druid had me wishing he’d already completed chapter 2 because I so wanted to keep listening!

I hadn’t really planned on doing audio versions of this series simply because it’s expensive to hire a narrator and it takes a very long time to recoup the outlay never mind make any profit. That’s okay if you have plenty of spare cash but for a humble, thrifty Scottish author, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

But then I was contacted by a publisher who wanted to produce The Druid audiobook. They’d pay all production costs, give me an advance and royalties and, since I wasn’t going to do it myself I thought “Why not?” I traded emails with them for a few days, they made me an offer, I accepted and then…silence. As happens so often in this world (authors out there will know this all too well) it seemed to have come to nothing.

The same thing happened to me before when a Spanish publisher contacted me, wanting to do a translation of Wolf’s Head. Emails traded, files sent, everything positive, then silence and no reply when I tried to find out what was happening (another histfic author told me last week this same publisher did exactly the same thing to him around the same time). It was the same again when the movie producers contacted me about the film rights for The Wolf and the Raven. They loved my writing, wanted to make an offer, would get back to me soon. Never heard from them after that and they never replied to my follow up emails (I was NOT begging, honest! Well, maybe a little, but I really fancied a Ferrari…).

So, back to The Druid audiobook…

I had started to see the attraction of an audio version of The Druid and looked up some narrators on ACX, the same as I’d done before for my Forest Lord books. I found Nick Denton, heard good things about him from David Pilling, enjoyed his sample reading, and sent him an offer that night. He accepted the next morning.

Then, Sod’s Law, the publisher finally got back in touch saying, yeah, they apologised for their delay in responding but still wanted to go ahead with the deal.

Oops.

By that point I was already looking forward to working with Nick Denton so I decided, rather than withdrawing my offer to him which would have been a shitty thing to do anyway, to continue with our deal and walk away from the publisher’s contract (sorry!). Nick recorded chapter 1 today, including the song “Rhydderch The Red”, and, as I say, it was excellent.

I think Audible listeners will thoroughly enjoy what he does with this book and hopefully the next in the series, Song of the Centurion, which is inching closer to completion every week.

Look out for The Druid on Audible and iTunes this summer, it’ll be AWESOME!

And then will come Lucia… 😉