One witch. Three hearts. A town full of magic.

Aspen Fahey never planned to become anyone’s community witch — especially not their late aunt’s.

A non-binary aspiring witchfluencer barely holding their life together in downtown Toronto, Aspen is burned out, heartbroken, and desperate for a reset. When an unexpected inheritance pulls them to a picturesque town on Vancouver Island, it feels like stepping into a cozy small-town fantasy, complete with folklore magic, and the chance to start over.

What they don’t expect is the complicated pull of new and old connections. A charming local who makes Aspen believe in possibility again. A cool-headed jock whose steady presence feels dangerously safe. And the one person from their past they never quite got over.

As Aspen rebuilds their aunt’s magical practice and learns what it truly means to serve a community, they’re forced to confront the emotional scars left by an abusive ex, and the fear that they might not be capable of the healthy love growing around them. But magic isn’t just about spells and rituals. It’s about trust, vulnerability, and choosing the people who choose you back.

In a town filled with cozy magic and modern folklore, Aspen must decide whether they’re ready to stop surviving, and finally allow themselves to belong.

Perfect for readers who love: #OwnVoices Friends to Lovers Second-Chance Romance Why-Choose / Polyamorous Romance Queer Found Family Small-Town Fresh Start Cozy Modern Fantasy Witchy / Community Magic Healing After Emotional Abuse Slow-Build Triad Romance

I’m so proud of the work that went into this new edition, and I’m really happy to have a chance to put my super gay, super trans stories into the world. Special pricing on the eBook pre-order, which you can find here.

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So I decided to see if I could record my own! My criteria for success: I had to be able to do it for zero monies and the end result had to be high enough quality to pass the audio checkers on Audible. (I’m not a Bezos fan, but I’ve got bills to pay.)

Now, before I go into my process, let’s acknowledge some starting advantages I have that may not be available to everyone:

1. I have previous audio editing experience. I’m not a professional, but I know my way around the basics and have used Audacity a lot.
2. I own a house, which means I have control over my space.
3. I’m a musical theater queer, which means I have previous acting experience. As with audio editing, very much not a professional, but competent enough to get the job done.

The first hurdle: Recording

Good recording requires a good mic, which I don’t have. Thankfully, a friend of mine who podcasts off and on was in the middle of moving and was willing to lend me theirs (which was important because I can’t afford to drop $2-300 on a mic).

The mic they lent me is a solid podcasting mic, but definitely isn’t a top-tier recording mic, which created some issues because the audio standards for audiobooks are a lot higher than for podcasts. Right away I was able to get audio that would be perfectly fine for podcasts, but that had too much room echo for an audiobook.

From there, finding a setup to reduce or eliminate room echo was… challenging. I tried all kinds of things, even including recording under a blanket. (A friend who had recorded a few audiobooks created a little alcove in their space by hanging moving blankets from the ceiling, but that wasn’t an option in my space.) Finally, I talked to my sibling, who does a lot of streaming, and they pointed me toward a tool toward Nvidia Broadcast – a tool available to people with Nvidia graphics cards that comes with room echo and noise reduction filters. Basically, you install the program, start it running, and use Nvidia Broadcast as your input microphone into Audacity.

Thankfully, that helped enough to be able to get the job done.

After several hours of fucking around, here’s what I learned:

• Broadcast’s beta studio mode, while initially very promising, needs more polishing. It completely eliminated room echo, but at the cost of making my voice sound too digital, with occasional weird audio artifacting.
• Broadcast didn’t like starting recordings with hard consonants. I found that I had to say a few filler words when starting a new recording session when I had to record the title of the book no less than four times. (It kept cutting off the beginning and only getting “mmunity Witch”.)
• The audio setup that worked best in my space was sitting half in a closet with a blanket hung on the wall. Because my desktop has an Nvidia card, but my laptop doesn’t, this meant hauling my entire setup to the guest room when I wanted to record.
• Reading from an iPad on an iPad stand was far, far better for my neck than reading from my phone.
• Removing jewelry was a necessity, as I couldn’t stop myself from fidgeting with it when it was on.
• Record all of your chapters as separate tracks. It will save a lot of time and effort later.
• HUGE SANITY SAVER: Whenever I flubbed something, I would pause for five seconds before trying again. This made all of the spots with errors VISUALLY FINDABLE when scrolling through the timeline on my recordings in Audacity – extremely important as the final edited recording time was 7.5 hours.
• ANOTHER SANITY SAVER: Mark your setup with masking tape if you need to disassemble and reassemble it so it’s as close to the same as possible every time. I had to record a few things several times when the audio didn’t match.

