Part 2: Choosing a Narrator
Part 3: Creating the Audiobook
Part 4: Publishing (Coming December 26th)
Part 5: Marketing & Selling (Coming some time in 2022)
In Part One, I describe how I found voice actors to audition to narrate my audiobook. I posted to several sites expecting 5-10 auditions, and instead got 83.
Criteria
So now it was time to start thinking about what I wanted in a narrator. My novel has four main POV protagonists, each with a unique voice, and I wanted a narrator who could handle all of them differently. Three of the main characters are men, one is a woman, so I was leaning a bit toward a male voice, but decided it didn’t really matter what gender the narrator would be. I think the finalists were about half and half male/female sounding.
One interesting note, though: While all the women who auditioned did just fine voicing the male characters, about half the men who auditioned failed in voicing the female characters. Sometimes they’d sound like parodies of a woman’s voice, and other times they just wouldn’t do individual voices for the characters at all.
The Script
I created a script by taking three different samples from the novel, each from a different POV. The script had a combination of dialog, action, description, and emotions. It was also, as it turned out, more than twice as long as it needed to be. If I do it again, I’ll use a shorter script, but I would still keep different sections for different points of view. 80-100 words should be long enough to get an idea for how that actor portrays that character. The three sections of my script 214-276 words long, which gets redundant fast. And takes a lot longer to listen to a hundred times.
Also, you might want to write something specifically for the audition script. Representative samples for the characters’ whose scenes they are, but there’s no real reason you need to take direct excerpts from the manuscript like I did.
Sorting the Auditions
90% of the auditions I received came in in the first week. But I had scheduled to leave the call up for three. I’d recommend only one week, then you don’t end up in the frustrating position of having a whole lot of auditions but having to wait another two weeks to choose one.
As they came in, I listened through all of them, sorting each into one of four folders, “No”, “Probably not”, “Maybe”, and “Probably.”
Some read my script, some sent in their own samples. I didn’t hold that against anyone. I do the same thing when I’m looking for work. For the most part, I just spam out my resume with a generic cover letter to everything that looks like I might be remotely qualified for or interested in, and then take the time to customize it for those I really want. Of those who read the script, maybe half read the whole thing, and the rest only the first part.
Some of the samples sent were of commercials, with all the music and sound effects making it impossible to hear any subtleties in the voice. These all went into the “No” folder. The others that went into “No” did weird or funny voices. Men who made exaggerated high pitched voices for the women characters. Also, narrators who did a straight read without changing their tones at all for the different characters.
“Probably not” was for narrators who weren’t bad. I could live with them if I didn’t find anyone better. “Maybe” was “I really like this one, but let’s see who else there is, too.” And the final category, “Probably” was for auditions I really liked. All but one in this category read from my script.
The Final Four
After sorting all the auditions, I had a dozen in “Probably” category, so I rejected everything in the first three. Now that I had only 12 auditions to go through, I could listen more carefully, and repeatedly. There were certain things that the ones that made it into the final four all had in common:
- They made the voices distinct, and that includes the narration. Several made the voices in dialog distinct, but the narration all sounded the same. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but not what I was going for.
- Clean recording. Everyone who made it into the final four was flawless. Truthfully, most of the ones that got rejected at this point were, too. One had a bit of static in the background that was almost imperceptible but started to get annoying by the fifth listen, and once I noticed it I couldn’t ignore it.
- Then I looked at price and what exactly they’re offering. Most of them were offering finished audio for a price I could afford. The ones that would require me to exceed my budget, or that required me to find a separate engineer were eliminated at this point.
At this point, I also started checking into the narrators themselves. I looked at other books they had done, and listened to their samples and read the reviews. I also looked into their web presence. Web site, social media, I looked for statements from other people who’ve worked with them, anything I could find. This didn’t actually turn up much that was useful, though a lot of problematic comments all over social media would have been a turnoff.
Once I had narrowed it down to four, it got a lot harder. I went back and listened to all of them over and over, trying to pick apart any nuance. There were a couple of sections of about ten seconds that I listened to all four in succession, repeatedly.
Making the Final Selection
Obviously, I finally decided on one. The things that finally clinched it were that the narration sounded different for each section, picking up on whose POV it was. I actually didn’t like her voice for Veer at all but, and this is where having the multiple sections come in and where the narrators who read all three were heavily advantaged, I absolutely loved her rendition of Grant (creepy af) and Toni and Carl in a scene with high emotions where each character is doing their best to conceal what they’re feeling and she nailed Toni’s combination of anger, confusion, and restraint perfectly. I knew when I included it that this would be a difficult scene for anyone to do and was surprised when a few people really did.
Coming up next: The process of working with my narrator to create a high-quality audiobook that sounds like I want it to sound like in Part 3: Creating the Audiobook
Yellow Tape and Coffee is available in print now everywhere books are sold. The audiobook will be released next week. If you’d like to get a sneak peak, you can download the first chapter now from https://dl.bookfunnel.com/aeztbic1fd