Writer's Grove

Friends, Druids, nerfherders…lend me your ears

After doing a little inventory thingie in the GIANT! WAREHOUSE! of my wee closet, I’ve decided I could stand to give away three copies each of the audiobooks for HEXED and HAMMERED. US only, no previous winners, leave a comment, I’ll pick ya randomly on Saturday. :)

I just began to enjoy audiobooks this summer. While I of course prefer to read myself, sometimes you simply don’t have the time, or you’re in a situation where it’s illegal to read, like when you’re driving. I listened to The Hunger Games in June while I was driving around Colorado on the Book & Beer Tour, and I loved it. Kind of expensive, though, for all those CDs. There is good news if you’re not used to the audiobook thing and maybe not so anxious to plop down a wad o’ cash on a big package of CDs: there’s a fairly newish service (new to me, anyway) that works on the subscription model—but it’s a subscription you can cancel anytime, and you get to listen to stuff on whatever device you want (iPods, etc.). It’s called Audible.com, and they have this deal where the first three months are $7.49, which includes one free audiobook download per month. Naturally, from the Shameless Plug Department, I would like to point out this means that you can listen to all three of my books for $22.47. That’s more than 28 hours of entertainment for less than a buck an hour! Aw, yeah! That’s way cheaper than movies. It’s cheaper than the soda and popcorn too! Plus you can listen on the treadmill or something and maybe lose a couple pounds! Woohoo!

Methinks that there are many other services similar to Audible out there. Feel free to share your faves in the comments—I’m very new to the audiobook scene and could stand the education. One of the cool things about Audible is that it lets you rate every audiobook on an overall basis, and then separately for story and performance. Huge kudos to Luke Daniels, the reader for my books, who consistently gets better ratings for his work than I do for mine! :) He seriously does a great job with all the accents in the series, and his voice for Oberon is hilarious. So yeah, there you go—a cheap way to try audiobooks.

Right now I want to feel that I have cleverly mixed a public service announcement with wholly self-serving promotion. It’s sort of like a yin-yang thing. Balance achieved! Except that I don’t think I was very clever about it. If I have achieved balance in the Tao, I should feel calm and at peace, but instead I feel that mild revulsion yet strange attraction you always get when you realize you have a bad case of Cheeto fingers. But wait! I’m giving stuff away for free! Ahh, that’s what I needed: a small salve for my conscience. :)

Yet perhaps there is no hope for my conscience, because I’ve been hiding this secret for years: I don’t even know what a nerfherder is or if they indeed have ears. I think they must, because how else would they hear the lowing of the nerfs at night? Still, this lack of knowledge has not prevented me from brazenly claiming a Nerfherding Award. I present these facts to a candid world and beg mercy.