I’ve just released the next Galactic Coalition Academy series, An Endless Game. It’s the 29th entry in a very long-running series I started way back in 2014. I can’t believe I’m almost up to 30! When I wrote Ouroboros, the first series, I hadn’t planned on writing a sequel. I loved the universe’s premise of a space academy too much to abandon, though.
An Endless Game combines two of my favorite tropes – enemies to lovers and forced proximity. In An Endless Game, we have an untouchable rogue spacer and a science officer with so much snark, she can’t shut herself up around him. They instantly clash – until they’re stuck on a mysterious, dangerous alien station with no one else to rely on.
You can get the first book for free from any of the below retailers or from my website here. Amazon | Apple Books | Google Play | Kobo | Smashwords | Barnes and Noble
In other news, I went ahead with my audiobook project. I didn’t end up going with ElevenLabs in the end – I found their pricing structure too opaque. If you missed my last email, while I’ve offered audiobooks on Google Play for over three years, I decided it was time to publish them elsewhere. If you’re curious about why they were only available on Google Play, it’s because they have an auto-narration service that uses AI voices to produce your audiobook with a single click. I want to be upfront about the fact the end product is not perfect. AI can’t get nuance. And its cadence changes often miss the emotion of the sentences they’re reading, especially dialogue. So why do I bother? Two reasons. I can’t afford human narration – which I would vastly prefer. At an average of about $4,000-$5,000 USD per book, the cost for my 500+ title catalog would be astronomical. I also couldn’t afford the time to check the audio files, let alone project manage the narration. But I still appreciate some people prefer audiobooks. They’re also an important accessibility option.
It’s taken me two weeks full-time to do it, but I’ve now uploaded over 170 audiobooks to Kobo, including over 50 free ones. I’ve also put about 70 on my website, too. For now, the full catalog is only available on Google Play. Not because I wouldn’t like to have everything on my website and Kobo – because it takes so long to upload the files. To get everything up, I’d probably have to take another two weeks off work. Which would stop me from finishing the fun urban fantasy I’m currently writing – more on that below.
Since my audiobooks are AI-narrated, I suggest downloading a free series starter if you’re curious. You can look up any of my series on Google Play, or just plug ‘Odette C. Bell audiobooks’ into Kobo. One cool thing about Kobo is that all those audiobooks – and every one of my ebooks – can be read/listened to as part of their Kobo Plus subscription. I recommend it if you read a lot of books on a budget.
As for what I’m writing, I’ve been paused on the last book of Devil in a Hatchback for two weeks! I’ll go back to it tomorrow, and I’ll have to do some serious reading to remember where I am. There’s certainly something to be said for writing every day.
Once that’s done, I’ve already nutted out the plot for my next GCA novel. It’s about two unlikely heroes thrown together on a quest through dying worlds. When that’s done, I’m really going to have to write something short to make up for the hole in my schedule all this uploading has caused. I have no plans yet, but if it’s short, I always like to make it a chase novel. Maybe I’ll add a vampire and a snarky bounty hunter for good measure.
That’s it from me for this month. I hope everyone is well. And happy reading!