In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with MaryCatherine Jones of The Audiobook Experience about how authors can set themselves up for audiobook production success during the editing phase. They discuss the growing popularity of audiobooks, the importance of writing with the ear in mind, and how to avoid pitfalls like confusing names or unclear pronunciations. They also offer practical tips on working with narrators and directing listeners to bonus content, all with an eye toward meeting the expectations of today’s “ear readers.”
Listen to the Podcast: Preparing Your Book for Audiobook Production
Sponsors
This podcast is proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote.
This podcast is also sponsored by Gatekeeper Press, the all-inclusive Gold Standard in Publishing, offering authors 100% rights, royalties, satisfaction and worldwide distribution. Gatekeeper Press, Where Authors are Family.
Thoughts or further questions on this post or any self-publishing issue?
If you’re an ALLi member, head over to the SelfPubConnect forum for support from our experienced community of indie authors, advisors, and team. Simply create an account (if you haven’t already) to request to join the forum and get going.
Non-members looking for more information can search our extensive archive of blog posts and podcast episodes packed with tips and advice at ALLi's Self-Publishing Advice Center. And if you haven’t already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally.
About the Host
Matty Dalrymple podcasts, writes, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage as The Indy Author. She has written books on the business of short fiction and podcasting for authors, and her articles have appeared in Writer’s Digest magazine. She serves as the campaigns manager for the Alliance of Independent Authors. Matty is also the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, beginning with Rock Paper Scissors; the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, beginning with The Sense of Death; and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, including Close These Eyes. She is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime.
About the Guest
MaryCatherine Jones is the owner and executive producer at The Audiobook Experience at Voice Over Vermont, an award-winning boutique audiobook recording and production studio. She delights in working with authors in her Vermont studio to bring their stories into the world, either using their own voices or by finding the perfect narrator for their audiobook. You can also find her on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Read the Transcripts
Matty Dalrymple: Hello everyone, I am Matty Dalrymple. I'm the campaigns manager for ALLi, and I am here today with MaryCatherine Jones. Hey, MaryCatherine, how are you doing?
MaryCatherine Jones: I'm awesome, thanks so much for having me today.
Matty Dalrymple: I am pleased to have you here. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, MaryCatherine Jones is the owner and executive producer at the audiobook experience at Voiceover Vermont, an award-winning boutique audiobook recording and production studio.
She delights in working with authors in her Vermont studio to bring their stories to the world, either using their voices or finding the perfect narrator for their audiobook.
The Value of Audiobooks
Matty Dalrymple: We're going to be talking today about editing with the audiobook in mind.
I thought that to start out it would be useful just to put in a little plug for audiobooks. I'm guessing you're going to be pro-audiobook. I myself am pro-audiobook, but I think it's that third format that is hardest for indie authors to reach.
Like the eBook's pretty much a no brainer, print books have gotten so easy, you don't particularly need any special technical knowledge, or it's not a lot of extra effort to make a print book.
Audio is a little different because audio is going to be more time consuming and more expensive.
So, talk a little bit about the pros, and if appropriate the cons, of adding an audiobook to a person's portfolio.
MaryCatherine Jones: The only con I think is to the pocketbook. So, anybody that I talk to, I really make sure that they know that this is going to be an added expense because it is creating it in an entirely different format where even though the words are written, we are literally starting from word one and we are recording every word and then editing and all that kind of thing.
So, the budget is something definitely to be taken in mind, but with that said, having an audiobook is absolutely increasing your access to the market.
There are a growing number of people who are now only reading with their ears.
I love audiobooks, but if there's a book that I need to have, I'm always going to go for the print version first, and then what happens is I start reading it and I go, oh, I need to have this on audio because I never want to stop. I want to be able to read in bed. I want to be able to read when I'm going to the grocery store, all of that kind of stuff.
So, as more people are understanding how easy it is to have access to these audiobooks, there's more demand for it.
A case study of one is my husband who never ever listened to audiobooks, but now that Spotify has come up with their listening program for premium listeners, you get 15 hours per month of audiobooks, all of a sudden he's like, oh, there's actually this audiobook about this rockstar that I'm interested in, and he never would've touched them before.
