James S. Peet, Author, novelist, and all around good guy!

Okay peeps, I finally have some breathing room, so back to the keyboard with me! I’m sure many of you are wondering, “when will Reset come out?” Sadly, not soon. Need to get two screenplays out first, then back to Reset.

One of the screenplays is based on Uncivil Actions, the other is more personal (which I’ll discuss more when I finally finish it – anyone know a good producer/director – ideally Emilio Estevez or Reece Witherspoon?).

A little preview of Uncivil Actions: “A man’s right rest in three boxes; the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.” Frederick Douglass, former slave, freedman, and statesman.

The book is done. I’ve just got to approve the proofs for Ingram Spark, and then bookstores can begin ordering.

If you’d like a paperback copy, I recommend asking your local bookstore to order one for you. I always recommend buying local. Our local bookstore, The Dusty Shelf, carries all of my books, so I give them my business (buying books, coffee, wine, and sometimes their big chocolate chip cookies). If you don’t have a local bookstore, then you can still get a paperback by ordering from Amazon (but you can’t pre-order it, apparently).

If you prefer a digital version, they’re available for pre-order at Amazon, Google Books, and Kobo.

I’ve finally finished writing Uncivil Actions, a political thriller that mixes JA Jance with John Grisham. Not gonna reveal the entire plot line, but you can pre-order it on Amazon. Simply put, guy with cancer gets fed up with politicians infringing on his rights.

The launch date will be 9/14/24. One thing to remember – this is fiction (not a blueprint and not my desires). It’s way different than any of my SciFi, but I believe, if you like thrillers, you’ll enjoy it.

On launch day, we’ll be having a launch party at the Dusty Shelf in Enumclaw (1-4 PM). If you live in the Puget Sound area, it might be fun to come on by and buy an autographed copy (and meet me -as the blog says, I’m an all around good guy!).

While working on Reset (the second in the Hayek Chronicles series), I went out and watched the movie Civil War (the one with Kirsten Dunst and Nick Offerman). If you haven’t seen it, it’s quite disturbing.

When I was driving home after the movie, I got to thinking about “what would lead to a civil war in the US.” I’m disregarding the whole election thing, despite the events of January 6th. My conclusion – all hell would break loose if the Democrats pushed some draconian gun control laws (think confiscation).

This led to me starting another novel. Yeah, I know. I should finish the three already in progress. But, this idea really grabbed me, so I’ve decided to run with it and step out of my SciFi genre and into the Political Thriller genre.

I’m already 40+K words into it, and hope to wrap up between 70 and 85K (that works out to between 230 and 250 pages. Just for the record, I haven’t progressed much past 25K words on Reset (Surveyor was 102K words for reference). This is the fastest writing I’ve ever done, starting the project on May 21st and hoping to wrap up by September. I even took several weeks off to visit Alaska during this time, so pretty high speed/low drag writing for me, especially since I have a business to run with multiple cases to investigate.

General plot line – guy gets upset at politicians and takes matters into his own hands. Trial ensues. SHTF.

If you’re interested in getting and Advanced Reader Copy, let me know. The only requirement is that you post an honest review on Goodreads and/or Amazon and posting it on your blog and/or YouTube channel (and if you happen to be friends with a famous YouTuber, radio talk-show host, or TV host, let them know about it).

For those that like my SciFi stuff, not sure this will be for you. It’s certainly not what I’ve ever envisioned writing, but there it is. Other authors (and readers) I’ve spoken to (explaining more of the plot) think it’s an awesome idea. We’ll see.

Why, yes. I do write short stories. Just not many or very often. But, if you’d like to read one that’s not my usual Corp of Discovery stuff, then check out this Kickstarter program Edward Willett is running – it’s for an anthology written for SciFi readers by SciFi authors (including yours truly).

The Kickstarter can be found at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/shapers-of-worlds-volume-v.

A little bit about Edward Willett and his anthologies can be seen here on YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dKvuLT2SVg. Some truly great authors (and to think, Edward invited little ole me to contribute!).

Today I took the plunge and put all my books into audio format using Amazon’s Beta voice AI. We’ll see how it goes. If you listen to it and find something that just ain’t right, let me know so I can fix it (regardless of how many times you proofread something, have an editor proof and edit, and have beta readers read and proof, typos and wrong words still manage to make their way into the story).

