For most of my life people have been telling me I’m inordinately fond of the sound of my own voice. Well, it turns out a few other people like it too. Chuck Wendig had me do a book trailer, John Hornor Jacobs has borrowed my pipes a couple of times, I’ve recorded a mess of my short fiction, and now I’ll be reading the audio book for my debut novel, PENANCE.
(A hat tip here to the folks at AudioGo, who are producing the audio book, for giving a first-timer a shot, and to Emlyn Rees, my editor at Exhibit A, for going to bat for me when I told him that reading the book is something I’d very much like to do. Going to bat, Emlyn, that’s an American thing, has to do with baseball.)
Now, though, I gotta deliver.
See, I like doing voice work. I like the challenge of bringing a story to life by reading it out loud. I’d like to do more of it. But that ain’t gonna happen if I gum this up. Not to mention PENANCE is my book It’s my first book. So I really don’t want to fuck it up.
But I haven’t been a big audio book consumer over the years. Long car trips a couple of times. I still remember the time I was driving the family down to squat at the joint my parents used to rent for the winter in Florida. My Dad did a fair bit of driving in those days and was an audio book fan. We had compatible tastes and he’d just finished Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith. He knew I’d have some long late-night stretches when the kids were asleep and I could finally shut off that damn Raffi tape, so he lent me the cassettes. It was a great production of a great story. (It’s not like nobody’s heard of Martin Cruz Smith or his Arkady Renko novels, but they’re a few years back now, maybe something some of you newer or younger readers haven’t read. I heartily endorse them. In fact, I just finished Stallion Gate, another Smith novel, this one centered around the final weeks of the Manhattan Project in New Mexico that was also tremendous – so a write to check out if you haven’t yet.)
Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, I’m driving to Florida and listening to Polar Star. Now remember, I’m kinda old, so this thing was on a mess of cassette tapes. It’s asshole dark thirty AM somewhere in the bowels of southern Georgia and the story is rocketing along to its climax. The tape ends, one more tape to go. And it’s not there. I even pull over to look for it, and I never pulled over. You can ask my kids. As a parent, I was usually a pretty tolerant, easy going guy. But stick me in a minivan with three young kids and 1,200 miles to cover and I changed. Maybe it was just the daunting task. Maybe it was a side effect of my standard travel diet – Diet Dr. Pepper, Hershey’s Minatures and No-Doz. Stopping was not on my agenda. You need to go to the bathroom? Really? You can take a leak when I need gas, kid. So pulling over, that was a big deal. But I did. I pulled over, woke up the kids and ransacked the van. The tape wasn’t there.
We finally get to my parents’ joint and the first thing my old man does is wiggle that last tape at me with a nasty little smile on his face and say “Looking for this?” Dad didn’t let his evil streak off the leash often, but when he did he knew how to stick it in and break it off.
Anyway, the point is I understand how good an audio book can be. And I’m looking for some help here. Are you and audio book fan? What makes one work for you? Or not work? How much “acting” do you expect – how much differentiation between characters’s voices and such?
Finally, what’s one of your favorites – especially in the thriller genre. I’m listening to several as I prep for my taping, and I’m looking to learn from the best.
So drop your tips and favorites in the comments box. To reward you, I’ll pick two comments at random and send the lucky ducks signed ARCs of PENANCE.
I am a huge audiobook fan. I always have one tree (or e) book and one audiobook going. I listen to and from work, while mowing the yard, walking the dog, folding laundry, things like that. I’m pretty picky about my audiobooks though. I tend to stick to books with the same narrator, or to certain authors that somehow always seem to have good narrators. Stephen King, Don Winslow, James Lee Burke never disappoint (except for IT by King). Steven Weber wore me out on that one. A few of my favorite narrators are Frank Muller (best ever), George Guidall, Joe Barrett, and Ray Porter. Ron Perlman was absolutely perfect with CITY OF THIEVES.
I, personally do not care for “acting.” I also seem to have trouble with female narrators, unless they are foreign. Go figure. I mentioned Steven Weber and IT. I felt he was just over the top, but others love it. It’s nice to have some differentiation between the character voices (if the narrator can pull it off), but it can also be very annoying if not done well. To me it’s nice but not necessary.