So, the access to the market is really important, and if you don't have an audiobook, there are some people who won't read your book with their eyes or their ears. The market itself has been growing by double digits for the last 10+ years. I think last year it might've been 9%. 2023, the numbers were 1 billion, 980 million in sales for the US.
This year, I don't have the official numbers yet, but it's expected to be over 2 billion, and worldwide in the next five years, it's supposed to be over 30 billion. So, that's my plug for audiobooks, and because they're delightful to listen to when produced correctly.
Matty Dalrymple: Yes, I was going to add that caveat myself, and I should probably be able to figure this out a little bit if I could do the math more quickly. But are there certain markets outside the US that are growing more quickly or that seem to be especially in love with audio, that listeners should know about?
MaryCatherine Jones: I'm not as familiar demographically with anything other than the English-speaking market, but I understand from what I remember, I believe that in all markets across the world, it's growing, but particularly in markets like third world countries. Emerging markets, just like everything else, they want access to everything.
Matty Dalrymple: That's interesting to hear about how you decide what you're going to listen to, you know, Read with your ears rather than your eyes, because I'm the other way around. When I'm listening to audio, I'm generally doing it with non-fiction because my interest is in consuming the content rather than having an experience as the way I am for fiction. And for the fiction experience I tend to like to read with my eyes, but when I'm consuming content I like to consume with my ears. Then sometimes I will buy the print book because I want easy access to it. I think, oh, sometimes I'm just going to want to quickly look up that chapter about such and such, and then I can more easily do that with a print book.
So, I think another interesting thing is that you don't necessarily cannibalize sales of one format with audio because oftentimes people will get it in multiple formats.
MaryCatherine Jones: Also, a lot of the platforms encourage you to do that. For example, Amazon and Audible, owned by the same company, they will have incentives if you buy the print book, oh, now you get this discount on the audio.
That's, I think, something that authors should definitely take advantage of because they're going to increase the sales. I like it when I'm not paying full price and if it's 10 bucks versus 20 bucks, and it's a book that I want to have an uninterrupted experience of reading, then I'm going to get both.
Matty Dalrymple: I think that the other thing is that, obviously, if we asked 12 people about their use of audio, we're probably going to get to 12 slightly different answers.
If people have a pool of people who are already reading their work in print or eBook, it would be a fun conversation to have with them on social media or via their email newsletters or something like that to find out how and if they're consuming audio, because that could be a good way to weigh that, when is the right time to make the investment, kind of question.
Challenges and Solutions in Audiobook Production
Matty Dalrymple: So, since we in this stream of the podcast talk mainly about editing and design, we're going to be focusing primarily on that.
I think that one of the things that I didn't appreciate until I started producing my own audio is that question of writing for the ear as well as writing for the eye. Can you talk a little bit about what that means and how that plays out for authors?
MaryCatherine Jones: Sure. So, to qualify, my expertise is mostly working with authors who have come into the studio, and we open up their book and go, we're going to need to do some adaptations here. But with that in mind, there's some things that I have basically developed that would be good guideposts for authors working with an editor at the beginning of the process to streamline that so that these decisions don't have to be made the day that you arrive at the recording studio.
Writing for the Ear: Tips for Authors
MaryCatherine Jones: I think that the most obvious one is for books that have visuals. Now, I'm not talking about children's books, because again, that's a whole separate thing, but your typical non-fiction book that might have some charts or graphs that might have a list of, like, items to eat, that kind of thing. That is fine when your eye is scanning the page and is absorbing that information, but two pages of a list of foods to avoid gets really dull for the ear.
So again, visually, when I'm looking through a book and getting it ready to record, those are the kinds of visuals that I'm going to stop and say, all right, let's think about how we can address this, so we don't lose the listener.
So, in that situation, I would say, why don't we pick four or five, and you can list them. Maybe you actually go into detail about why these particular items are particularly bad for you or good for you, or whatever that is. But then you direct people back to your website, because hopefully you have a website. You encourage the listener to download a PDF that has the complete list of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Similarly with charts and graphs. There are some graphics that are really more like curly cues. They're there to enhance the text, but they don't need to be there. They just make it more visually appealing. So, those you can get rid of.
