Today’s guest blogger, Richard Rieman of RRVoice.com, is the author of The Author’s Guide to AudioBook Creation. He’s also an audio book self-publishing expert and a top Audible narrator. Richard has narrated dozens of titles on Amazon, Audible, iTunes, and more. He also produces audio books for authors voicing their own audio books and consults authors seeking a narrator.

Guest post: 5 common audio book production misconceptions

By Richard Rieman

Do you ever wonder if an audio version of your book is a good idea?

Maybe you listen to audio books – perhaps a Harry Potter book with Jim Dale doing more than 150 voices – and you think that it’s probably way too complicated or expensive.

Not necessarily!

It’s not as hard as you think if you do a little research and know what you’re getting into first. Like anything else in the book publishing business, the more you know about how to do it, the better your end product will be.

If you’re an audio books rookie, you’ll want to get smart about these five common audio book misconceptions now:

1. Audio books aren’t popular enough to make this worth my while.

E-book popularity is waning, but audio book listening on Audible grew 38 percent last year. Audio book sales growth is up 20 percent worldwide two years in a row.

Smartphone listening is the fastest growing method for enjoying audio books, so automakers such as Honda and GM are now including audio book apps from Audible and iTunes in new cars.

Audio books also have their own fan base, so it’s a way to sell more books.

2. It costs a lot to create an audio book.

As recently as 10 years ago, audio books could cost $30,000 or more to produce. Getting a recording studio, voice actors, audio editors, music rights, and more meant that this was the realm of major publishers, not individual authors.

Now, thanks to the growth of self- publishing in the audio book world and the explosion in the number of narrators with home studios and editing skill, high quality audio books can be produced for less than $3,000. If you’re willing to share your royalties with a narrator/producer, the upfront cost can be reduced to several hundred dollars or less.

Amazon created ACX (the audio book Creation Exchange) to make it easy for you to find narrators for both fiction and non-fiction titles at a relatively low cost.

3. It’s okay to settle for a good voice instead of an actor.

When choosing a narrator, you can easily be seduced by a beautiful voice. But what you need to look for is a voice actor who can distinguish characters by subtly using different vocal tones and inflections and glide easily into the changing emotions of your story. A skilled narrator can hold your interest for hours by talking to you, not by reading to you out loud.

4. You can narrate it yourself easily. 

There are a few good reasons to narrate you own book:

• It’s your book and words, so you can tell your story best. You know your characters, story, or subject, as well as the thinking behind your words, better than anyone else.
• You keep more money. If you pay a narrator, you will either share royalties or pay them upfront to produce your audio book. When you narrate your own, your royalty payments go to you (after your publisher or Amazon take its piece of it).
• You have acting or radio/TV experience or have done lots of public speaking.

None of the above? Then get a professional to do it.

It really is a lot harder than it looks. Do you really want the bad reviews that come from a poor narrating performance when listeners judge you against the professionals?

5. You don’t have to promote your audio book.

It’s great to produce an audio book, but if it falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Your audio book needs to be shouted out to your fans and new listeners.

Here are some tips:

• Include an audio book sample in all promotions. The “retail sample” required by ACX is ideal for this. Your book cover and audio clip can be used in all social media and your website.
• Request listener reviews from all your contacts and use a review service like Audiobook Boom.
• Create a promotional video like this one for my book. You can hire a book trailer expert or use a resource like Animoto for less than $100.
• With future books, try to time your audio book release with the print and e-book versions so all of your efforts can simultaneously share your promotion efforts.

Not all books are suited to audio versions, but many are. Why not take advantage of the opportunity to reach more book lovers through another medium?

What do you notice about the narration of an audio book? What stands out for you?

I met Wayne Hughes in a Facebook group and was intrigued by his perspective on book narration. In addition to being a narrator who specializes in book-length projects, he is a freelance writer and editor. His background is in journalism, theater, and broadcasting. Learn more about Hughes on his website or Facebook Page.  

For reading out loud!

By Wayne Hughes

When I was a cub newspaper reporter, we called the night editor “knuckles.”  We’d turn copy over to him, proud of getting it on his desk before deadline.

When he saw a problem, he broke young reporters to his way of doing things by standing, shoving aside the mounds of teletype paper, empty coffee cups and ash trays brimming with half-smoked cigars, leaning over his desk and supporting himself on his knuckles.

We knew what was coming, so we tried not to make eye contact.

“Hughes, g**damnit!  Have you read this?”

My timid newcomer response: “Well, yes, I read it through.”

“All right, everybody, shut the hell up!” he’d yell.  Here it came:  “Hughes is going to read to us now.  Go on, do it.”

It was the worst possible embarrassment for a young reporter. He expected it to be read out loud, above the din of typewriters and phone conversations. It was his way of focusing on the readability of even the driest car chase.

It was his contention that anything written should sound right or the reader wouldn’t get all the information. I only had to do that once to get the point.

Ever since those days, I’ve tried to read everything I’ve written out loud. It’s amazing how typos, verb-tense disagreements, and incomplete sentences come leaping off the page when vocalized. Now that I’ve embarked on a second career as a book narrator, it’s even more important.

Speak the speech, I pray you

The importance of reading out loud is stressed by the University of North Carolina’s Writing Center:

• Listeners appreciate order – Listeners can’t go back a couple of pages or paragraphs to pick up the thread. Thoughts must come in a predictable order.
• Train for transitions – A writer must become disciplined in helping the reader move from one idea to the next, without fragmentary or run-on sentences.
• Eliminate the errors – Typos sound silly if they look silly on the page, even though you felt you’d caught them all.
• Keep it simple – Grammatically incorrect sentences sound worse than they look.
• Listen to yourself – If you’re not on deadline, have a helpful friend read to you. This gives you a chance to “stand off” from your work and give it an objective “listen.” If not, consider text-to-speech software.

Read it before I do

Case in point: I’ve rarely turned down a narration assignment until I’ve waded all the way in. Sometimes, it’s difficult to determine how “voiceable” a piece will be from just the audition excerpt or even the “first 15” as required by Amazon Creative Exchange (ACX).

Love is blind and so is the author who’s so in love with his subject that he can’t see the trees for the underbrush of misplaced nouns, verbs, and subjects. I remember an assignment that looked interesting at first blush and read well enough until it became obvious the author was suffering from “wandering parentheses.”

He would start a paragraph with a solid-enough topic sentence, but immediately offer a parenthetical aside which ran on for one or more paragraphs before the over-stretched thought of the sentence was picked up. I tried to work with him to salvage his prose by cutting back on the parentheticals, but inevitably pulled out of the job. If for no other reason, it was impossible to draw sufficient breath to voice the run-on sentences before light-headedness set in. And, fundamentally, it’s not the narrator’s job to edit.

He clearly had not read any of his work aloud and was not about to. He let me know he was just too sophisticated for such a thing. In contrast, you can hear excerpts of some easy-to-voice works on my web site.

Sounding good

Give narrators a hand. If you’d like your readers to hear your work as well as read it, please read it aloud.

Rewrite, reread, let it sit and reread again. You sound good when narrators sound good.

And yes, I read this aloud, several times.

What questions do you have for Wayne Hughes about audio books? Ask them in a comment!