An increasing number of audiobooks are recorded remotely in personal recording studios in narrators’ homes. Raconteurs Audio LLP is a creative partnership of professional audiobook narrators, Tim Bruce, Liam Gerrard, James Gillies, Helen Lloyd, Nigel Patterson, Greg Wagland and Malk Williams. All of us record regularly in home-based studios for publishers around the world, as well as producing and publishing independently. Narrating from home does create some additional challenges – here are our thoughts on some specific topics…
Audiobook Narrators
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Recording an Audiobook
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!
An Audiobook Narrator Prepares…
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…
The Challenge of Audiobook Narration
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.