But if you have information that is embedded within the graphic, let's say a pyramid. If you've got a pyramid where you can easily describe, maybe it's like Maslow's hierarchy, that would be easy to describe. Imagine that you need a strong foundation at your base and you have the need for food and shelter, and above that…
You can write out so you're not doing it extemporaneously in the booth, but how you would describe that particular visual. If it's more complex, then you would refer to the fact that, I have a graphic that really goes into detail explaining the nuances that I'm trying to get across in this particular theory that I'm explaining, I encourage you to go to my website, it's available as a PDF download.
Having that conversation either with your editor or with your audio editor in advance means that you're not caught flatfooted when you get to the booth.
Some production houses don't even open the book until the author gets there.
Everybody has their own methods. I do look in advance for that because those are important things to have.
Another point about that is that by directing people to your website, you have an opportunity to build your list so you can capture their names. We don't have to make them pay anything, but everybody now is very used to, if you go to somebody's website, they're going to ask for your email, so they're going to give you the email, and so it's a list building tool for you.
Another point I want to make is if you're going to direct people to your website, and even if you don't have graphics, you should do that, and just say, there's more information about me and all of the wonderful things that I do. Have that written out. That's not going to necessarily be in the PDF of your manuscript. So, think about what you want to say to the audiobook listener.
I encourage the authors I work with to create a note to the audiobook edition, and the sky's kind of the limit with that. So, I hope that answers your question.
Matty Dalrymple: Yeah, I had lots of following questions and thoughts. One is not really specific to audio, but that whole idea of sending people to your website, I think it's obvious from the examples you gave about how that can play out in non-fiction.
I think even for fiction. For example, one of my novels has a backstory of a big fire that took place in Maine in 1947. You may know about that being from a neighboring state. In the author's note, I described what had happened and how it inspired me, but I realize now I'm losing an opportunity by not saying, if you want to see some pictures from the fire or if you want to read the National Park Services description of what happened as the fire burned across Acadia National Park and things like that, sending them to the website.
So, that's independent of audio, but what it made me think of audio specifically is that I just recently went on a big Malcolm Gladwell binge. I pretty much listen to every Malcolm Gladwell audiobook out there, and it made me think of that in a couple of ways.
One, is when you were saying like reading the long list of things, the only time I got bored through, I don't know, eight Malcolm Gladwell audiobooks is he was reading basically a long list of figures and after a minute I thought, dude, there has got to have been a better way to do this than just reading it out.
But what I thought was more interesting is one of his books, and I think it was Bomber Mafia, was a book that was originally written for audio and then adapted in order to be able to put it out in eBook and print as well. I think everybody thinks of their books in the indie author space as being eBook first and then hopefully along with print, and then audio may be down the line. But thinking of audio first as an option is fun.
Then he had a very robust website that he sent people to that he was using, not only to provide photographs and things like that, that illustrated the Bomber Mafia story, but also, and if you want to listen to my podcast, click here. If you want to sign up for my newsletter, click here. Oh look, here's the product I have. Or here's another book.
So, he was doing it in a very appealing way because he knew that the people who were visiting a site were people who were already fans of his work, but I'm sure he gets a lot of bang for the buck for doing that.
MaryCatherine Jones: And if you don't do that, people don't necessarily know. So yes, definitely do it. You don't want to bang people over the head with it, but let people know there's more ways to connect, to learn more about the story.
In memoir, there are often photographs and those can be such great pieces, and you don't want to have the audiobook listener lose that opportunity to see the photos, and you can also have way more photos than you might have had in the book because you don't have to, pay for printing.
Matty Dalrymple: One thing that I also thought he did very well is he posed it much more as building a community, like join other fans of the Bomber Mafia story to learn more, and I can't remember if he had places where people could log comments and things like that, but that would certainly be easy to add on.
