Audiobook Recording - My Experience

04/10/2019

For those of you who don't know, I have just finished my first job as a narrator of an audiobook! This was a real eye-opening experience for me, and so I thought it might be good to share my experiences recording this audiobook, and hopefully help anyone who is considering doing this in the future.

I've written this article talking about three main things, the process of getting the job and submitting the book, the recording, and the editing, and then added a Top 10 Tips list at the bottom. so feel free to scroll down to the part which seems most relevant to you in the process.
This is a long article, so if you want to skip to a certain part of this, then feel free, I've added picture between the different sections to help split it up a little for you

Some of these might seem obvious but trust me, if you follow these tips then you'll be fine 

Background

Towards the end of last year, I landed a could of voiceover roles, for an online web series and a student film, and I really enjoyed the experience. So after this, I did a bit of looking around and signed up to the website ACX, which is a place where actors and authors work together to produce audiobooks for Audible. I uploaded a few samples I had from other work, recorded a couple more for good measure, and then started auditioning for lots of different audiobooks.

After about a dozen or so auditions, I was contacted about a job recording for a romantic novel. I wasn't sure if my voice was best suited for that, but I recorded an audition and sent it anyway. After a few days, the author got back to me, and said that they would be happy for me to record the audio for their book. I was over the moon!
So after a little bit of online form filling and contract signing, I was officially able to record the audio for their book!

Recording

After getting the contract, I immediately started to record the audio for the book. Thinking back on it now, I feel that I probably should have read the whole book before I started to record the audio, instead what I did was read the chapters I was going to record before recording them. This worked for me, but made the recording process a little slower as I wasn't as familiar with the text as I probably should have been.

The actual recording of the audiobook was the really fun part. I enjoy getting behind the characters, understanding their motives, and trying to convey all of this to the reader of the book. Just doing the recording alone, I learned so much about my own vocal ticks, and how to get the best out of my own home microphone and dicatphone setup.
As you can see from the photo, I do not have a high quality setup, and I often had to pause my recording due to people/things around me being noisy, but I created a rough schedule in my mind for recording the book and tried to stick to this as best I could do. This was great, and allowed me to get all of the audio (aside from a few re-records after spotting mistakes) to be done well before the deadline.

My style of recording is to start from the top and just go for it. The chapters had several parts to them, and I used these as natural break points for my recording, where I could save the audio I've recorded and take a drink before starting the next section.
When I made a mistake, as I inevitably did, I'd stop speaking, pause for a moment, then go back to the previous break point and start again from there. This meant that most of my recordings had lots of little breaks in them, making them much easier to identify and correct when I got to the next stage of the process. The Editing. 

Editing

This was the part of the process I have the least experience in, and is the bit I learnt the most about. I wouldn't say that I enjoy the editing as much as the recording, but I certainly think that I am much more confident about doing this for future projects. I used the free audio editing software Audible for most of my editing, and the tool made the process really easy to do. the only problem with it was that all of my recorded audio needed to be converted to MP3 files before I could edit them.

The audio editing was not a particularly complicated processs, until it got to the final corrections, because most of it was simply cutting out the mistakes and joining the different audio files together. I did use a couple of the tools to try and remove some of the background noise from the audio, but didn't do this much because I didn't want it to affect the audio quality or make it sound too processed.
When I was editing, I'd have the book next to the editor, and would read the text as I listened to the audio file. I did this not only to make sure that I'd picked up all the mistakes, but also to try and make sure that it sounds the way it reads. This might not seem obvious at first, but it really helped me keep track of the story and gives me a better insight into what the listener would experience when compared to the text.

The actual editing process took longer than I initially thought it would, especially for the first few chapters while I was still learning, so in future I will get this process started MUCH earlier than I did this times round. This is something which I wish I had started to do as I recorded the book.

Submission

The final thing I want to talk about is the actual audio submission process. This was really easy to do on the ACX website, but I didn't know how the process worked when I started so thought a few lines about this might be helpful.
Firstly, the author can listen to the audio throughout the entire recording process (something my author didn't know), so let them know when you upload the files and they can listen and give you feedback as you go along. By telling them when you've reached certain goals (first 5 chapters, corrected any errors, half way through, etc), then you can both work in parallel to make sure that the whole process is as smooth and efficient as possible.

Also, once you press the submit button, this is not the end of the process, the author gets another chance to listen to the files again and can ask you to correct any mistakes which were missed in the process. This was useful for my book as there were a minor corrections which we both missed through the process, and this allowed us to correct them before the book was accepted and submitted.

Now, onto my tips.
Some of these might seem obvious but trust me, if you follow these tips then you'll be fine and will make the most out of the process! So here are:

Tim's Top Tips;

  1. Read the whole book before starting the recording
  2. Don't rush your reading, take it slow and absorb the words on the page
  3. Ensure your setup is consistent and professional
  4. Record at your own pace, but with a clear schedule in mind
  5. Do the editing alongside the recording
  6. Submit the files as soon as possible
  7. Communicate with the author throughout the process
  8. Don't worry about making mistakes
  9. Make sure you meet your deadlines
  10. Enjoy the process


I hope this was helpful to you, please let me know if it was, or let me know your own experiences and I'll add your advice to this page as well.

Until next time,

Tim

Image credits: image 1

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