Once I had everything recorded, it was time for….

The second hurdle: listening to myself

Once everything was recorded, I had to listen to the whole thing to identify mistakes, audio issues, etc. I made this my commute listening in the car for several days and recorded audio notes for myself when I caught things that needed to be fixed.

NGL, this is the part that sucked the most. Listening to yourself is never fun, but it extra sucks if you have voice dysphoria, like I do. (Honestly, the jury’s still out on whether all of this was worth the emotional suffering in that respect.)

Once I had my list of issues, it was on to re-recording! Again, per my sanity-savers above, marking my setup would have been helpful, because I ended up re-cording some things several times because of audio inconsistency.

Third: audio-editing

Once all of that was done, it was time to do audio editing! Without going into a ton of technical detail, the main issues I had to fix were:

Further reducing remaining room echo: I used Audacity’s Noise Reduction for this (Effect > Noise Removal and Repair > Noise Reduction) by selecting a portion with only my voice, clicking “get profile”, and then going back and running the filter on the whole track. This didn’t 100% eliminate it, but it made it Good Enough For Everyone Who’s Not Me.

Fixing the noise floor – the recording needs to be silent when the narrator isn’t speaking. Generally, this isn’t possible with a DIY setup, which requires removing that extra noise in post-processing. Again, Audacity’s Noise Reduction was able to fix this, this time by getting the profile from the “silent” portions of the track and then running Noise Reduction on the whole file.

Average loudness – the standards for what is acceptable audio for a podcast and what’s acceptable for an audiobook are very different. The dynamic range (basically, the difference between the loudest sound and the quietest sound) was too big in pretty much all of my tracks. The fix for this required more steps, and the installation of a free Audacity plugin.

After some searching, I found Chris’ Dynamic Compressor – a free plugin that evens out the range of volume in tracks by bringing up the quieter parts and bringing down the louder parts. (Apologies to my audio technophiles for this extremely reductive explanation). I ran all of my tracks through this plugin first, using just the basic settings, and that helped a lot.

Here’s an example of what that looked like in Audacity:

The next step was getting my files to where the peak volume was -6db, but the RMS (average loudness) of the file was still between 18 and 23. (You don’t need to understand what that means in audio terms, the thing that’s important are the numbers themselves.)

With my example track, when I measured the RMS in Audacity (Analyze > Measure RMS) after running dynamic compression, it looked great! 22.4, which is between our target RMS values of 18 and 23! However, when I ran the tracks through ACX’s free audio checker, my peak audio exceeded -6 db, which meant it failed audio standards.

In order to fix that, I had to run a Limiter on the tracks: Effects > Volume and Compression > Limiter. (My settings screenshot below)

In addition to setting the noise floor at -6db, the Limiter also evened out my volume a bit more. However, now the average loudness of the track is too high – when I measure the RMS, it comes back as 17.8 – just outside our target RMS range. So now we get to run one more filter – Normalize Loudness (Effect > Volume & Compression > Loudness Normalization. Make sure that you’re normalizing RMS in the pulldown, and set your level to -20db.

And voila – now we have a track with a noise floor of -6db and an RMS in our target range, meaning we can now output files as MP3! Which you need to do using these settings (which are not the default Audacity export settings): Stereo, with a sample rate of 44100 Hz, Constant Bit Rate Mode, and Quality of 192 kbps.

Now we can start actually publishing this sucker, right? WRONG.

LISTEN TO YOUR FINAL FILES ONE MORE TIME ALL THE WAY THROUGH

Was listening to it all over again a bit soul crushing? Yes. Do it anyway. I swore there couldn’t possibly be any errors at this point and guess what, I found five.

Fourth: Publishing

(Something I don’t discuss here: how to set your price. There’s a lot of great, easily searchable resources on how to set audiobook prices, so I’ll just urge you to do your own searching. For Community Witch, I set my MSRP at $19.99 USD.)

Draft2Digital doesn’t handle audiobooks, and only has a very limited partnership with Apple and Spotify, so after some research I ended up going with Author’s Republic, which is basically like the Draft2Digital of audiobooks, except they push to a lot more platforms. Their royalty rates are only 80%, but with my ADHD it was worth sacrificing 20% to have them handle the back end for pushing to this many partners:

However, when it came time to set up my audiobook, I learned a few more things!

