Audiobook Production: Help Your Narrator

Here’s something I learned fast working on audiobooks for audible dot com. Help your narrator.

The audible dot com process works like this. You upload a section of your book, and unless you’re a professional voice talent and plan to narrate the book yourself, narrators audition for you. You provide a small segment of your book and the voice talent narrates it. If you are the rights owner (either the author or publisher) you choose the narrator. Once you’ve selected a narrator, you or your publisher negotiate a royalty agreement.

There is no guarantee that anyone will audition for you. Narrators gamble their time and talent on your book and its anticipated sales. If you find a narrator that you click with, latch onto them, for now and in the future.  A big thing to consider is brand consistency, especially if your books are a series. Having the same person narrate your books presents a consistency to your work, literary voice, and brand.

What’s the first thing you can do to help your narrator, which helps your final product? Provide them with a detailed character summary. When listening to the auditions you might be surprised that the characters DO NOT sound the way you envisioned, in tone, attitude and rhythm. Put yourself in the narrator’s place. All they have to go on is the short segment of text you or your publisher provided. They make their best guess and interpretation. If it’s wrong, it’s not their fault. It’s yours.

This is where the character summary comes into play. Having a cheat-sheet of sorts prepped for your narrator helps immensely. They know who the protagonists and antagonists are and they know who persists throughout the story and who doesn’t. They know  who must be liked and who needs to be loathed. This helps them invest their time and talent in the characters that require it.

You, the author, will learn a lot about your book listening to the auditions. I learned an old trick from another author a long time ago. You’ve probably heard of it. To accurately proofread your book, say it out loud. That way it’s almost impossible to let a grammatical errors slip by and is a means for correcting awkward passages. You’re listening to your own voice. When you hear a professional narrator recite your book. It’s cool and puts a new, unique light on your work. To get to where you want your book to be, do all that you can to help your narrator get it right. A solid character summary will go a long way.

Covers for Audiobooks

Here’s something I didn’t expect at the onset of producing an audio book with audible dot com. The book covers need to be reformatted or recreated. You might think this is no big deal, but to complicate things, the cover must be square like a CD cover and not rectangular. No big deal? That’s what I thought before I dove into the details. The cover specifications are simple and must be adhered to, otherwise the cover will be rejected.

You can’t just scale your current book cover from a rectangle to a square. The aspect ratio will be askew and will be rejected. Besides, it will look squashed and amateurish. You cannot add white space by adding a border to the sides of your cover image. This will be rejected also. If you scale up or zoom your image to fit the square format chances are it will be rejected since there will be too much noise and pixelation.

Here are the format specifications that audible dot com requires: the native or default size is 2400 x 2400 pixels with a resolution of 72dpi. Squashing down your existing cover may be difficult or downright impossible. So what to do? Create a new one.

What about brand continuity? I look at this a little differently. Audio books are unlike print or eBooks, so why not give them their own identity? Check out some of the covers on audible dot com. The ones that catch my eye are the ones with the big print with simple covers, and not the ones that take a portion of an existing cover and trim it or expand it.

I decided to redo my covers from scratch. I also decided to keep them relatively the same for at least the first two books. Why? Brand identity, specifically tailored for the audiobooks. If this works I’ll do it for all the books that appear on audible dot com.

Here’s the original cover for The Day Detroit Went Dark

Here’s the audiobook cover.

Here’s the cover for The System – A Detroit Story –

Here’s the audiobook cover. Pretty much the same thing.

The Day Detroit Went Dark Audio Book

Sealing the deal and kicking off the audiobook production of The Day Detroit Went Dark. The audiobook will be available on audible.com, targeted for December 1st, 2013. Narrating the book is the voice talent Stephen Marsden. I’ll be posting progress reports here and what I’ve learned throughout the course of this project. It’s kind of like being a movie director (without making a movie).