Finding a Voice for Your Book
When I lived a two-hour commute from my teaching job, I also lived on audiobooks. My ancient Saab had a CD player, but no way to hook up my phone, so I stopped by the library each weekend to check out more books on CD. I got very opinionated about the voice of each of these recordings. Even though I could love reading a book, a narrator’s tone and dramatization meant everything to whether I would listen to it.
Voiceover is an art. I feel, now that I’ve been through a sometimes-onerous journey getting my own audiobook produced for the novel that will be published next month, we writers need to know about it, realize how big the audiobook world has become, and look for ways our own books can be voiced as well as read.
I knew so little about it when I began in April of this year. I didn’t know that voiceover artists are actors, that they specialize in what kind of books they record. They may do commercials, business, or education presentations, but there are those who only do books and who do certain genres and voices well.
I was picky, from all my years as a listener. I wanted a narrator to accurately represent the voices in my head—these were the characters I’d lived with for ten years, and I wanted to do right by them.
Publishers sometimes collaborate with writers on this part of a project. Mine never did. But I haven’t had a book out in twelve years, and the world of audiobooks wasn’t that big back in 2011, compared to now. I paid for and managed the creation of one audiobook before this, for my writing-craft Your Book Starts Here, using ACX’s profit sharing platform via amazon. But I wanted wider distribution this time, and truthfully, I was even more picky about the voice.
I remember the first time I watched the film version of one of my favorite stories. I was a teen, in love with a novel—I don’t even remember its name. I was so shocked and dismayed by the visual and voice of the character on the screen, who didn’t at all resemble the person I’d formed in my mind as I read each chapter, that I walked out of the theater. Dismay that the world I’d created in my head as a reader was not even close to the author’s.
For this reason, this memory, I wanted control over the choice of who would read my book aloud. I wanted the narration to perfectly match the voices of the characters living in my head.
Good narrators are hard to find. Many are well respected for their work. A favorite for my commute was Robert Bathurst, who became famous for narrating the voice of Inspector Armand Gamache in Louise Penny’s cozy mysteries about Three Pines. Bathurst discusses his experience in this interview from Lit Hub.
Another joy to hear was Meryl Streep brilliantly narrating Ann Patchett’s new novel, Tom Lake. Streep is unsurpassed in her range of voice skills: tones, accent, pacing.
A friend runs a company in the Twin Cities that specializes in voiceover narration. He met with me on Zoom to educate me about union rates, how actors charge for a project, and where to look for lower-price but still excellent voice I could audition.
Voiceover narrators charge by PFH, or per finished hour. Union rate hovers around $250 per finished hour, and the average number of hours to record, edit, and revise (if needed) an 80,000 word novel came to 8-10. An audiobook for my novel would cost around $2000 to produce. This was before distribution. Not a small expense.
I sat with this new information for a few days. I could only imagine what uber-pros like Streep or Bathurst charged; would I be able to find someone for what I could afford?
With that kind of pricing, no wonder many publishers I’d worked with in the past declined any requests for an audiobook.
But times change. Publishers do too. Audiobook sales skyrocketed during the pandemic, becoming the fastest growing format in publishing, according to Writer’s Digest magazine. Good E Reader predicts even more astonishing growth by 2027. More and more people are listening rather than reading, it seems. We’re a culture wed to our iPhones, and it makes sense we’d listen to more than music. Podcasts are also a fast-growing element of audio entertainment. No surprise that audiobooks are too.
But it wasn’t for the stats, the marketing benefits, that I couldn’t let go of the idea of an audiobook. It was that extra electricity I’d experienced as a listener on my commutes, engaging with a story in a new way.
So I made a list. What did I require if I were to go ahead with this project?
The narrator would be a woman; although there are male characters, the three women run the story.
The narrator would have to be versatile, since a good twelve voices, between the major and minor players, appear onstage.
I dislike overly dramatic voice narration. I didn’t want a narrator in love with her own sound, every adjective inflected and dramatized. I wanted the story itself to shine forth.