• Audiobook covers are square, which required some irritating fucking around with my cover in Canva to get something that worked
• Your Intro and Outtro have to be their own separate files
• Your title in the track has to match the copy on your title EXACTLY

Once everything was set up, I submitted it all for final review and… it failed audio standards! Thankfully, Author’s Republic has a lot of solid resources on how to correct various issues, so it didn’t take long to figure out how to fix it. What did take a long time was individually opening 29 tracks, running the correction, and re-outputting the files. Then, because AR’s interface could use some improvements, I had to delete all my existing tracks individually before I could upload new ones.

Then finally, finally, it passed.

Except, lol nope it’s not over, because now I have to actually fucking promote it.

Which is where this guide runs out, because that’s the nut I’m trying to crack right now.

So. Was it worth it? Reply hazy, ask again later

Honestly, I don’t know yet. From start to finish, I’d estimate this project took between 80 and 90 hours – which makes that $3000 starting rate for audiobook recording make a lot more sense. Now, I’ll be able to cut that time probably by about 40% for next time, if I decide to do it again, but will I decide to do it again? I don’t know. In order to even reimburse myself for my time at Ontario’s minimum wage rate, I’d need to net about $1100 USD, which is about 69 copies sold at full price. Currently, I have yet to even sell my first copy. Though admittedly, I’ve been holding off on promoting it until now since the publication delay is a hilariously unuseful “5 to 60 days”.

What I can say is that this project occupied the majority of my “working” hours for about four weeks, and was frustrating, emotionally draining, and dysphoric, so I very much hope that over time the audiobook gets enough traction to feel like it wasn’t a wasted effort.

Lastly: the obligatory capitalism

I’m an unemployed trans romance author whose “day job” profession of content and SEO marketing has been replaced by genAI, so unfortunately my ability to produce more such content comes down to capitalism. If you found this even marginally helpful, I hope you’ll consider tipping me a few bucks on Ko-Fi.

The post I recorded my own audiobook (and it sucked). first appeared on ashkreider.com.

• First Tuesdays: Chapters of Community Witch, for those who prefer to try before they buy.
• Second & Fourth Tuesdays: Chapters of Witch Unmasked – the sequel! Chapters posted will be 3.5/4th drafts – not entirely final, but the whole novel has already already been through developmental editing two extensive structural rewrites.
• Third (and fifth) Tuesdays: Chapters of Enemies to Enemies – a novella that started as a fun little Odo/Quark-inspired romp about a shapeshifter being very confused by human bodies. And then because it’s me it’s turned into a. Uh. Why-choose enemies-to-enemies/ friends-to-friends erotic anti romance with a big side of me making everything trans?
  
  Chapters will release to paid supporters 2 months ahead of public release – meaning that the first chapters of Community Witch will release to paid supporters on April 1st (yes, really), but won’t be available to the public until June 3rd.

Additional paid perk: Exclusive epilogues and side stories

Epilogues will ONLY be available to people who pay – either here, or for a copy of the book. There’s also a… quasi-epilogue/short story that won’t be available to free subscribers.

Last, regarding paid levels:

I’ve retooled the levels to be much less stingy. The changes:

• All paid levels will get free copies of any new short stories / novellas. Full stop. Anything that’s not a full-length novel, you’ll get a copy of when it’s finished.
• Bigger discounts on finished novels.

That’s… a lot of content. Is all of this actually doable?

Yes! I’m currently finishing third draft revisions of Witch Unmasked, have already finished a penultimate draft of Enemies to Enemies, and am 75% finished with the first draft of Book 3. Additionally, my plan for the remainder of 2025 (SO. MANY. SPREADSHEETS.) assumes I’ll only write 75% as much as last year’s 200K words, despite being on track to exceed last year’s total.

And to top it all off, I am motivated by THE POWER OF SPITE.

If the fascists are going to say I’m a pervert simply for existing, then friends. I’M GOING TO BE A FUCKING PERVERT.

The post Patreon release schedule for 2025 first appeared on ashkreider.com.

In 2024, I finished Community Witch – Book 1 in a series that is currently planned to have 4 books, a second draft of Book 2, and am 75% done with a first draft of book 3. Unfortunately, in 2024 I also got laid off and discovered that my former profession (content marketer) has now been automated. Which is why I’m now turning to writing.

By supporting me, you’ll be helping pay my bills, which will make it possible for me to devote more time to writing. It will also significantly reduce the burdens on me for existing as a trans non-binary person in a time of The Horrors. (Please note: the romance I’m writing does contain on-page queer, trans, and non-binary spicy scenes)

Subscribe to my Patreon now!

The post Support a queer author writing fantasy romance first appeared on ashkreider.com.