As those of you who follow me know, I’m taking advantage of the various AI (artificial intelligence, if you’ve been hiding under a rock) products out there. So far, I’ve had all of my books translated into Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Polish using DeepL (an AI translation program). Unfortunately, the translations aren’t 100 percent perfect, so I’m investing time (and money) into having the translations proofread by native speakers who are making the corrections necessary to ensure good readability.

Recently, Amazon invited me to enroll in their Beta version of their audiobook AI program (officially KDP’s beta for audiobooks). Today, after ensuring all typos and other errors were corrected in Surveyor, I submitted my work. Now to see what happens.

If you’re an audiobook person (which I am most definitely not), please take some time to listen to it and let me know what you think. The voice I wanted (young white male with a slight southern accent due to military upbringing) wasn’t available 😦

I’m planning on using ElevenLabs for other audiobooks (e.g., Openings and all foreign translations), but it needs more training (e.g., it didn’t pronounce Selah properly).

Now here’s the interesting thing. In the content creation industry, of which I’m part of as a writer, there is a huge fight going on as it relates to using AI. Many content creators consider it evil, replacing jobs of people who will starve/die if we take work away from them. Others are saying “this work wouldn’t happen without AI!”. I’m in the latter camp. If it weren’t for AI, there’s no way I’d be able to afford the translations. One book can cost up to $12K to translate into one language! With four books out currently, that’s $48K. Considering all the languages I’m going to publish in, that would be over $288K. And then, if going for audiobooks, add another $3k per book. Again, that’s over $60K. In other words, to reach me goal of having all my current books in at least six languages would cost me about $348K (that’s $348,000.00 for those that prefer real numbers).

I don’t know about you, but I know for a fact that there is no way in hell my wife would agree to me spending $348K for the possibility of making money – not the likelihood of recovering the costs, but just a possibility of making any money.

On the flip side, the way I’m doing it now using AI and humans, it costs about $500 per translation per book (which works out to $12K, which I can afford over the course of a couple of years). Publishing an audiobook using KDP Beta costs nothing (other than a little time), while using ElevenLabs will likely cost me about $50 per book (for a grand total of $1,200), and the generated voices actually sound pretty good.

So, I’ll continue to us AI for audio and AI and humans for translations. Those that benefit are me and you, my readers. Without AI, there’s no way my work would be put into other languages or into audio format.

Ok peeps, one of the takeaways from the conference was using AI to help authors. Many ways, from actually writing prompts and assists (which I have no intention on using), assisting with administrative stuff (scheduling, billing, etc.) which I may learn in the future, and the latest and greatest in AI generated audio-books. This latter one is the one that intrigues me.

As some of you may know, I’m using AI to translate my books into foreign languages, then hiring editors in those languages to clean it up (and it definitely needs cleaning). I currently have my Spanish versions out, with French, Polish, and German in the works (all of which costs $$$).

Now comes the real fun – creating the audio-books. I’ve got two options for voices – I can either use an AI voice (likely cloned by a narrator – voluntarily – the company doesn’t steal voices) or clone my own voice.

Feedback I’ve had previously is that a young male with a slight southern accent (the military family standard accent, if you will) would be most suitable for the Corps of Discovery. No input yet on the Hayek Chronicles, so willing to listen.

Another option is that I clone my voice (which takes about 3 hours of me actually reading my books so the company can clone it with my inflections, pauses, burps, whatever) and use that.

One of the biggest advantages of using AI for audio-books is the cost savings, which is passed on to you, the reader. To give you an idea, a typical audio-book costs about $200 per finished hour. A finished hour is the hour of audio you hear after all the narrating, proofing, and editing (which is usually twice as much time as what you typically hear). For my books, that would be between 8 and 9.5 hours per book, so roughly $1,600 to $1,900 (that’s why audio-books are so expensive). Using AI, I would be able to create my books for less than $100 (and it would sound like me, or whatever voice you, my loyal readers, select). That means I’ll be able to distribute my audio-books on my site for the same price as the ebook.

Amazon’s ACX doesn’t allow AI generated audio-books at this time, but I’m betting that will change within the year (especially since they’ve recently invested quite heavily in their own AI for audio-book generation). Kobo and other platforms already allow it, and as I’ll be setting up my own sales page (so you can order directly from me), I’ll be allowing it.

Your thoughts on the voice choice?

Also, for those of you who listen to audio-books, how many of you listen to them at a faster speed than normal?

For those that have read Openings, here’s a recent article on one of the restaurants featured – Whistlin’ Jack’s.

For those who have read my first book, Surveyor, you might recall the Flitter – a vehicle that flies like a drone. Well, it’s now a reality – introducing the Jetson ONE.