If you are a self-published author, then there is every chance that you own the audio rights to your work. But if your book is traditionally published, you may have unwittingly assigned your audio rights to your publisher. What options do you have?
Audiobook Narrators
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.