The other thing I was thinking when you were talking about changes between perhaps the written words and the spoken words are that, for my own books, the narrator for my fiction works, Victoria Matlock Fowler, is very good at voices.
So, if I have a long thread of conversation between two or three people, it's very clear by the way she distinguishes each of the voices who's speaking. Whereas in writing, my editor is always reminding me, now you've gone a couple of lines let's stick in a dialogue tag, just to remind everybody of where we are in the conversation.
So, when I give the book to her, I say, if you ever find that and you feel like you can leave out the, he says, she says, do that.
Are there any other specific circumstances like that where you would advise an author, if they're reading through their book preparatory to producing it as audio, that they could profitably adjust between what they're writing and what will be voiced?
MaryCatherine Jones: I think it's a matter of time and resources. So, what I advise, and this is a conversation I have when we're working with a professional narrator, Some are more adept than others at doing the voicing, and so you then rely on the producer and the narrator's self-knowledge about that, but what I ask is, if in the course of narrating this book, the narrator feels like the tags are getting in the way, can they have some discretion about omitting them?
Obviously, ideally you would have the author go in and actually make those changes, but that can be very cumbersome. Whereas a skilled narrator can do that on the fly.
If there's some hesitation about that, then we'll say, all right, let's give a sample so that we hear the difference between having the tags and not having the tags, and then we just see what feels right with that.
But I think that what you do is absolutely wonderful because you don't want to have the listener burdened by those dialogue tags. When you have something where a character is shouting, hopefully the narrator has been shouting and you don't need to say, “shouted”. So, it's just those kinds of redundancies that it's nice to keep an eye out for, to try to get rid of them. But other times it can be helpful to have them there.
Character Consistency and Narration
Matty Dalrymple: One of the things that I have encountered in producing my audiobooks, along with my narrator, is that there was one circumstance where the narrator interpreted an interaction between two characters very differently than I intended.
So, 99% of the time, I try to bring to it the perspective of, I'm a professional writer, she's a professional narrator, I’m going to let her bring her own creative interpretation to what's going on.
But this was one of these things that, it was early in the story, it was really setting the scene for these two characters, and if the reader brought to that character's relationship the assumptions they would get if they listened to it, rather than read it as I intended, it was really going to make the story very different.
So, that was a learning to me in the fact that she could interpret it differently.
So, I had intended in this interaction between a father and a son for the father to come out as the aggrieved party, and it read very much in the audio more like the son was coming out as the aggrieved party.
So, I explained my reasoning, I asked her to rerecord it, she very graciously did, and it was a learning for me that what I had intended with that scene did not come through, at least for her. So, there was an editorial learning for me.
But do you have any advice, if authors know that somebody else is going to be reading their work, do you recommend that they annotate it in some way at a macro level, like character motivations and things like that? I'm going to get to the more micro level in a minute.
MaryCatherine Jones: One of the things that I find very helpful and that I ask for is to have a very broad, high-level summary of what is happening in the book, who the characters are, and perhaps a little bit of interaction, you know, what are the dynamics between the characters? That's wonderful because that helps the narrator when they're reading understand what the framework is, so that as they're building their narrative approach, they've got that in their back pocket.
I also think that, again, as a writer, if I've written something that could be ambiguous, you want to be clear about that.
I also think that for every project that a narrator is involved with, it's really lovely to have a meeting with the narrator, the author, the producer, if you're working with a producer, and make sure literally everybody's on the same page.
Give opportunity to say, oh, I had a question about this, and let's not even get into pronunciations, but really make sure that everybody agrees that, oh yes, this is the way that we see this character being embodied. And oh, let's have a lighter touch. Or I'm looking for something a little bit heavier.
And I've had a couple of times, only a couple, but where there has been a scene that has been interpreted by the narrator where it's, oh, the mom sounds a little too angry, can we redo that? And a good narrator is going to want to have the story be first and is going to be fine with that.
If the entire character throughout is not interpreted correctly, that means that there wasn't a good conversation at the beginning, and that's why that needs to happen.
