Guest Post: Constructive suggestions for audiobook narrators and producers
I’d like to offer up a piece of advice for new and existing authors and readers / actors of audiobooks. Don’t take it personal, unless that is you are really looking for something that will help your career in acting / audiobook recording.
A very large number of my own listeners and listeners to other serialized audiobooks have stated the same common disappointment with a high percentage of the free versions of these works that often has turned them off to the whole serialized audiobook and podcast media. In a nut shell they wish that more of the folks who make them would:
Learn how to read.
Now I am not of course saying this in the literal sense of grammar and alliteration. I am referring to stagecraft. When to breathe, when to pause. When to raise the tension in your voice or suddenly drop to a whisper. How to bring your listener to the edge of their seat and make them lean at an odd angle or cry out on the subway because your story telling has convinced their sub conscious mind that they are actually seeing what is happening in the story. To make it, as one listener said:
“A movie in my head.”
How do you do that? Well, with twenty years of experience on stage as a public speaker and small time actor the best advice I can can give as to the way to get it into your brain is quite simply to listen to pros who are already doing it and then emulate them.
Some of you try to make your story sound great with special effects or fancy back ground sounds. While that can work to enhance some stories, those effects and sounds cannot tell a story in themselves. No matter how masterful the production or well written the manuscript if the story telling sucks, the audiobook sucks and it won’t grow.
On the other hand, the majority of best selling audio books have no sound effects or back ground music whatsoever. They are also usually voiced by an individual reader who is acting all of the characters themselves.
So my advice, pick up a few copies of best selling audio books recorded by professional actors and readers who make a living doing it and see what makes them tick. Then do what they do.
Here are a few recommendations I would suggest that can help you get an idea of how the best do it, and to learn the trade.
US Voices:
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Dick Hill (Lee Child’s Reacher Series)
George Guidall (over 650 audio books including Alex Berensen, Stephen King, Neil Daiman)
UK Voices:
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Robert Powell (Frederick Forsythe’s the Afghan)
John Lee (Ken Follett’s World Without End)
Josephine Bailey (Ken Follett’s Whiteout)
If you like a full cast story, try the Martin the Warrior series of children’s fantasy. These are very well done, and even though they are kids stories, I found them extremely entertaining.
Well, that’s my two cents on the topic. Work hard at perfecting your craft and you will make an impact that will be noticed.
Basil Sands is the author of several military fiction stories on Podiobooks.com. He’s also a damned fine narrator and producer, so heed his advice. – Evo
December 24th, 2008 at 12:56 am
Or, alternatively, you can either borrow a friend or family member or hire a voice actor (very affordably, I might add) to read for you.
If you have a terrible lisp, a quiet voice or a thick accent, you probably shouldn’t be the narrator anyway. Just because you’re a writer doesn’t mean you’re also going to make a good voice actor.
When doing promo trailers, if you can’t sound like The Movie Trailer Guy, don’t try to. Get someone else to do it. You want people to love your story, not your voice. A terrible voice can indeed send people screaming away very, very quickly. So when in doubt, get a friend or family member who totally rocks at it or hire a professional. You’ll be surprised with how affordable they can be.
December 24th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Good advice.
Some time ago I set down my own thoughts on this very subject.
December 24th, 2008 at 7:27 am
ZL, sometimes its not possible to hire someone or get a friend or family member to help you out, or, in most cases, the friend or family member are just as bad sounding as you are. I asked my girlfriend to help me with a promo once and she had this look of horror on her face and said, “no, I can’t do that!” And, like most people, I couldn’t afford to hire someone to read a story. But, some people want their stories out there or they take pride in doing it all by themselves (like me).
I’ve got a few writer friends who have asked me if they should go the Podiobook route, I tell them yes, do it, but keep in mind that unless you read out loud on a regular bases or you have some hidden talent, you’re going to sound bad. Keep working on it, identify the problem (for me it’s reading too fast, something I still need to watch out for when I do my books) and work on making it better.
-Tim
December 24th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
That’s a great point Tim. The reason most folks here on Podiobooks are here, instead of at Brilliance Audio, is that we haven’t sold our books yet. Therefore we probably can’t afford to pay someone to do it for us. Skill can be trained into people though.
Maybe some folks could go out and get involved in their local community theater. Or take some theater classes at their university and get the training they need.
