Narrating Your Own Book. Harder Than It Seems

I recently finished narrating Zappa’s Mam’s A Slapper. Jim Williams, the owner of wowandflutter, which is the recording studio I’ve used for my last two books, tells me he’s almost finished the editing and I should expect to be able to upload the finished audiobook to ACX within the next week. If all goes well, that means it should be on sale two weeks from tomorrow. I’ve no idea how much it will sell for – ACX decide that.

I narrated the book in three-hour sessions, because I find my performance deteriorates hopelessly beyond that time limit, and it took me a week. I started on Monday morning and finished at lunchtime on Friday. It was hard work.

I’m a writer. I’m not an actor. I’m probably better equipped than many writers, because in a forty year international sales career I gave more presentations than I can count to rooms full of people, but narrating still didn’t come easily. Zappa’s Mam is written in the first person, so for a lot of the book I was speaking as Billy, the protagonist, but there are quite a lot of other characters, some of them are women, and I had to make at least a stab at letting the listeners know, from the tone and pitch of the voice, who was speaking.

So, I had to give voice to chavs, the wealthy middle-class, the educated and the uneducated; to social workers, teachers, prisoners, criminals, students…the list goes on. Concentrating on which voice to be using is one of the things that limit how long a session can be.

There’s a commonly expressed view that writers should narrate their own books because people who buy audiobooks like to know that it’s the author they are listening to. Well, maybe. I’ve no evidence to support that view or contradict it. The reason I narrated Zappa’s Mam, and the reason I narrated A Just and Upright Man before it, is that I know the book. I know what I intended – how I meant the reader of a paperback or e-book version to speak the words inside their head. So that’s what I did: I spoke the words (and not just the dialogue, but especially the dialogue) as I had intended they should be read on the page.

A little while ago, I paid an actress to narrate Sharon Wright: Butterfly for me. I did that because the central character is a young woman and I didn’t feel I could do justice to her. It was a terrible and expensive mistake, and that audiobook will never be published. I’ve had to write off the cost. It isn’t that the narrator wasn’t capable; simply that she didn't "get" what was intended – why a character spoke particular words at a particular time.

Whether I’ll now narrate Sharon Wright: Butterfly myself, I don’t know – it will probably depend on how well Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper performs.

But I do have some advice for any writer who thinks they may at some point in the future decide to produce an audiobook version of their work in progress:
At the end of each writing session, read what you have written aloud. How does it flow? Make whatever improvements you need to to make sure that you have removed any obstacles to easy narration.
Otherwise, you’ll find yourself – as I did – making textual changes on the fly when you get into the recording studio because what looks great on the page simply can’t be read with any fluency.