All aspects of self-publishing have been very much of a learning curve for me, but I think putting together an audio book has been the trickiest.
I was asked about an audio version of A Deadly Rejection back in 2017 when I first published the ebook and paperback, but I hadn’t really planned to use that format. In fact, it quite surprised me that someone had asked me about it.
The tools of the audio book trade
As you’ll have noticed, it’s taken me quite a while to get round to it. That’s mostly because I thought the process would be hard work and time consuming. And, yes, it is both. There are a number of stages to go through and each one takes a significant amount of time if you do it properly. It didn’t help that this was my first attempt so I was feeling my way through the process.
I chose to go with ACX, as it’s connected to Amazon where my other books are, but fortunately you can choose a non-exclusive distribution, which means I’m able to take my audio files to another distributor with a wider network.
My narrator, Ben Hynes, has been fantastic. We had bit of to-ing and fro-ing over what accents the characters should have but I think you’ll agree it sounds fantastic. It was a strange experience hearing someone else reading your words, but the accents Ben chose really brought the book to life.
It was a great experience, but I’ve definitely learned a few lessons:
Write the most thorough brief you can – It’s important to remember that the narrator hasn’t read the story the way you have as a writer or even as a reader. You need to give them a really good understanding of what the story is, who the characters are and how you want them to sound. On reflection, my briefing was a bit vague, which left Ben having to guess at the accents I wanted. It’s much easier for both of you if you explain upfront what you want. Do give the narrator some freedom to work though – I’d never heard DI Burton as Scots but it sounds really good.
Pick a good audition script – on ACX, alongside the briefing, you provide an audition script. Narrators use this to record an example of how they would do the book in terms of voices etc. This will give you a flavour of what they can do with it. It’s really important to think about what bits will best serve you by giving you the best impression of the narrator and how they’ll make the book sound.
Listen carefully to the auditions you receive – this is important because you have to make sure that the narrator’s voice fits your story and characters. My main character is in his late twenties, early thirties and so he needed a fairly young sounding voice. I spent some time listening to the auditions over and over with my eyes shut so I was just taking in the voice and not anything else.
Listen to the full book once it’s submitted – this is the stage which takes the most time and I think I’d have struggled to manage this if I wasn’t focusing on writing full-time at the moment. Listening to your nine-hour audiobook and trying to catch any mistakes is exhausting and will take a lot more than nine hours. I also found that I couldn’t do anything else at the same time. Usually I’d listen to an audiobook while walking around or cooking or whatever but this needs your full attention. I also found that keeping a notebook handy meant that when I spotted an issue I could mark the chapter, the time and the mistake which meant it was easy to point Ben to things that needed changing.
All in all, it’s been a great experience and I’ve come through it with a fantastic product. One other thing it’s brought home to me is that it’s much easier to spot mistakes, clunky phrases and bad grammar when listening than when reading on the page. So now I’ll be adding a stage into my editing process to read the book aloud because I think this will help to pick up more issues before I get to the final stages.
Will I be doing the next book in audio? You bet, but it won’t be out at the same time as the ebook and paperback. Hopefully, this time, it won’t take two years for it to appear.
A Deadly Rejection is now available in audio format on Audible, iTunes and all good retailers/libraries.