We went behind the scenes to find out what really happens when a narrator steps inside the booth for Audible, the world’s largest provider of audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment. Despite offering more than 200,000 titles across every topic imaginable, creating a new listen is surprisingly intimate.
Sound engineer Bill Dowling, together with studio manager Karly Joyce, has recorded thousands of hours of audio from his studio, where he produces audiobooks for Audible. Together, they take care of everything from finding the right voice talent to creating the best sound and stitching it all together, giving them plenty of insight into this unique process.
The right casting can be make or break
Bill says finding the best talent is the most important part of the process: “The voice has to take you into the story and keep you with them right to the end. The best narrators can add light and shade to their voice and sustain energy in their sound. They bring a story to life and take the listener on a journey, so selecting the right voice for the right book is paramount.”
Voice actor Jacqui Duncan agrees. After years of experience working in radio and TV, she recently recorded Canna Campbell’s The $1000 Project, launching on Audible from 29 June. She says Audible chose her for the role because she has a similar voice to the author, but she’s not a writer herself.
On the other hand, Lisa Messenger, entrepreneur and author of Daring and Disruptive and Money and Mindfulness, says her audiobooks are about connecting with her tribe. When it came time to produce them, she wanted to be the one to narrate them.
“I asked myself, ‘Do I really want to do it?’ But my readers and my community are deeply engaged, and while I was reading I thought, I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing this.”
Great narrators show emotion
Writer and publisher Phillipa McGuinness recently recorded her own memoir, The Year Everything Changed: 2001, for Audible. Many audiobook listens are moving, and Phillipa’s is especially so: a story of loss, grief, and a need for change. Reading the emotional words out loud was sometimes overwhelming.
“When I got to the chapter in the book when [her son] Daniel dies,” she says, “I started to think, ‘I have wasted everyone’s time.’ I wondered, ‘How the hell am I going to do this?’”
But it was familiar territory for Bill. “Some books may be heavy or emotional in subject matter, so we really need to make the narrator comfortable – particularly if an author is reading their own story and the content is traumatic.”
After reading aloud her own words about her stillborn son, Phillipa turned to Bill and said she worried her voice was too shaky, and that the confident authority she had had in previous chapters was gone. “He said to me, ‘How strange would it be for listeners to hear someone tell this story as though it wasn’t affecting them? Listeners want to hear authenticity.’”
Authenticity comes in many different forms, though, and Audible’s catalogue includes something for every listener. For example, Bill and Karly say they’ve never laughed as hard as they did while recording Benjamin Law and his mother narrate their own advice book Law School.
“We were crying happy and needed laughs breaks. It was so funny. To witness their relationship was heart-warming and entertaining – like no other mother/son relationship we’ve seen. It made the perfect audiobook.”
It’s a marathon – preparation is key
Recording an audiobook can take up to 30 hours – and that’s before production. “It’s not as easy as sitting down at a mic and reading out loud,” Bill says. “Even some professional voice actors struggle – it can be quite a marathon and really is its own artform.”
A good voice actor will do plenty of research before their session. “If characters are involved, a good artist will list the characters with descriptions, to get the variety and range right,” Bill says. “A voice actor might need to read medical terms or words they aren’t familiar with. A good actor will do the research, check online dictionaries to ensure pronunciations are correct, and sometimes chat with the author directly.”
In the booth, there is a dedicated recording space just for Audible. The narrator is angled away from the producer to make it feel private, and without any distractions from the other side of the glass. It’s a reading zone, specifically designed to create the best end-listener experience.
The narrators all agree that it’s difficult, but rewarding work. “Quite often as I was reading,” Phillipa says, “I thought, ‘If I had known I would be reading this book out loud, I would have made it shorter.’”
For Lisa, it was full of surprises. “The recording experience has been much harder than I expected,” she says. “But it’s been beautiful, too.”
New listeners receive their first audiobook free when they sign up for a free 30-day trial. Head to Audible.com.au to select one of these newly-recorded listens, or choose from more than 200,000 audiobooks.
