How are audiobooks made? How narrators like Stephen Fry make it look so easy | Radio Times

That’s because, as pretentious as it sounds, the best audiobook narrators don’t just read a novel, they perform it. they breathe life into a book, adding rhythm, emotion, and tension with just their voice. they have to do that while mastering all the character accents, complicated place names, and often foreign languages. And, here’s the kicker, they have to get it right the first time.

These challenges mean that if you take someone who is not a trained actor, say the author of this article, into audible studios and have them record part of an audiobook, you will likely see the result, such as the recording. below – is bad. oh god, it’s so bad.

You are reading: How are audio books recorded

if you haven’t researched how to pronounce problem words (in this case, the archaic collocations in sherlock holmes, like “maiwand”), you didn’t annotate the text and they have a producer ready to point out the slightest mistake through your headphones, chances are you’ll make a couple of mistakes.

granted, probably not as many as this one. (sorry for the swearing, mom).

It seems that in order to learn the many skills necessary to achieve a perfect recording, you’ll need to talk to a professional narrator like actress Imogen Church instead.

Starting his audiobook career by reading erotica for the royal national institute for the blind (titles he mainly listened to “two old men in southport,” he says), the church has been the voice of more than 200 books, from bridget jones , to crimson peak and even an autobiography of sharon osbourne.

In other words, the church is the perfect person to reveal the secrets of how audiobooks are made and how much work goes into a single recording.

If you want to be a storyteller, you’d better listen.

preparation time is essential, and very short

Imagine, just for a second, that you’ve been selected to narrate what is considered the best-selling audiobook of the year. Congratulations! Now for the bad news: you only have three days to prepare.

That’s the average for a 10-hour audiobook, according to the church. “And preparation is very important,” she says. “In those three days, I need to mark up my digital version of the book, always on a tablet, with my own edition shorthand version.”

what notes would you need to make? First, there is the obvious: dialogue. Marking the characters’ speech in different colors helps you identify which voice you need to use.

take it from church, you’ll definitely need it: “sometimes authors write long dialogues where they never say who’s speaking. you really need to highlight them or you’ll end up speaking in a completely different character’s voice. it’s second nature for me to do this as I’m reading now.”

then there are sentences like this: “‘you have to speak softly,’ she whispered.” Chances are when you read the quote out loud you didn’t see the need to whisper until it was too late. you have to know a character’s tone before they speak, something the church accomplishes with a little note in the margin, a ‘q’ in this case.

and that’s before marking the beats (a cue to speed up or slow down the voice) and noting any breath points during particularly long passages (particularly in Edwardian literature).

then you’ll have to learn to pronounce any problematic words, be it a misleading medical term or in another language (“There are always books with French! and I don’t speak French!” laughs the church ).

You may even need to research what a character sounds like if it exists in real life. “While doing one of Sharon Osbourne’s autobiographies, I had to check out what kind of voice these celebrities had that I hadn’t heard of,” says Church.

“I just wanted to know where you were from. I didn’t want to make a real impression on anyone. well, except ozzy. Giving her a normal voice would have been weirder than not doing it.”

then, once you’ve done all that prep (in three days, if you’re a pro, remember), you’re ready to hit the recording studio. And that’s where things get really tricky.

recording is not a sprint but a marathon. a long, long marathon

What is one of the most amazing things about recording an audiobook? most are read only once.

Although voice actors in animated films like Tom Hanks in Toy Story can spend hours on a single line, applying that technique to a ten-hour audiobook (the average length) would take several months to complete. instead, storytellers like the church can deliver a book in a week.

It is a gigantic task. While storytellers typically record six hours of audio a day (split into four one-and-a-half hour sessions), that’s a huge amount of time to talk. while the average person speaks 10,000 words a day, a storyteller will outgrow it in two sessions.

“It sounds so ridiculous, but it’s actually incredibly back-breaking work,” says Church. “The first book I did, I had a headache for about a week after.

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“It’s because during those hour-and-a-half sessions it’s literally just you blathering nonstop. all time. there’s no ‘oh, I’m going to stretch my legs’. you’re just talking nonstop.”

