AUDIOBOOKS, EBOOKS, AND A TORNADO, OH MY!

I would dearly love to be one of those authors (people) who isn’t flying by the seat of my pants at times but I’m not sure if that’s ever possible when you have ADHD and the kind of luck that likes to pile disasters on top of everyday life.  

As for how I ended up managing the Goaltender Interference audio release from the basement while tornado warnings went off? Well, we’ll have to go back a bit.  

When I set up the pre-orders for The Home Game, The Blame Game, and Goaltender Interference, I messed up one little thing. I set up the BookFunnel page and the Shop page in the wrong order and forgot to add the SKU to the BookFunnel page. That meant that some of the pre-orders didn’t automatically deliver. I realized this when The Home Game went live and, thankfully, I was able to manually send the files to everyone who pre-ordered before I fixed the issue. But it meant I was going to have to do that for the next two pre-orders as well.  

It was a little annoying to have to be up at midnight so people would get their orders on time, but not the end of the world. A sacrifice I was willing to make.  

This time around, I had the brilliant idea that I’d just release it a little early on Thursday. You would get the audio early and I’d get more sleep! 

Except, everything else went sideways! I’d shared the audio files with Kim on Thursday morning and thought we had plenty of time to upload them BookFunnel and get everything compiled and ready to go but boy I was wrong.  

My internet has literally NEVER been slower. Eight hours later, some STILL weren’t uploaded. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth on my part, I finally reset the router and at about 10:30 pm-ish, Kim was finally able to send them to BookFunnel to be compiled.  

But as midnight crept closer and closer with no update, the weather outside my house got wilder and wilder. There was torrential rain and several claps of thunder that were so loud the windows rattled.  

Just after midnight, an emergency alert went off with an extreme weather alert. Tornados had been spotted!  

I sent a quick screenshot to Kim, so she’d know where I went, threw my laptop and charger in a bag, hunted down all three of the cats and tossed them (gently) down the basement stairs, then joined them and set up a chair next to my dad’s workbench. My parents joined me a few moments later and we turned on the radio to listen for updates as I stared at my computer screen and (not so quietly) panicked.  

Thankfully, the audios finally finished compiling at 12:35 and everything delivered properly. Except for those pesky ones we had to do manually …  

The tornado warning was lifted at around 12:45 so I went back to my room and sometime around 1:20 am, we finished. Audios had been sent (and double and triple checked) and we went to bed.  

So, for anyone who got their audios a teensy bit late, now you know why! 

To everyone on the outside, it probably looked like a calm, normal audiobook release. On my end, it was a liiiittle bit more chaotic.  

All that to say, thank you to Kim for holding my hand through the panic! And, thankfully, we did not experience any serious wind or tornado damage. It could have been a lot worse.  

Kim and I made some plans for how to make sure the next audio release goes more smoothly on our end.  To quote Sandy, my friend and alpha reader, we’re definitely building in more “chaos padding” in case of slow internet or extreme weather next time!