My First (and Maybe Last) Attempt at Audiobook Narration
I’d like to think I’m a solid “out loud” reader. I’ve done it a lot in front of an audience, and every time I read my latest romcom, Running with Hounds…and an English Degree, people would tell me afterward I should do the audiobook. So I did.
What a humbling experience. LOL I have a ton of respect for narrators who do that for a living.
The one great thing about this venture was that I was able to utilize a professional recording studio. I work for a tech company with a video team, and they have all the necessary equipment (top-notch mic, headphones, a quiet room to record, etc.). They were instrumental in helping me get through the process, putting together broken files whenever I messed up and adjusting the audio quality. I couldn’t have asked for a better setup or support team.
So the only one who could screw things up was me. And man, there was a lot I hadn’t considered going into it. Because the mic was SO good, it picked up every sound, so I had to print out my original version and try to spread out the pages in front of me to avoid moving them around. Then I realized, because my book is written in first person and there’s a lot with the protagonist’s internal thoughts, the listener wouldn’t be able to discern between what she’s saying and what she’s just thinking. So I went through chapter by chapter to add tags for conversation and her personal musings.
And that was just the beginning. With all the different characters, I tried to vary my inflection and change my voice to help distinguish who was talking. I had to try to maintain the same distance from the mic every time I returned to record, which was over several weeks. I discovered my voice couldn’t handle more than 4 chapters before my throat would get sore and my tone scratchy. While I’m excellent with enunciation and projection (although that wasn’t needed with this mic), I didn’t have any training on how to treat my vocal cords during the process. And my allergies worked against me depending on the pollen count that day.
Of course, once all that was done, it was post-production time. I listened to all the files with my boyfriend, which was a huge help because he heard certain things that didn’t catch my ear. And we discovered that I constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, wet my lips every couple of paragraphs, so there were tons of smacking noises throughout. Listening to that over and over again, it was the only thing I could hear after a while. Never mind the whole chapters that were read in a raspy tone—those I rerecorded because there was no saving them.
Thankfully, there are easy-to-use programs for editing. On my own, I was able to delete those annoying smacking sounds and lower the breathy noises as well. Some chapters had very little while others I sounded asthmatic, depending how close I was to the mic. And having rerecorded some things, the video team adjusted a few of the files to match the pitch of previous chapters. When talking with one of the team members, I mentioned wanting to rerecord the entire thing, and he warned, “At this point, you want to think about the amount of effort you’re putting into it and how much or how little it would improve what you already have.”
The final step, of course, was uploading the finished files. I used a site called Findaway Voices, which has a lot of resources to help you create an audiobook, or you can bring already completed files and they’ll run them through a quality check. One thing I hadn’t done was chosen a short clip for a retail sample, but I was able to use the editing program to grab a section from one of the chapters. Then the site sends everything off to 40 different distributors where it can take up to 30 days for your work to appear. Right now Running with Hounds…and an English Degree is offered on nine sites: Audiobooks.com, BingeBooks, Chirp, Google Play, Kobo, Libro.fm, NOOK Audiobooks, Scribd and Storytel.
So, would I do this again for another self-published book? Maybe. This whole thing was a learning experience and I now know what to watch out for while reading. It WAS fun to try something new (especially once I got the hang of audio editing), and knowing I could do all this for free was pretty liberating. But now that I fully understand how much work goes into creating an audiobook, I may just leave it up to the professionals.
As a bonus, I put together a blooper reel of some of the mistakes I made while recording. You can check it out on my NEW YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9Fr8QrtvEE