Solaced: now on Audible!

I can’t believe it’s been nearly 10 years since the Solaced project was first spearheaded.

I’m still so immensely proud of, and grateful for, our community for rallying together in what felt like the biggest school group project ever (you’re all peaches for putting up with my pestering to get your submissions/ edits/ contracts in by the various deadlines!).

I’m humbled by how much you’ve all taught me about the therapeutic benefits of corseting.

It started with the Kindle format published in 2016. Then a new and improved edition published in 2021 (expanded to paperback!). Now I’m happy to announce that Solaced is available as an audiobook as of this week!

Why an audiobook?

I really love audiobooks. I have an Audible subscription, as well as Overdrive and Libby apps – our family has accounts with half a dozen different libraries. I’m a really slow reader, and have a tendency to fall asleep after a couple of pages. Audiobooks have revealed the way my brain learns and retains information best, which completely changed the game for me – they’ve enabled me to keep up with my passion for lifelong learning. They’ve also kept me company through long nights with a sleepless baby – I’d have an earbud in one ear to keep me awake so I could safely hold my son.

I also love them for their accessibility. Some 15 years ago, my aunt had a rare ocular stroke that took her eyesight overnight. She went from driving to work one day to being plunged into complete darkness the next morning. (It’s been a life adjustment for her, but she’s taken it remarkably in stride.) She would still listen to my Youtube videos and follow along as I narrated my reviews (“here’s the front, side, back, and other side…”) and because of my detailed descriptions originally meant for her, other blind followers have since thanked me for making my Youtube videos accessible. Naturally, my aunt also absolutely devours audiobooks.

Addressing the How:

It’s always been a long-term goal of my to make Solaced into an audiobook, but I didn’t want to narrate all 101 stories in my own voice. The book already feels a little too “Lucy-centric” for my own tastes (although my editor saw nothing wrong with contributors mentioning my role in their corset journeys).

For the most impact, I wanted each story to feature a different voice. (I think it was the audio version of World War Z that did this really effectively.) Poking around on Upwork, ACX, and Fiverr, I figured it would cost about $5000 in compensations to 101 different narrators before I even got to the compiling/ editing/ mastering.

As for any of the original contributors lending their own voices, a few of them were willing (some of them are Youtubers, live performers, twitch streamers, and even radio hosts). Before the days where cell phones had decent quality microphones, I even considered a “traveling pants”-style shipping arrangement with a handful of Yeti mics for the other contributors – “record your story and pass the mic on” type deal – but the thought experiment quickly became way too expensive and complicated. I let the idea of an audiobook go, until a couple of weeks ago.

Synchronicity

As I told my patrons recently: I was reviewing my Q1 goals for 2025, of which one of my personal goals was to complete 3 audiobooks in personal development. (Of course, grammatically it should’ve said “Listen to 3 audiobooks”, but when writing down my goals and targets for each quarter, I tend to braindump and I rarely go back to edit.)

It was coming to the end of March and I was one audiobook short of my listening goal. I was searching my library of downloads, trying to choose the next book I’d listen to, when I heard the ping of my inbox. It was an invitation to try ACX’s beta program for virtual narration. The timing was nothing short of serendipitous.

After nearly a decade, I had the chance to fulfill the trifecta of book formats! I decided then and there that the 3rd audiobook I would “complete” that quarter would be my own.

A moral debate

Upon further research into the beta program, I was torn about using virtual voices. I do use text-to-speech on my computer sometimes when an audiobook is not available. (Surprisingly, Microsoft Edge has some not-terrible text-to-speech voices. It’s about the only thing I use that browser for.) Of course, my navigation app also has a virtual voice. But I’m uncertain whether ACX utilizes AI – and with creative industries being anti-AI, could I justify the use of a virtual studio? (Edit to add: after pretty extensive scouring of the site, I am pretty sure it’s not AI, as I can’t find anything apart from “computer-generated voice”, but the question remained the same.)

I spoke to a few close friends about it, and at the end of the day it came down to accessibility. Folks who can’t see (like my aunt, and several Youtube subscribers), or folks who consume/ retain information differently, would probably love to have access to an audio version of my book. The compilation in itself has always been a statement of intersectionality within the corsetry community, and denying the existence of an alternative format of my book just because it’s not perfect to my vision or standards would be doing a disservice.

And I’d rather be as transparent as possible about it, so people are fully informed before they buy an audiobook format. I’m not pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes here.

The making of:

There are definitely a couple of perks to the virtual studio – they had a library of about 50 different voices, so I was able to assign different voices to the 101 stories in my book. I did my best to choose the voice that seemed well-suited each writer/story, even going on youtube to find said writers and playing back their speech to compare them to the voices available. I wasn’t able to find a perfect match, of course, but I did try to find some similar in pitch, speed, intonation, and accent. (Profuse apologies to the New Zealander who ended up with an Australian accent, and the Scot who ended up with an RP accent. 😭 I really did try!)

Listening through all the stories again also helped me catch half a dozen small typos in the text (annoying as it was to catch them, I’m glad they could now be corrected).

Drawbacks included having to go through the stories – sentence by sentence, word by word – occasionally modifying the syntax and prose so they would sound more natural in speech / oral communication (although I did try to keep that to a minimum in order to preserve the original voice of the writers). I also had to modify the spelling of certain words like “fibromyalgia” and “spina bifida” in the script for correct pronunciation (even changing “corset” to “corsit” to ensure that the word was not pronounced like “corsette”).

I put some nearly 50 hours into the creation of Solaced on audio. The total length of the finished audiobook is 10 hours, 25 minutes! But because no human narrators were compensated in the making of this audiobook, I’ve priced it nearly as low as the platform would possibly let me. Audiobooks are priced on average between $20 and $30. Mine is currently $4.99 as a standalone on Audible; less than a nickel per story. If you already own another format of the book, the add-on price is just $1.99 (of which I receive 80 cents).

To the chagrin of my husband, I care much more deeply about getting the message of therapeutic corsetry out there to the people who need to learn about it, than about comping my time.

If you don’t want to support Amazon:

I totally respect your choice! If you boycott Amazon, the paperback version of Solaced is still available through these independent sellers:

Timeless Trends – ships within the US, with or without their Timeless Returns discounted corsets.

Orchard Corset – ships internationally, with or without a corset.

Dark Garden – available online and in their San Francisco boutique.

Lace Embrace Atelier – available online and in their Vancouver atelier for my Canadian followers.

Thank you all for nearly 10 years of Solaced! And if you’re not sure what the Solaced project is about, you can read more here.