Matty Dalrymple: One thing that I found super useful, and I don't know why it took me like five books to figure this out, is to give my narrator a picture of a person, a well-known person, that I think sounds like the person, because there was a character that I pictured as like a big, gruff person, and she didn't read it that way at all.
Fortunately, one of my tips, this is more of a production tip than an editing tip, is listen to the chapters as your narrator reads them, because if you get to the end of the book and they've failed to make the big, imposing person sound big and imposing, they're pretty much stuck with it. But if they've only recorded a short chapter, you're okay.
I ended up sending her a picture of Dick Butkus. This reference may not make sense to people under a certain age, a big burly football player from back in the days when I used to watch football with my dad and she was like, oh yeah, now I see what you're going for.
So, a visual could sometimes be helpful, and that could be useful for the editing process for yourself, even way before you're thinking about the audiobook.
MaryCatherine Jones: I think it's great. But again, you do have to remember that not everybody's going to get the references. I just was working on a project where one of the character pictures was Ricardo Montalban and the narrator was like, no clue.
Matty Dalrymple: I found a picture, I think Dick Butkus hosted Saturday Night Live at one time, many years ago, and I found a video of him doing the monologue and I sent it to her, and I said, this is basically the character.
MaryCatherine Jones: Any of that is so welcome. Anything that you can do to make the narrator's life easier is fantastic.
Practical Tips for Audiobook Narration
Matty Dalrymple: One of the things you had mentioned earlier was the fact that if you really get enmeshed in a book, you want to be able to read it at any time, consume it at any time, and the fact that with, I think it's called WhisperSync on Amazon, you can switch from the eBook to the audiobook and it picks up where you've left off.
If you're making changes, like taking out the, he says, she says in the audio, does that mess up things like WhisperSync?
MaryCatherine Jones: That's a really good question, and I think that it depends on how much, and the algorithm. I have not had any problems with WhisperSync. Nothing has been flagged in the books that I have worked on, but that doesn't mean that something couldn't come up.
So, I think that's a very good consideration. In the case where you're doing a pretty extensive edit, like you're getting rid of three pages of lists, that could affect the WhisperSync.
That said, I think that it's still worth having the different formats because I know that for me, I often do a lot of my audiobook listening through Libby, the library app, which doesn't sync with my print version, but if I know that I've finished chapter three and it's time for chapter four, I know how to go to chapter four and pick it up from there.
But I think that's a really good question and I don't have a definitive answer, I just know that so far there haven't been any flags on that.
Matty Dalrymple: Sticking with a theme of the editing process, are there other tips you have, as a person is going through the editing of their book, are there things they should always be having in the back of their mind? Other than the fact that if you say it out loud, is it hard to say out loud because it has unfortunate consonants next to each other or something like that? But what are some of those things that people should just have as a particular list in the back of their minds as they're doing the editing on the manuscript?
MaryCatherine Jones: Well, I was talking about this conversation with one of the authors that I worked with, and she got so excited. She's like, oh my gosh, that's so cool.
She said one of the things that she didn't realize until we had produced her audiobook was that there were characters in the written book that, I think one of them started with the letter S, one of them started with Ch and one of them started with a Ts or something.
So, visually it's very clear, at least, our brains know, oh, different character. But in the audiobook, they all had the same starting sound, and that can be a little bit confusing. So, when you're writing with the ear in mind, it's very important to realize that the audiobook experience is completely linear. You can't really go back and see what happened and who was that character. So, when you have very subtle reminders of who these characters are, particularly if you've got a central character that's maybe introduced in chapter one or two and then doesn't appear again until chapter 17, what can you do aside from naming them that's going to bring that listener back to who that is?
There's a book that I'm listening to right now that has, and the narrator is doing such a great job with this, but this one character's way of speaking is very distinctive. So, even though we haven't heard from him in seven chapters, he appears walking in a room and he's like, “dude”, and you're like, he's back.
So, those kinds of signifiers, think about a character on stage wearing a particular kind of shirt. It's that kind of, how can you bring that with you into your writing as a kindness to the listener. The more complex the story you're telling, world building fantasy, all of that, the more important that is, to have those subtle reminders. Whether it's a cough or a sneeze or just describing how they walk. Oh, it's the shuffle guy, oh, I remember who that is now.