Secretly, I wanted a narrator who loved the book. Who would bring heart and passion into the narration, making it come alive in a new way with her voice.
My voiceover friend recommended I check out Fiverr. Fiverr is a wonderful resource for anything you need to hire out, and often the results are excellent too. Fiverr offers scores of audiobook narrators for hire, both male and female. Each specializes in a certain type of story: kidlit, sci-fi or fantasy, mysteries and crime, business and other nonfiction book, memoir.
To use Fiverr well takes time and vetting. Each narrator offers a short video of their credentials, a sample of their voice.
My friend advised narrators who were Top Rated Sellers or Level 2 Sellers to weed out beginners and those with bad reviews. Also, he advised, read the reviews carefully—did the narrator deliver on time? were they easy to work with?
Hours later, I had six to audition.
I messaged each of them, asked if they’d record a sample. Most said yes—standard practice—but one refused. Off my list. For the yesses, I prepared three chapters, one for each of the point-of-view characters in my book, Red Nelson, Kate Fisher, and Kate’s daughter Molly Fisher, and sent each narrator the first chapter in Red’s voice, the opening of the story.
This first chapter is a plane crash—Red’s Piper is caught in crosswinds before a storm and she has to make an emergency landing in a mountain gorge far from the sanctuary she’s running to. A good test. I felt the written chapter contained plenty of drama; I wanted to see if the narrator would also recognize this and leave it alone, not push the intensity more than was necessary.
My first reply was from a narrator in Europe, a native-speaker of English, who mostly records young adult books. A great voice but she couldn’t resist adding on even more. Plus a faster pace than the chapter required. I’m proud of the quality of the writing in my novel, I’ve worked hard to get there, and my endorsement from Caroline Leavitt, a New York Times bestseller, called it “gorgeously written,” so I wanted the language to be savored by the listener, not raced through. Overly picky, less than humble, yes, but that’s the artist in me coming out and taking a stand.
Three other samples came in; also good contenders until I noticed my inability to slip into the story itself. The person behind the voice took precedence. Wearying at best, annoying at worst.
I’d just about given up when a narrator in California sent me her sample. Good voice, not overly dramatic. She trusted the words, the language, and let it stand for itself. Pace was a bit fast, but when she revised, it worked beautifully. I sent her the other two chapters, to see how she’d vary the two other character voices, and I loved the result. I had my narrator.
Alex Furness was also incredibly easy to work with, a true professional. She sent me finished chapters every few days, our goal to complete the project by August 11 to upload to Findaway, the audiobook distributor. And we made it.
An amazing thing happened as I listened to my book read out loud for the first time: I heard things in the story I’d never noticed. I always knew that pacing was best “heard” from reading aloud—most writers do this, at some point in revision, just to catch things their eye never noticed. But the emotion that Alex was able to bring in, via subtle changes in her voice as she read each scene, touched me deeply.
At one point, I found myself in tears. Alex was reading my favorite chapter in the story, a culmination point of the three women's journeys to freedom and how they finally become family to each other. Somehow, combining the visual, the light, of words on a page, which had touched me as a writer, with the audible, the sound of the words being spoken aloud, was a thousand times more powerful than I expected. It was as if I’d never encountered the story before and it was a wonderful surprise.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
This week, learn about the dramatic intensity of your own book (published or in process) by using a voiceover recording tool and your listening ears. I always learn so much when I hear my own story read aloud, rather than just reading it on the page.
First, listen to the audio above, to enjoy chapter 1 from A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, but also to hear a professional voiceover artist. Notice how Alex backs off to let the story itself shine, while not losing any of the drama of the plane crash, explosion, and escape. Share your thoughts here. What did you learn, notice, like, experience?
If you’d like to try narrating a chapter or scene or a few pages from your own published book or work-in-progress, check out Voice Record Pro, a voiceover software I’ve used for podcast recording on my iPhone. Amazing quality for a free app. See how much you can let your own words shine without overly dramatizing them.
If the language doesn’t wow you as you listen back, ask yourself where you might upgrade it, raise the natural drama of the scene, or tone the action down to let the character emotion shine through.