17 Comments
User's avatar
Alicia M. Rodriguez's avatar

Congratulations on your audiobook! I just released my memoir audiobook and it was a learning experience. I used a local studio and completed it in 10 two hour sessions over a month and a half. My voice couldn’t do more than two hours. Because it was a memoir I felt I needed to narrate it- and there are words in Spanish which I speak. The producer was great to work with. As for future books, I may use Eleven Labs voice cloning. I’ll look into that soon.

Expand full comment
Joan Bauer's avatar

Excellent piece! Thank you… and I love your dilemma about wanting to rewrite everything.

Expand full comment
Lars Hoel's avatar

As a former audiobook producer/director (in the days of cassettes!), it warms my heart to read this. Recording an audiobook should be challenging. It should be a grind. It should feel like a marathon. Because you’re doing it the right way — with a good director, in a proper studio.

I have directed scores of authors reading their (mostly non-fiction) books, and each one presented its own challenge. There was the writer whose reading voice sounded odd until I convinced her not to try and suppress her Southern accent. There was the memoirist who mispronounced “chiaroscuro.” I once even caught a mistake in the text (the writer referred to a David Lynch film as “Black Velvet.”) I got into a bit of an argument over saying “a” and “the” with long vowels, which to my ear sounds stilted. And so on.

The point is, every writer who plans on self-narrating their audiobook needs a director — someone they trust to catch these things. What saddens me most about the self-publishing industry is that most authors don’t do this. They go it alone, with what I can only imagine are sometimes cringey results.

Expand full comment
Simon Sharp's avatar

This is great - something I'm passionate about, even though my day job is an audiobook narration agency (we DO NOT use AI). For anyone interested, we recently designed a course to guide authors through the process of narrating their own audiobooks. I won't put a link here, but if anyone wants it, please give me a shout. The authenticity of the voice reading the book is absolutely key! Excellent!

Expand full comment
Jeff LaGreca's avatar

Congrats, Kate! I love that you are recording your book in YOUR voice. Your human voice.

Expand full comment
Michelle Spencer (she/her)'s avatar

Bravo and thank you for sharing this experience with us.

Expand full comment
Elayne Crain's avatar

#authorgoals for sure! :)

Expand full comment
Nita Sweeney, Author's avatar

Congratulations! Love this inside peek of the process.

Expand full comment
Richard Donnelly's avatar

Congrats! But I wonder how AI voiceover technology will change our industry. Certainly it will help those of us who sound a little like Elmer Fudd : )

Expand full comment
J. Aaron Courts's avatar

This is great! I recorded my first audio narration of my work on here after I discovered that the AI, auto-voice, Skynet narrator on some of my work. It's a steep learning curve, of which I know I'm just leaning in to, but man has it been fun. Semper Fidelis!

Expand full comment
Jennifer Silva Redmond's avatar

I love that I am the voice of my memoir in the audiobook, but damn it was *hard* work. I'd done voice over work before as an actress but never for so long at a time, for three days running.

Expand full comment
Kincaid Jones's avatar

Thank you for answering my questions about this process. It seems so mysterious! I’m most interested in the role of the producer… does she give performance notes? How do you handle “punch ins”? This is the most distracting part of really high end fiction recordings. They don’t EQ between takes, or wild line is inserted inside a prose paragraph. Also, so many mispronunciations (see Lessons in Chemistry) As a video producer I’m just trying to get a handle on who’s responsible for what. Thanks again for this window into an equally important part of the craft

Expand full comment
Kathleen Donahoe's avatar

This is extremely cool, Kate. Obsessed with the detail about your teeth hurting! Bodies are so weird.

Expand full comment
Susan Corbin's avatar

I read my self-published book in a closet with rented equipment. That took longer, but wasn't as exhausting. Then I never had it produced. Ah, well. It was fun to do. Glad you enjoyed the experience.

Expand full comment
Quill & Clef's avatar

Fantastic. I'd love to record my books

Expand full comment
Maggie Balistreri's avatar

67 pages a day! That's astounding.

Expand full comment