A Beginner’s Guide to Narrating Audiobooks
Narrating audiobooks is a unique skill. Just because you’re a great voiceover artist doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a great narrator. You need to have great stamina (as books can be LONG), be good at a variety of accents and character voices, be able to sight read well and possess good acting skills. The acting and accents are less of a necessity when narrating non-fiction, but having great storytelling skills is a must.
Being an audiobook narrator can be truly rewarding. A few years ago, the author of a book I narrated contacted me directly to tell me how much she had enjoyed my interpretation of her book and how much I had brought it to life, so much so, that she almost forgot she was listening to her book at times! When I received that email from her out of the blue, it made my week and felt amazing to know that I had shaped someone’s listening experience in that way.
Making a narration reel
To begin your path to audiobook success, you’ll need to start by making a narration reel. I’d start with a fiction one for now, but you may want to make a non-fiction reel at a later stage too.
Do your research first by listening to other narrators who have a similar voice to you (gender, age, natural accent, tone) and look at what genre of books they usually narrate. This will give you a good idea about what books would suit your voice best.
Once you’ve done that, you then want to find two contrasting excerpts of text. Not only do they need to be contrasting in genre and style, but also pace. Perhaps you could have one very descriptive excerpt that’s narration heavy and then have another that’s dialogue heavy with a few different characters speaking in the excerpt – this will give you the chance to show off your accents. Perhaps one piece of text could be from a drama or sci-fi novel and you could find a fast-paced section that’s about to reach the climax of the story. You can listen to my audiobook narration reels below to give you some ideas.
Once you’ve found the pieces of text you’d like to record, you can either record your reel yourself if you have the equipment to do so or you can pay a voice reel company to do it, but just be aware that their prices can be quite high. If you do decide to record the extracts yourself, then make sure you get a sound engineer to master it afterwards.
Approaching people for work
You have your reel, so now it is time to approach potential employers for work. The best way to do this is to send a cover letter and your reel to publishers and audiobook production companies. A quick Google should give you a list of some publishers and production companies you could write to. In the cover letter, you want to introduce yourself, explaining your voiceover experience, your vocal tones and age and attach your voice reel. In the beginning, it will involve a lot of banging on doors and sending a fair few unsolicited emails, which you may then have to send follow ups to every few months, but it’ll only be a matter of time until someone will give you your first job.
I’ve booked my first audiobook, how do I prepare?
Whether you’re recording your first audiobook in a studio or your home studio, the same preparation will apply. It’s probably easiest to prepare your book on an iPad, tablet or laptop (without a fan). You can prepare on paper, but you’ll then have to deal with paper page turn sounds once you’re in the recording booth, which will create extra work for you. I want to say as well, that the following is what I do to prepare, but you may choose to do something slightly different if my method doesn’t work for you.
I always read the whole book before I begin recording. As I work through the book, I highlight any dialogue I come across. I assign a different colour highlighter to each character and every time that character speaks, I highlight their dialogue in that colour. When new characters are introduced, I make note of any descriptions they are given that may indicate their tone of voice, i.e. age, gender, adjectives, accent etc… If I come across any words that I don’t know how to pronounce, I look them up and write them phonetically next to the word, so that when I come to record, my flow won’t be interrupted.
Once I’ve marked up my book, I then decide on what kind of voice I want to assign each character. I like to record little snippets on my phone for each character so that I don’t forget. I usually keep these recordings on my phone right up until the book’s finished, just in case I need to make any amendments after the initial recording session.
I hope this gives you great insight and advice on how to get yourself started as an audiobook narrator. If you’d like to check out some of the books I’ve narrated over the years, most of them can be found on my audible page. If you would like to book me for your next audiobook, contact me today for a quote!
