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.

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).

Creating an Audio Book

I’ve uploaded The System – A Detroit Story and The Day Detroit Went Dark to ACX to create audio books to be made available through audible.com.  A lot of people really like audio books and have been asking for them, so I thought I’d give it a shot. ACX and audible.com are owned by Amazon.com, so that made it really easy to get started. You, the author or copyright owner, log in through your Amazon account and go from there. I found out about ACX via Hugh Howey’s blog. Hugh is the author of the WOOL series.

It works like this: you upload a sample of your book and actors and producers audition for the audio book. You, the author, choose who you like and the rest follows from there. There are essentially two ways of getting your book produced: A) you pay up front and then keep the profits if and when your book sells or B) split 50/50 with the producers  and pay nothing up front. I opted for plan B.

This is my first experience with audiobooks, ACX and audible.com. I will keep everyone posted how it goes.

Here are some links: www.audible.com

ACX: http://www.acx.com/