Matty Dalrymple: Fantasy specially makes me think of the tip of always providing a phonetic representation of how you want words pronounced, but not even fantasy.
I live outside Philadelphia, Paoli got pronounced poli in the audiobook, and fortunately because I was listening to a chapter by chapter, I got it right away, and she was able to fix it. But even names that seem very straightforward to you, I think any proper name, you might as well provide a phonetic rendition of it, so you know everybody's on the same page.
MaryCatherine Jones: That's really important. I live in Vermont and there's a town in Vermont that's spelled B-E-R-L-I-N, and if you call it Berlin, everybody will know that you are not from Vermont and this is not authentic, and it takes you out of the story.
So, those are really important, and having those place names, having those character names is fantastic.
I was talking with a woman at a conference, I think three weeks ago, and she said that she had a fantasy series, and she worked with one narrator who did the audiobook version and for whatever reason, decided to go with a different narrator for the other audiobook version.
There wasn't a whole lot of conversation, and so the second book, even though it was the same world, had completely different pronunciations of names and places, and it was already created.
So, those are the kinds of consistencies that you want to think about.
It's almost like making a film. You need to have those things continue throughout the book or throughout the series.
Matty Dalrymple: I ran into an issue with that because I have two series, both of which are set in the Philadelphia area, and every once in a while I'll stick a little easter egg cameo in of a character from one that is appearing in the other one, and the narrator didn't realize that this was a cameo character and she didn't remember this minor character's name from the other book. She read it in some different way, and I didn't pick it up until the second book when the same thing happened. And she said, oh yeah, it never occurred to me to go back and look and see if this character was just making a walk on.
So, that's another of those things that you can keep a list at the side of your desk and say, I have to remember to explain proper names, I have to remind them that this character has shown up before and it would be nice if the voice was the same. A whole different consideration of consistency issues.
MaryCatherine Jones: Another thing when you're talking about creating a glossary of names and place names. I would recommend that, even if the author is going to be the person doing the narration. I do a lot of work with authors of memoir and have found that there are times, particularly if they're talking about their visits to different countries and places, they may not actually know the way to pronounce those places. So, to make sure that is set up beforehand is a real kindness.
There are resources that one can access on the fly, You Glish and Miriam Webster audio, and all that kind of thing to get these, although some names can be more obscure and can be very time consuming to find, particularly when you're talking about proper names of people they may have met and, oh, I can't get that wrong.
Having that list, making sure that's all nailed down is a great time saver and probably a face saver too.
Matty Dalrymple: My tip would be don't put in words in a language other than your own, unless you're really sure you could tap into someone who could check it, because in a couple of my books I had a couple of phrases in Swedish, the bad guys were Swedish. Normally they were talking English, because they were talking with my English-speaking characters. But every once in a while, they would have a little burst of Swedish, and fortunately my nephew is Swedish, and I could run the Google Translate and then I would send it to him and say, does this make sense? And he'd be like, yeah, that's fine. Or, no, that really doesn't mean what you think.
I think that the other thing that I found is that, if a character has a particular accent, like an American southern accent, for example, to note that in the character sketch, because I realized in one case that I hadn't clarified for the reader as soon as they met the character that the character was speaking in a Southern accent. If I had, of course, that would've clarified it for the narrator, but I also thought, if I haven't clarified that for the reader until they've encountered the character a couple of times, then they have to make this uncomfortable switch of their perception of the character to now give them a southern accent.
So, that was another one of those things that you need to consider for audio and also to improve your writing in other ways.
MaryCatherine Jones: That's so true. I narrated an audiobook way back in the day and I was new to my craft. I spent so much time doing the prep and I didn't have the benefit of working with a producer or knowing that I should have set up a meeting with the author. It was something that came to me, just here's your manuscript, go do your thing and let me know when it's done.