However, there is one big advantage to a long stint in the recording studio: it’s incredibly comfortable. while the producer sits behind a huge crew platform out of sight behind a glass window, the narrator enjoys a room designed specifically for his comfort.

The storyteller not only has a wide selection of plush chairs that you can bring into the studio, but you can also use as many pillows, throws, and blankets as you like. the lighting is also under his control, with the narrator free to illuminate the soothing beige walls as softly as he wishes.

Basically, whatever setup you need to feel comfortable, the studio will set it up for you. “We had a storyteller who liked to sit almost in the dark with a single spotlight on him. they had duvets everywhere and they were warm,” recalls audible content director laurence howell.

“It’s a long time in the studio, so we do whatever it takes to get the narrator into the zone. For most people, there is always one little thing they want: a special honey for their tea or something. we’ll get that for them.”

But according to howell, there’s something the producers try to change from time to time to keep the storytellers on their toes. “We try to keep it a bit cool to help keep people awake and not too unplugged and falling asleep.”

acting skills: a storyteller needs them all

no, you won’t be on camera or performing in front of a theater-sized audience. but narrating an audiobook is still a task that pushes most actors.

“It’s a real skill,” Howell says. “Even with established actors writing their first book, we often get to the end and they come back and maybe do the first couple of chapters because they were still finding their groove the first time.”

“There are some exceptions,” he adds. “That includes genius Stephen Fry, who doesn’t make many mistakes. also thandie newton. he can do many characters and many difficult dialects and words. and she loves it and it is reflected in her performances.

“but storytelling is an art in itself and a difficult one to get right. It’s not easy.”

“I think audiobooks use all the acting skills, but they all need to be put into your voice,” Church adds. “While I’m sitting in a dark room, I have to use everything I learned in drama school.”

how? church says that storytellers have to learn how to create tension in a scene, the subtle art of capturing emotion in your voice, or gradually build their power before suddenly falling into full breath control.

If that sounds manageable, consider this: You’ll need to do that with every character and switch between them seamlessly, no matter how challenging their accents are.

“Imagine if you are doing a play. you have a month or six weeks to learn, say, a German accent to play a German character. all you’ll do is play that german all night for months,” explains church. “I have to speak to myself in 14 different accents with no time in between to take a moment.”

this can become particularly tricky the more distinctive the accents are. the best example here: aussie and kiwi. “I really had to put in some practice with that,” says the church. “I saw a lot the flight of the snails.”

Another voice change you might not have expected to be so difficult: Yorkshire and Cornish accents. “Actually, I had to write a couple of lines and take a break,” says Church. “It was so hard to switch between them and I don’t know why!”

Fortunately, Church says that when possible, talk to the author beforehand to see if they have any direction on how a character sounds. at other times, however, she has to rely on some very abstract guidance from the text.

“i remember one description: ‘by his accent you could tell he had public school roots, but also grew up on the streets of glasgow.’ and in another book, one character was said to be “highly cultured, but bordering on Indian.” how do you paint your accent with Indian? (author’s note: we don’t recommend trying this out loud if you’re reading this in public).

All that said, however, we must warn you that no matter how much effort you put into your performance and your various voices, it may not be appreciated by all audiences. even your children.

“I have a competition with my husband, who is not an actor at all, with bedtime stories. and my son sometimes says ‘no, daddy’s better!’” laughs imogen. “I just have to tell them they’re wrong.”

listening to the error of your ways

the goal of any storyteller: complete the audiobook in one take. but unfortunately, even if you are a professional like the church, this is practically impossible.

“I’m probably saying I make a bit of fluff per page,” she says. “And from what the editors have told me, that’s pretty low. the people who get a lot of work are the ones who can essentially do it right away.”

“Usually it’s the innocuous words where mistakes are made, like changing ‘she says’ to ‘she said.’ the kind of thing that when you look ahead, your mind decides to change it to what it thinks makes sense. words like ‘as’, ‘if’ or ‘of'”.