They must also realize that if they haven’t got the talent, they need to acquire some level of skill before recording their audio book.
You only get one chance to make a first impression.
December 25th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I agree with Basil’s point. I’ll add something else – don’t be afraid to try different things and see if they work. It doesn’t have to perfect, it just has to be effective. Also, I’ve read comments on podiobooks expressing negative opinions on certain voices some of my favorite fellow authors do, when those particular voices are some of the things I like best. So keep in mind that you can’t please everyone – it’s just like taking criticism about your writing, you have to decide what to use and what not to. I know some of the criticisms we got for the performance of New World Orders were accurate, and we will be trying to correct them in future books.
Finally, talking specifically about how to best deliver scenes, be flexible. In New World Orders, we tried to do a different voice (or at least different inflection) for every character that appeared in more than a couple scenes. In our current podcast with a short story every week, we started to do the same thing for one of the stories and then realized that it didn’t work for that particular story. Instead, we delivered that story with no real shift for different voices.
Also ask for feedback from multiple people if you’re not sure whether something works – and make it clear you want honesty.
December 26th, 2008 at 1:33 am
I’m a voice actor so maybe my view is a bit unique. While I primarily do audio trailers and commercials, I can also do readings. Because I support (and enjoy) the podiobook medium, I offer reasonable podiobook rates (a tenth of what I’d charge for mainstream film, tv and radio). From time to time, I have even given away my services at no charge.
While I perfectly understand that it might be quite a bit more difficult for the unemployed or college students, I’d say that anyone with an average job could afford it by saving up a little bit here and there for a few months. Your results may vary.
Also, I can’t be the only voice actor who reads podiobooks. What about Sigler’s guy? Or other authors with good reading voices like Phil Rossi, J.C. Hutchins, Mur Lafferty and so on? While more well-known authors like those may want to reserve their voices to promote their own work, the occasional cross-promotion or a project they just really dig, I’m certain there must be other authors here at the site who would help out a fellow podiobook author. Perhaps that’s something they could think about.
The first barrier to entry is in getting someone to listen to your story. If the reading sounds atrocious or amateur, most people won’t even get to the story. They’ll drop it like a hot potato after a few minutes. Better to do whatever is necessary to get things firing on all cylinders than churn out a lemon.
Then, whether it succeeds or fails, it’s less the reading that’s responsible and more the story.
December 26th, 2008 at 5:01 am
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December 26th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Sometimes I worry that the experienced podcasters set the bar too high for beginners, but I can’t fault this advice: “Learn how to to read.” Particularly when to pause and when to breathe.
The way you learn how to to read is by practicing.
John Lenahan, author and performer of Shadowmagic, practiced his reading for months before podcasting, and few other podcasts are up to his level of production! John is a professional entertainer.
For a slightly different angle of approach, Suzette Hayden Elgin recommended (in “The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense”) that you record a short bit (3 to 5 minutes) of a speaker you admire and then speak along with them until you are getting fairly close. The human brain is very good at matching sounds, so don’t over-do it, you (probably) aren’t trying to mimic — although it could be a way to get particular voices for your characters.
PRI: Selected Shorts Podcast is a free source of stories read by actors and voice actors. Also free is Corduroy Mansions, a novel read by a voice actor, written by Alexander McCall Smith, sponsored by The Telegraph.
You can even practice reading other people’s words for Librivox, and get all the experiences of podcasting before tackling your own work. I’ve noticed that Scott D. Farquhar reads novels in the public domain (Black Star Passes, and others) as well as performing with Prometheus Radio Theatre.
Thank you Basil for this terrific advice for the less experienced. I hope other people will post other ways to learn to read.
December 26th, 2008 at 10:06 am
I think some of the best advice in this comment thread was to get some theater training. My background as a radio announcer was both a plus and a minus, I discovered. My radio commercial approach, fitting as much into :30 or :60 seconds as humanly possible, meant that when I started reading “Vatican Assassin” using this approach I went WAAAAAYYY too fast! But as I got feedback from folks saying “love it… but SLOW DOWN” I began to fall back on what I’d learned in a college theater class called “The Oral Interpretation of Literature”. This is the “proper” term, if you will, for what we’re doing here. If you google the term, “Oral interpretation” you’ll find many resources available online that might help you become a better dramatic reader.
December 26th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
This is some great conversation folks. A lot of good suggestions.
