I’ve been told for many years that I have a lovely voice, even before I started podcasting; lots more since then. Whilst I’ve been known for my accents and impersonations as well, of which some have actually got me in serious trouble in years past, it seemed a logical extension to consider audiobooks and vocal acting.

Upon putting my name down at an agency I wasn’t sure what to expect and when I landed an audition, then I landed the narration job for an audiobook! I was ecstatic. Once that wore off I signed the contract and realised I was now on the hook to record, edit and supply a complete audiobook that someone else had poured their time, energy and effort into creating the written version of. It was my job to narrate that book and make it sing!

Easy huh?

Oh boy.

I think it’s fair to say that I underestimated how much work it would be and looking back, just how much I learned in making it.

Some of the key lessons I learned from this experience that weren’t obvious to me when I signed up:

• It is NOT possible to record even a short book in a single recording session especially in the midst of a COVID19 lockdown. My house is my recording studio and with the lockdown restrictions my recording periods are very brief, disjointed and highly problematic. Whilst I accept in future this won’t always be the case it made this particularly challenging. Children, TVs and music blaring, neighbours with too much gardening time on their hands mowing their lawns constantly, a Harley Davison motorbiking enthusiast up the street, it was incredibly frustrating!
• Keeping a consistent pacing of speech, the same tone and pitch between recordings is extremely difficult. I learned to record in blocks wherever I could to avoid differences in my voice, and keep my positioning in front of the microphone identical every time.
• Test your gear twice before you start a recording session! I unfortunately had a bad cable and I didn’t realise until I had an hour recorded! I had to re-record all of it.
• If you put down some audio and you start editing and the levels aren’t the way you like, admit defeat early and re-record it! I made the mistake of persevering with sub-par audio for several hours of editing but after a few listen-backs to the finished product, I just couldn’t give it to the client. It wasn’t good enough. I should have cut my losses hours earlier and admitted I’d had a hardware failure and just re-recorded before I spent any time trying to salvage it.
• Make sure you pre-record at your set levels, keep the same recording booth layout and confirm all the way through your workflow to your audio editing final output to ensure every link in the chain is set correctly before recording for any significant duration.
• Scan a few words ahead, read those words after a delay in your brain, listen back to what you said whilst re-reading the same text to confirm you read exactly what was written. This is as hard as it sounds, but after about the 3 hour mark I started to get the hang of it. Like learning Morse Code I was amazed my brain was able to bend itself around that way of read/speak/reviewing but it actually is possible.
• You might be recording multiple chapters spread over different recording and editing sessions, but the end listener will be listening in succession, hence between Chapters take an extra step and match the volume levels in post-production between each of the Chapters as the final listener will notice the differences.
• This is someone else’s hard work. When you’re being paid to turn it into an audio form, you need to do your absolute best job to make their work SING! Give them your very best, don’t phone it in. If you need to re-record a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, the WHOLE THING because it doesn’t make the grade, then just do it and do it right!
• I edited in Ferrite on my iPad (as I do all my podcasts) and unfortunately there was a strange volume glitch (I submitted a bug report to the developer), but fortunately I learned how to work around it by force-restarting after a second track import which fixed it. Unfortunately I’d sent out a badly volume-matched final audio chapter before I realised the problem was with Ferrite. Not a good look.
• Expect feedback from the client. I didn’t submit a single full chapter without at least one suggestion for improvement. Sometimes the written word just doesn’t translate into a spoken sentence that sounds correct. Some abbreviations should be spoken in full and others not. The pacing of some sentences and the emphasis might need to shift. I had all that sort of feedback but by incorporating it, I know the client will get the result that they want. It’s their book!

Of course this is the first audiobook I’ve ever recorded for a client. Realistically though it wasn’t what my friends and family expected. Firstly it wasn’t fiction, I didn’t do any voices, and spoke in my normal accent. In some audiobooks I’m aware of, narrators tweak sentences and ad-lib to an extent, lending their own personality to the reading. That isn’t always the case and wasn’t for this book.

Am I Planning Another AudioBook?

Absolutely yes, I am. I’ve done another audition and I’m working on my own series of AudioBooks as an Author-Narrator. The next time I’ll have a much better idea what to expect and am intent on doing an even better job each subsequent book I narrate.

So How Long Was This Book?

The book runs for just a touch under 3 hours, which is quite short for an audiobook but I speak pretty fast. A “normal” narrator should take about 3.5hrs for the same word count. That said my client loved the pacing and that’s what matters to me.

So in terms of Raw Audio, unedited, including all re-records and edits was 5.3hrs of raw audio. The entire book took approximately 28 hours to record, edit, re-record, normalise, remove noises, review and organise ready for release.

That’s a lot. I suspect I’ll get better next book but it’s no walk in the park. I lost about 10 hours where I had to re-record effectively a third of the book so that didn’t help…

Conclusion

The book is “The Knack Of Selling” by Mat Harrington. In reading the book I have to admit, I learned a lot of little things I had long suspected were salesperson “tricks” and a few things I hadn’t picked up on too. So to be completely fair, not only did I record this book for Mat, I learned a lot about sales while I was at it!

It’s currently available on iTunes and the Google Play audiobook stores.

I’m planning my own audiobooks in future and I’m going to record some of my accents as well on my profile page at Findaway Voices.

If you’d like me to record your audiobook, reach out and let me know. I’d love to help bring your work to life too!