You need to listen to Scott Brick, who has done so many mystery/thriller books. I think he does a great job. I listen to audiobooks all the time at work. I do like a little acting, and if there is a main secondary character, I like a different voice inflection. Doesn’t have to be anything crazy, but just enough that you know it’s someone else. It helps for a character who pops up a lot in the book. Good luck!
I’m on the road right now and traveling with three audiobooks. They’re essential for long car trips. I was thinking as I was listening to one the other about how the convention seems to be that the reader (voice actor) switch voices between characters, and that if he or she slips up, you really seem to notice. But what if he or she just read them in one voice? Would it matter so much to me? I don’t choose audiobooks because of the actors reading, but I know some people do. I think if I liked the reader’s voice, I’d be content to hear it all in his or her voice. Sometimes, no matter how good the actor, a dude pretending to be a woman is just weird. And vice versa. Hope this helps.
Thank you, too, for your recent post about pursuing your dreams as a writer. It meant a lot to me. I think I’m in similar circumstances. A lifetime of editorial work, but little of my own writing to show for it. Hopefully correcting that all now.
My number one tip for you is to develop a close working relationship with your studio director. If there is anything that does not work between you, the book will not turn out well. If for whatever reason, the director is replaced mid project then you might as well start over from the beginning.
The studio director has to have the ear’s equivalent of an audio microscope. Their whole attitude will revolve around the very make up of the syllables of the words you are reading, their color, timbre, and force. Very little of this can be heard by you as you read which is why extremely few if any self produced audio novels have worked.
Many of the professional audio book readers have extensive stage acting experience and many of them trained in the U.K. system where voice is everything.
Which leads me to “character” voices, accents, and dialect.
Truly, unless you can do an Australian, Scottish, Canadian, or whatever accent perfectly then do not try.
Nothing turns off a reader faster that to hear their own accent done incorrectly, even very slightly incorrectly. The same goes for dialect.
You can try putting on different voices for your various characters but unless you have some high level innate talent this will not work without proper acting training.
If your book is written well then you don’t have to bring on a cast of singing dancing character actors anyway so unless you are a hundred percent sure of your abilities just trust to your writing and your own voice.
Expect long and physically hard sessions. It is demanding work that does not tolerate any sloppiness. Expect to have to read certain passages, if not just sentence fragments, over and over and over again to get right.
Your voice will change from day to day and even throughout a session. This can be quite troublesome when the director and audio engineer have to match up the previous day’s work with the start of the next. That match up has to be perfect or the listener will hear the difference. It can take an hour or more sometimes to get your new voice to match the old session’s voice.
There are many talented readers out there but there is little point in me recommending them because no two of us can agree on their relative merits, such is the discriminatory way humans hear and understand different voices.
That said, in my personal opinion, the most accomplished voice talent I have ever heard is Patrick Tull. Over the course of some 30 years he read all 20 of the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin novels for Recorded Books Inc in accents, characters, and dialogue.
In all of that time, and for all of those novels, his voice and his acting never wavered or changed.
Good luck. I hope you have a good and fun time.
Rick Grant
Calgary
When I lived out bush I used to listen to audio books, mainly on the drive back to civilisation. But when I moved, I stopped buying them as I need to be a captive audience for them. A wall of text as an e-book or a real book and I’m glued to it, but I just can’t do it aurally unless i am confined..
But I love your stuff I’ve heard, Chuck Wendig’s one, and your stories that I downloaded last year (I didn’t know about the This Dark Earth excerpt, but I’ll listen to that when I kick my students out of the classroom), so I’d be sorely tempted to buy the audio version.