Edward, One of the hardest things I have found doing multiple voices and accents in my own books is keeping the voices consistent when the characters carry over from one book to another. If you are going to do different voices, you want to make sure that you don’t have two different main characters in different that don’t get the same voice. Otherwise your listeners will get confused about which character they are hearing. That said, I think it is important to clearly delineate the different characters and hard to follow conversations if they are all the same.
As a case in point I recently listened to the original 70′s cassette recording of “Day of the Jackal” all done by one man’s voice with no differentiation between characters and with no theatrical tone, he just read it out loud. It took half the book to get to a point where I started to actually get into the story. If not for the fact that I was listening from a technical point of view, and if I had not known how good a story it was already, I would never have finished that audio book.
ZL you do make a good point, and perhaps more talented narrators would consider recording for other authors in the right conditions and for the right fee. I know I have considered it myself but due to the time constraint of producing my own books, work and family declined to offer such services. But hey. Now I’m between books and might be willing to think about it for the right story.
For the sake of the readers here, what types of fees would you say were typical of standard readings for commercial enterprises and what could a podcast author reasonably expect?
As far as what Gail and Mike said, theater training would be a great experience and certainly a worthwhile enhancement for any voice actor / reader.
December 27th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Hi, Basil. Thanks for posting this topic. Creating the stagecraft necessary to bring an author’s words to life requires preparation.
Anyone planning to narrate a book should plan to read it at least twice before recording. The first time, you will read the book to get a feel for the material. I take notes on the characters’ introductions so that I know whether they are major characters with a lot of dialog or have any sort of unusual accents.
The second pass is to mark the copy. I use colored highlighters to mark each character’s lines so that I can instinctively flow from one character to another when I am recording the book. I also mark phrasing in the copy and look up pronunciations of unfamiliar words.
As the narrator, you are responsible for ensuring the correct pronunciation of the words. When looking up the pronunciation, also read the definition; your knowledge of the words used in the book will affect your choices in coloring the words.
In addition to a good American-based, unabridged printed dictionary, I can recommend these resources for assistance with pronunciation (links are on the bottom right panel of my blog):
* IDEA – International Dialects of English Archives
* Merriam-Webster online
* Merck medical pronunciations
* National Public Radio
* OneLook Dictionary Search (LOVE this one — 973 dictionaries!)
* Say How? A Pronunciation Guide to Names of Public Figures
* Voice Of America Pronunciation Guide
Finally, I recommend that aspiring narrators read Robert Blumenfeld’s excellent book Acting with the Voice: The Art of Recording Books. Blumenfeld offers practical advice and practice material for text analysis and recording technique. The link to this book and others on my recommended reading list are on my blog.
I hope this info is helpful to other audiobook narrators, and I wish Podiobooks much continued success!
Cordially,
Karen Commins
http://www.KarenVoices.com
http://www.KarenBlogs.com
December 29th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Wonderful Karen, excellent resources. Thanks.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Basil, I would say that it really depends on what you want to charge and what the market can sustain.
Considering most authors here are not filthy rich, I’d say you’d want to be as reasonable as possible and yet not shortchange yourself for your time and effort. You could charge by the page or by the amount of recording time or even by the word.
An audio trailer is often the primary sales tool for attracting new readers and can thus command a substantial chunk of cash for a brief amount of time and effort.
A reading takes a LOT more time and energy but to remain competitive and affordable, you’d need to give away more a lot more audio (and hence time and effort) at a much lower price and then make up for it in bulk. If you don’t make more doing a reading than you do a trailer, something is wrong.
I don’t like to discuss actual numbers with anyone but clients for obvious reasons. I will say that it’s easier for the client to simply tell you their budget. With that, you can figure out what it’s going to take to get the job done and what you’re willing to do (or not do) for that amount.
If you take the job, always give them the best you reasonably can for the price you agreed upon. Never give them less than what they paid for. Try to give more whenever possible.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Good advice ZL. I used to do television commercial voice overs and was paid $100 per hour by the producer, with an hour minimum (even though it typically was a one take shot and I was out of there in ten minutes).
On audio books, I have seen a wide range of fees online from a penny per word, to five cents per word, to a dollar a page, or anywhere from $100-$300 per hour for recording and production work. So, like you said there seems to be a lot of room to work with.
Again thanks for your perspective and the different channel you provided for folks to consider on this topic.
Happy New Year.