Plans for the Audio version of "Tents Before Temples"
It's a big project, but it might be more feasible with your help!
It has always been my intention to create an audio version of my book, Tents Before Temples: Rough Drafts On Building A Culture That Lasts. My initial goal was to have the book out by September, in all formats. I had planned to do a final edit while reading and recording the book aloud.
Obviously, I was not able to get that done, and while it's easier to set up and get started to record a straightforward reading, I rarely have access to the kind of quiet, undisturbed time needed to make videos and audio recordings of any quality - a big reason why my YouTube channel is constantly languishing.
With those restraints, finding the time to read the whole book aloud (especially when looking for obvious errors that need fixing) was a far more ambitious undertaking than I first imagined, especially considering its length. While we tend to think of book length in terms of pages, that’s a very subjective measurement, depending on the size of both the font and the paper. The more accurate measurement is word count, and Tents Before Temples comes in at 294,953 words. (The earlier edition, which contained about 7 chapters that I stripped for my next book, was about 340,000.)
It’s a very big book, but in the grand scheme of things, reading and recording it is not unfeasible. But I realize that the audio recording is actually very important, since that is how I consume most of the books I ‘read’ (because it does count).
I compared the book to my brother to different volumes in The Wheel of Time, one of our favorite series, made up of 14 truly massive books. As I told him, the first version would have been in the top 5 books of the series for size, while the final version comes in right in the middle.
A good comparison is the novel The Gathering Storm, with a word count of 294,492, and an audio book length of 32 hours, 58 minutes. Since Tents Before Temples is just a few hundred words past that, (including the table of contents and title page), it’s safe to assume that a recording would clock in right around 33 hours.
With 56 chapters, (including the preface, introduction, and epilogue), that 33 hours divides into an average of about 36 minutes, However, the chapters are not equal in length. The roughly 800 pages of actual text comes out to an average of about 15 pages per chapter. Chapter 44 is the longest, at 40 pages, and chapters 31,32,33, and 46 are each a bit over 20 pages. Those 5 chapters, plus the preface, introduction, and epilogue, take up 204 pages. This means that the average remaining chapter is just over 12 pages (and probably less when considering page breaks) the recording time for most chapters would be around 28 minutes.
If I can get to two chapters a week, the process of recording would be done in just over half a year. That’s a long time to wait for an audio book, but it’s not a bad timeline for how much content someone can easily digest in that same period. So one possible solution would be to record and release the chapters on a weekly or semi-weekly basis.
That being said, while I am mostly concerned with getting these ideas out into the public space where they can be shared, discussed, and critiqued, I do need to justify the effort I am expending, as it takes away from other responsibilities.
One option would be to release them as paid posts here on Substack. For someone looking to support this effort from the beginning, they would end up paying $48 dollars over the course of six months. If someone wanted to wait six months, they could access the audio recordings for just $8; (or they could pay nothing if they can make it through all the recordings during the free 7-day trial.)
If I am able to get my YouTube channel past the viewing numbers required to unlock channel memberships, I could also release it there, which brings in another possible element - the visual medium.
I had thought about the possibility of a creative presentation of this media, since it’s easy to simply extract the audio from a video recording, why not make it more visually interesting? I had a few ideas about creative ways to execute this. The simplest would be simply to share the onscreen text as I read it (this was my plan when I was going to do my edits during recording.) The next step would be to include pictures and/or video footage that corresponds to the content. This would be a labor intensive task, one that I was initially planning to do later on, when I thought I would be able to release the printed and audio versions of the book at the same time.
The other idea that I had was to mix things up locationally. Throughout the book, I write in various different ‘modes’, some if it is more like the way I would present a lesson to a class, other sections are more like straight research notes/normal book prose, while others are personal memoirs from my own life. I thought it might be interesting to differentiate these sections visually. I could have one setting for the classic TED talk type lecture presentation, another for the guy sitting at the desk, studying and typing notes, and a third for the personal recollections - likely straight into the camera. This could be further mixed with the other format; text on screen for quotations, and visual images for descriptive sections. I could even insert the clips from various videos that I reference along the way (there’s a lot of footnotes with links to YouTube videos.)
This would obviously be a massive undertaking, since it would almost require a double-reading just to determine which sections should be recorded in which settings, and in reality, the odds of completing more than one chapter a week at such a high production level would be pretty slim. This means it would push the timetable past the 12 month mark.
On top of this, one reason I decided to release the book as-is is that I just got kinda sick of it. I still like what I wrote, but the ADHD brain has moved on to flashier pastures. Which brings me to my final solution; In a recent Sunday chill stream on McMosav’s channel, I was delighted to hear Phlebas give some positive feedback regarding the book, but the lack of audio became a topic of conversation. We have largely moved past the printed word as the main medium of communication consumption (it’s still very useful for crafting messages).
Audio and video allows the person to engage while they are participating in other tasks (one of the main themes behind this whole project,) which means that the A/V recording of this content was always going to be a very important step. One of the solutions the guys floated out there was paying someone to record it (Grim Griz), but I certainly don’t have the resources to do that, and it would still take a long time to finish.
After thinking about it for a bit, the solution was clear. Much like the editing of these “rough drafts”, the recording of an audio/video version could be decentralized and outsourced. If a few people were willing to record one or two 28ish minute videos with the text on screen (your face is not even necessary!) the time to get through the book would be drastically reduced. I plan to record the preface and introduction myself (along with the epilogue, and the longer chapters eventually) and will hopefully be able to do so sometime this week. But with a few friends, the first section (7 Chapters) could be made available very soon.
Anyone willing to contribute to this project would certainly be given complimentary access to the entire project, and if I’m able to make any money from this endeavor, some sort of compensation for contributors would be a top priority.
If anyone is interested in helping out, let me know. You can email me at tectonicschool@gmail.com or any other means you usually get in touch. Of course, anyone who has not purchased a copy of the book who wants to sign up will receive a PDF to display on screen while you read. I have made a simple signup sheet to assign chapters, and have reserved some of them for myself. You can sign up for any chapters that interest you, or the next available, though the long ones (in red) I will only assign by request. I’ll try to update it as soon as possible to keep it accurate.
I do like the idea of recording the personal bits myself, so if anyone finds examples in a chapter they have signed up for, let me know. You can either record them or skip them, but I’ll try to insert my own recording at that point.
With any luck, there will be an audio version available very soon. I’ll probably keep it behind a paywall for a little while, but it will all eventually be released publicly. The idea is to build community and encourage others to share their ideas.