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“But we have to make sure that every word reflects the book,” howell adds. “we should be completely accurate with the text.”

This is what it sounds like when the narrator of an audiobook makes a mistake.

Fortunately, it’s not just up to the narrator to catch the errors. the producer is reading the exact same text as the narrator on the other side of the studio’s large glass panel and is interrupted, very politely, to announce when something has gone wrong.

“However, usually if I make a mistake, I realize it, stop and go back to the beginning of the sentence again; they will remove it in the end,” church says. “But even if you are a cultured and literate person, you end up blind, especially towards the end of the day. That’s when you need a producer to come in.”

That’s not all. It’s the producer who also has to check if a storyteller’s clothes are making too much noise: “There were times when we had to send someone to Tesco to pick up a t-shirt for the storyteller,” Howell says.

and then there are unexpected noises from the narrators themselves: they have to use so much focus and energy while recording that tummy crunches can be a problem. “sometimes the only thing that stops you is a full English in the morning!” says church.

but perhaps the most important job of a producer is to check the energy levels during the recording. they have to listen and advise the narrator if they are giving the performance a little more or less oomph than the previous session.

“It’s very important that as a listener you don’t know when the audio was recorded, if it was the first or last thing of the day,” Howell explains. “Energy levels must be maintained throughout the process.”

With all of this in mind, Howell says that the producer is so important that Audible spends as much time picking and selecting a producer as it does a narrator. and that can often take much longer than the investigation and registration itself.

However, even if the producer and narrator are perfect, there is often nothing they can do about errors that appear in the original text. “Every book I read has at least one mistake. each. one.

“once it was very bad. I was doing a recording for a self-help book and there was the line, ‘it was a lot like em forster’s howards’ way.’ we continued and then the producer suddenly said: ‘wait, how howards? isn’t that the 80’s show set in a yacht club? Are you referring to Howards End, the book by Em Forster?’

“Between us, we thought: ‘we can’t do this to this poor woman.’ that’s not fair!’. so she stayed inside.”

sometimes text can throw an error simply because it’s too irritating. “Usually I’m very professional, but I’ve turned into a corpse a couple of times,” Church admits. Although she says this usually happens when she’s reading a particularly funny comedy book, the giggles can often be due to some raunchy miswriting.

“I remember there was a passage where the author referred to, and I think it was supposed to be a compliment to the woman, ‘the cauldron of her c***’. every time she read it we had to stop for a few minutes [laughs].”

luckily for the church and the producer, there is a whole team of editors outside the studio removing any errors, and fits of laughter, from the audio.

“they will edit slightly behind what is being recorded,” howell explains. “They can keep up a good pace. In general, we say that two hours in the studio equals one hour of finished audio.”

click here to hear what an unedited audiobook sounds like.

Another precaution comes in the form of test listeners. Sitting down with the original text, they review the recording to make sure the audio quality meets requirements and that every word is correct.

what if a fault is found? “In some cases, we have to get the narrator back because something needs to be done over again,” Howell says. “but often, [if a narrator has missed a word], it is elsewhere in the text. we’ll pick it up and drop it where it’s needed and you won’t notice.”

However, despite all these safety nets, the performance, no matter how long, still depends on the skill of the narrator. “it’s an art. people like imogen church make it look so easy. and it just isn’t. everyone thinks, ‘I could read this,’ but it’s very much more complicated.”

“You have to be an avid reader to do this work,” Church adds. “Because if you don’t read you won’t have the concentration levels. If you’re not a book lover, don’t bother. but if you love to read and want to dig in, then read aloud at home. just do it for ten minutes and see how it feels.”

In other words, if you want to be a storyteller, then there’s no better place to start than here, by reading these last few sentences out loud. after all, what’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like your ridiculous, rather swearing, efforts were recorded and uploaded to a prestigious entertainment website for all to hear, is it?

what a nightmare that would be.

You can listen to an audible title narrated by imogen church here

Also, we’ve put together a guide in case you’ve ever wondered, how does audible work?

originally published in 2019

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