Joining Rekka and Brian are Karen White and James Patrick Cronin, giving authors a glimpse of the lifestyle, experiences, and process of voice actors.

Both are members of Screen Actors Guild / American Federation of Television Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). She started in theater and moved into audio book narration when she started to build her family. She claimed she was good with ProTools and editing to get the job (and then learned ProTools and editing). She went full time when her kids were a bit older. She also proofs audio books at home, comparing the early audiobook cut to the full original text.

James also started in theater and attended a union-sponsored event and met the head of casting of Audible studios. He had an informal interview and then a reading. He checked “Yes” for the “Do you have a home studio?” question and got the job (and then scrambled to get it set up).

Technical Stuff

A recording space needs to be as small as possible (while still letting you work) to reduce natural echoes and other sound issues. James has used pre-fab studios and walk-in closets.

You have to consider the sound you’re creating inside and keeping sound outside from entering.

Acoustic Foam, carpet, wind screens stops sounds from bouncing back at the microphone (breaking up the flat surfaces).

Keeping other sounds out requires mass and density (so interior rooms).

Audio book narration requires very quiet noise floors and succinct and clear speech. Most of the time you’re only hearing the human voice in audiobook narration and any additional sounds are obvious.

Some audiobook productions include sound effects or dramatizations, almost to the level of radio plays, as an effort to expand the audience by changing up the styles.

Karen has observed that audio book performance has trended away from a narrator aware of their audience, toward character voices and emotional performance. Listeners expect a one-person show. Brian blames The Song of Ice and Fire series for popularizing this, while three other people in this episode have actually listened to Harry Potter audiobooks.

There are page-turning techniques which must be practiced and perfected (or carefully spaced so the sound can be edited out)

Building the Narration from a Manuscript

Voice actors glean a lot of information about the characters they perform from the exposition written by the author, but they appreciate more input from authors rather than “complete freedom” to interpret everything (and then find out in book three there was an important accent detail they didn’t know about).

Frequently James doesn’t get to work directly with authors when a production company serves as liaison, so he keeps careful notes as he reads through to build the world consistently and do his best job.

Make sure you provide any known information to the narrator to make sure they aren’t caught unaware by a detail later in your series.

Even if you, as an author, think the pronunciation of an important name or word in your story is obvious, make sure the narrator is aware of your pronunciation preference. Pronunciation is regional and cultural, and often a word has multiple accepted pronunciations. Be clear, because things like this can slow down the production schedule or rack up a larger bill in the end.

Karen tends to take a break when chapters end but also, because she drinks luke warm herb tea to protect her voice and throat, plans around the capacity of her bladder. It may be 45 minutes up to 2 hours. She is careful to stretch and take care of her voice or her career could end earlier than she’d like.

James aims for 2-3 hours of finished audio in a work day. Anything more is unsustainable and doesn’t result in his best work.

~9,000 – 9,500 words = 1 finished hour of audio.