My Summer Job as an Audiobook Narrator

Tuesday, 19 November 2013 | by Pat's Picks

I recorded an audiobook for the first time this summer. I’ve waited until now to write about it because the release of the book was timed to coincide with this week’s 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

Mark Shaw wrote “The Poison Patriarch” to explore his theory that JFK’s father created a situation where the mafia expected favorable treatment from the Kennedy family. Mob leaders felt betrayed when President Kennedy (and his brother Bobby as Attorney General) got tough on organized crime.

Many audiobooks are produced by the publisher. But many more are produced directly by Audible, the division of Amazon that offers thousands of audio titles online. As a narrator, I’m hired to read the book, word for word, in one of Audible’s New York or New Jersey studios.

Voicing an audiobook is a test of endurance. The rule of thumb in the industry is that you’ll spend two to three hours in the studio to generate each hour of finished product. The difference between studio time and “finished” time is caused by several factors, mostly human. I pre-read each day’s pages and tried to mark unusual pronunciations or inflections, but on the fly there are many occasions when I didn’t get it quite right the first time.

Audible assigns a director to work with each narrator. In addition to handling the technical aspects of the session, the director is a jack-of-all-trades who checks the narrator’s read against the text, listens for pronunciations and room noise, and suggests a break when a voice sounds fatigued.

My surroundings in the Audible studio were simple: I work from a tiny, soundproof room equipped with a chair, a table and a lectern to hold my iPad. Working with the digital version of the book on a tablet is a huge advantage over paper, partly because it makes it easy to share the text and partly because there’s no noisy shuffling of paper in the recording session.

After five recording sessions, my work on “The Poison Patriarch” wrapped up in September. A producer steps in next to “master” the recording, eventually calling me back for a quick session to fix any errors that went unnoticed the first time I read the book. And now, in time for the JFK anniversary, the final 7 hour and 45 minute unabridged edition is up for sale.

You can check out The Poison Patriarch on Audible’s website. 
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