Here’s a breakdown of what I thought of the handful of audiobooks that I do remember…
Tony Robinson reading Terry Pratchett’s Truckers: This is the first one I got (if you don’t count those Disney “Read along in your book. You’ll know it is time to turn the page when you hear a chime like this “Dling!” (I go Dling! when I’m reading textbooks at my students, so that if they’re napping they’ve got a chance to be jolted back to getting learning stuffed in their noggins)). I was really excited, because I liked him in Blackadder, but more importantly because I remembered him from Tales from Fat Tulip’s Garden. These stories had minimal props, no special effects and were basically him being a shit-hot talespinner (here’s a clip as an example http://youtu.be/1_fE16kOM34 ). I had built it up too much in my mind, and Truckers while good, wasn’t mindblowing. He did some voice acting, but not as much as I was expecting from what I’d seen him do, so I felt a bit gypped.
Chris Barrie reading Red Dwarf: I thought this was absolutely fantastic, as did a mate, who pinched it off me (remembering it made me go look it up, to link to a snippet http://youtu.be/S20jxNaBXZU and wow, you can buy it amazingly cheaply! I’m picking it up when I get home tonight). It has an extra layer of awesome, as Chris Barrie plays Rimmer in the TV version of Red Dwarf. In the audiobook version, he has good narrator’s voice, and then he approximately impersonates the voices of the other actors – including his own. That just made it for me, I loved it.
I had All the Weyrs of Pern written by Anne McCaffery and also read by her I believe. No voice acting, flat and emotional, except when a certain character kicks the bucket. You can hear her breaking down, and it sounds like they had to come back and record it in two parts – but that’s not a bad thing, it made it even more powerful.
I had a version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, no idea who was reading it though. I accidentally put one disc on shuffle, and hadn’t noticed it was jumping around until I was about three quarters of the way through, but the book, radio version and TV version all have stuff jumbled about anyway, so it isn’t that surprising. Pretty sure it was a flat, straight narration with no accents.
All the books were ones I had already read (and sometimes had seen in another format so I often already had pre-assigned character voices stuck in my head), were hugely famous and often there was another extra element that made them sexy above and beyond the dead tree versions I of them that I had in my possession. From what I’ve heard of your readings, I don’t reckon you need to do accents or different voices, your normal voice is compelling enough. I would most likely pick up the ebook version for myself (shipping is a bitch over here), and would think about getting the audiobook for my parents, as they have recently started dabbling in audiobooks and they’re far more into crime than me so I am sure they’d love your stuff.
Hi Dan,
I’ve gotten quite into audio books recently.
To get a feel for different narrators I recommend checking out Audible. I’m sure you know the site, it’s pretty much the amazon of audio books, actually amazon does own it. Every book has a sample clip which is a great way to familiarize yourself with the different narrators.
One of my favorite narrators is Will Patton. He has a slight southern drawl that I find very easy on the ears. He’s done On The Road, as well as others from Burke, Dennis Johnson, etc.
For me the qualities I look for in a good narrator is someone who reads as if he’s telling a friend a story at a bar.
I like an inviting narrator that’s easy to get in a rhythm with his words.
I too prefer some inflection between character voices as it helps me keep the thread of the story going in my mind. Nothing too crazy though.
Also don’t worry about reading everything perfectly clear, a flub now and then is human, and doesn’t really bother me. No narration is perfect.
The only other thing I can think of is, a good narrator tends to read dialogue faster, which I like. If you read it in the same pace as everything else it tends to get stale. Punch it up!
I think you have a great set of pipes, and I look forward to hearing your new book.
Go to http://www.aripublishing.com click Writing and publishing tips on the toolbar and scroll down to ;How convert your novel to an audio book.’
And the winners are *two-finger drumroll on table top* Rhonda H and Rick Grant. RIck, I emailed you through your website. Just hit me back with an address. Rhonda, email me at dboshea1@gmail.com with your mailing address. Thanks for the helpful hints, all.
If it isn’t too late, I agree with almost all of these comments. I listen five or more hours a week. I’ve had trouble with female narrators who try to fake a male voice. Doesn’t work. Slight change in inflection works. Avoid acting. Let the listener try to imagine the story. The bar idea is a good one. Since you like Burke, listen to Will Patton. He does a bit more acting in his voice, especially Clete, but I think he gets the characters. BTW, so does Burke think that. Remember that many are listening in a car or other places with noise so do not whisper. Your voice is perfect for this, just watch out that you don’t trail off too far.