About Allie Mars

Who is Allie Mars? Well… it’s me. Another side of me. I was perfectly happy being Sharon Delarose, so why did I split off into this other personality like Sybil?

To make it easier for you.

I probably made it harder, which is something I’m really good at, but my heart is always in the right place.

Here’s the logic. Sharon Delarose is an author, and Allie Mars is a narrator, and if Allie was just going to narrate Sharon Delarose books, we wouldn’t need to go all Sybil and confuse everybody.

It all started when a friend of mine told me he’d turned his books into audiobooks through ACX, an Amazon company, and how easy it was. ACX brings writers and narrators together, and for writers it’s the coolest discovery in the universe.

You post your book, wait for narrators to audition, and then pick one. Or you can listen to narrator voice samples, contact your favorite and try to make a deal.

If you’re a big famous author with lotsa money, then you’d probably just hire the narrator by the hour. If the world hasn’t discovered you yet, then you can hire the narrator as a royalty share deal where you split the audiobook sales 50-50 after ACX takes their slice of the action for bringing you together.

So I put three of my books into ACX, hired three different narrators, and smiled with childlike joy. For a couple weeks. Joy never lasts long.

The fourth book I wanted to turn into an audiobook was so personal. This was my true UFO abduction story, and I just couldn’t wrap myself around somebody else’s voice telling my story. I needed to tell this story, in my own words, and my own voice. I needed for the listeners to know that they were hearing this straight from my own lips. It was IMPORTANT.

Now I’ve done voice work before, and back in the day they told me that my voice was golden, so I knew I had the voice. I was already proficient with sound software, and had the technical ability — all I lacked was recording equipment. So I remedied that.

Then came the agonizing decision. Do I narrate as Sharon Delarose? I know it sounds like a daft question, but there was a reason. I knew I’d be narrating books for other authors, and with Amazon being this giant search engine, it would all get muddled once I attached my name to everybody else’s books.

You’d search for Sharon Delarose, and not only would the books I wrote appear, so would all the books I narrated. I can narrate a whole lot of books in the time it takes me to write a book, so for every book I wrote, there might be 20 or 30 or more books I narrated. And all those books would make it really hard for you to find me, as an author, on Amazon.

On the flip side, if someone totally fell in love with my golden voice and wanted to search for books I’d narrated, they’d find books I wrote that other people narrated and get confused. So instead of confusing you on Amazon, I figured I’d confuse you on my website instead, which is a tiny little confusion instead of a great big honkin’ one.

Also, separating these alter egos makes it easier for me to help market the books I narrate for other authors. That was the third factor in the equation. People might not want to hire a fellow author to narrate their books, and have our books get all mixed up together.

Like if I started narrating a bunch of cat books, which I just know is going to happen because I used to be a cat lady, and my voice fits cat stories. Only I write dog stories. So you can see how this would go down under the same name.

And there you have it. Welcome to the world of Allie Mars!