Many of you who follow this blog helped me out last week when “Deadly Doubloons” was up for a vote with Tale Flick, an entertainment company that provides a service of a catalogue where authors can post their books. This company has links with many movie and television producers and they run contests for people to vote on one particular book they would like to see made into a movie or television series. Deadly Doubloons was up against 39 other books last week. The winner received 7,304 votes, four times more than the previous contest winner. Even though I certainly was not in that league, Deadly Doubloons is in the catalogue. As I said in the Facebook post when I thanked everyone for their help, some producer may get the idea one day of doing a scuba adventure and there I’ll be for him/her to look at. In the process of vetting the book for the catalogue, one of the analysts compared it to, “The Deep” meets “Lara Croft, Tomb Raider”. Not quite the description I would use, but I’m not a Hollywood type.

Anyway, during some back and forth of Facebook posts, someone asked if the book was available on Audible. This question has been posed before and the sad answer is “No”. Despite what seems to be an explosion of audible books, in reality, it makes up about 20% of “readership”. Considering the millions of books, that’s still a large number. The “sad” part of the answer is the actual cost of converting a book to audible format. It runs about $3,000. If you decide to publish only on audible (as some do), that’s similar to the cost of publishing with a physical copy and e-book. The issue for me of course is I would have to convert. Hubby and I have talked about trying one to see and we still might. At the moment, however, the economic impact of COVID-19 on family, friends, local small businesses, and non-profits we support is having to take priority. We’ll see what the future brings.