Audiobook Narrators
Likened by some to an impressionist painting, Jacob’s Room (1922) was far ahead of its time and still appears strikingly modern almost a century after it was written.
Listen to narrator Helen Lloyd reading a sample from Jacob’s Room:
Virginia Woolf’s most famous “stream of consciousness” novel records the events of one June day in 1923 – the day on which Clarissa Dalloway is hosting a party in her London home.
Helen Lloyd reads an excerpt from Mrs Dalloway:
When the prep is done it’s time to start recording. Most pro studios estimate that it takes two hours of recording to produce an hour of finished audio, and expect a narrator to complete around three to three and a half hours of finished audio per working day. This takes discipline, concentration and stamina. Of course the schedule can be more flexible when a narrator is recording in their own studio – but the concentration and need for consistency still applies!
Every narrator finds their own way to deal with the challenges of recording an audiobook, but I suspect if you were to ask twenty narrators twenty questions about how they prepare, you’d probably get twenty different answers! But I think that there are some universal truths that 99% of narrators will observe…
Of course the audiobook narrator is telling a story – but that is really only the beginning. Each person in the book must live vividly in the listener’s imagination as a believable and unique person with a separate and clearly identifiable ‘voice’ that not only fits their character as described by others, but also allows the listener to understand each character’s motivation, feelings and emotions and their role within the story.