And I charted, thank goodness, every page that every character appeared on and all of that, and I'm telling you, it wasn't until I got to page like 279 that I realized, as I was narrating it, and I had read this thing like three times in advance, I got to this page describing an interaction between a father and one of his sons. He's got two sons, and I had the two sons, like everybody's different. Then it said, ” the son said, sounding exactly like his father”, and then there was a little bit more description that he always sounded like his father, and I'm like, what?
I completely had missed that, and I had a lot of rerecording to do.
But that's where, as a rights holder, as an author, when you're working with a narrator, you don't necessarily know their level of experience, and if you have an opportunity to have a meeting with them, I think it's really important to do that and ask for that and know that you can ask for custom auditions.
Don't just pick a narrator because you've listened to their demo and that sounds like a good voice. Send them a few pages of your manuscript, ask them to audition. If they don't, they probably aren't going to be a good fit for you. That's part of the gig of being a narrator is doing auditions. So, if they're not willing to do that, that's a flag.
Matty Dalrymple: Yeah, I was auditioning people when I was doing my first Lizzie Ballard book, and there was one person who I loved, and in the early parts of that book, Lizzie, the protagonist is very young. She's very young in some of the early scenes, and the woman was doing a great job and then she got to a part where Young Lizzie was saying something, and she started doing this really irritating child voice.
I wrote back and I said, love everything else you're doing, but nobody's going to be able to listen to that for more than like 3.2 seconds. So, she did it again, still with a squeaky voice, and I sadly had to pass on her because I just thought, man, that's going to be brutal.
Then I found someone who was able to convey that idea of a young person talking without it being like nails on a chalkboard.
MaryCatherine Jones: That's also why when you're thinking about, okay, you're going to ask for a custom audition, I recommend finding places where there's dialogue, because that's going to be really the make or break for most narrators.
Matty Dalrymple: Especially if it's weird dialogue, like someone with a Swedish accent. The other tip I've heard is picking a part or maybe a couple of short parts that represent different characters, so that it's not just a long conversation between two characters, but now you don't have any sense of how they would voice the other 13 characters.
MaryCatherine Jones: And when you're doing that, again, context is everything. So, if you're sending just snippets of, not pages because you really don't want to ask them to do more than about three to four minutes, because that becomes work, but if you're pulling things from the middle of the book, give them the scene. They shouldn't have to read the entire book to do the audition. Overall, this is what this book is about and set the scene for them and then let them have it.
There are also tools, not necessarily for narration, but in preparation for handing it off to a narrator. There's a platform called Positron that is mostly for narrators, but some authors have been using it too, and what you do is you upload your manuscript onto the platform. It is a closed system. It's not going to feed it to the metaverse, but it will actually flag for you, these are words that may be unfamiliar, and you can set the parameters.
But it also does flag things like place names and character names and that kind of thing, which can be good. A lot of narrators will use that tool and then use that as a starting point with a conversation with the author asking for that clarification. Those are some of the tools that are out there for that.
Matty Dalrymple: I just have one more thought that is, again, lapsing a little bit into the production topic, but something I think important when people are considering audiobook narration, it is something you need to factor in, is you really need to listen to the whole thing.
Because I know I've caught situations where the sentence is, “she asked her brother about this” and the narrator says, ” she asked her sister about this” or mispronouncing words that I as a Philadelphian know how Philadelphians would pronounce that she would not know.
The idea that it's not like you just turn it over and then pretty soon you have audio. There is this sort of proof-listen period that you have to sign up for as well.
MaryCatherine Jones: Absolutely, that is part of the process. We can only do as much as we know how to do, and there are ways that people talk that we're not going to necessarily know.
Matty Dalrymple: Thank you so much, MaryCatherine. It's been great talking to you about audio and please let everyone know where they can find more about what you do online.
MaryCatherine Jones: Fantastic. So, I've been going through a little bit of a rebrand. So, you can find me at The Audiobook Experience. You can still find me at Voiceover Vermont. Because I have been transitioning and doing pretty much exclusively audiobooks for the last six years, I thought maybe I should have that in my name.
I would love to talk and answer any questions that listeners have about audio and audiobooks.
Matty Dalrymple: Great. Thank you so much.
