Our Exclusive Interview with ‘Heart of Gold’ Narrator Steve Ogden

This week we’re shining a spotlight on Steve Ogden, the audiobook narrator of Heart of Gold, Warren Adler’s bestselling new historical thriller about a mysterious inheritance that reveals dark secrets from the past.

Click to listen to the interview below:

What do you look for in a project?

I like projects with a diverse cast of characters sparking off each other.

Is there a particular genre you gravitate towards?

I guess I’m drawn toward action stories more than anything else, but it’s nice if it has a good bit of character development and drama, so that I have more to work with as an actor.

What initially drew you to Heart of Gold?

I was lucky enough to have been contacted by Warren Adler’s people who had come across my other work on Audible through ACX.com. The story had a lot going for it – the diverse cast of characters, a good bit of action, and some good scenes of drama and character moments, and was pretty hard to resist. It’s one of those books that is a little like watching an exciting movie.

Tell us a bit about your background.

My background as a vocal performer comes from being a singer in several bands in my misspent youth. When I read, I treat the narration and dialog like lines of a song. You really use the same muscles and techniques. It’s all expression and pitch and phrasing. Add to that the possibility of inhabiting characters with different speaking styles and accents, and it’s a lot of fun.

What inspired you to become an audiobook narrator?

I was inspired to get into audiobook narration specifically by hearing Neil Gaiman’s read of Stardust a few years back and I guess you could say I was hooked. From there, I discovered a bunch of compelling audiobooks that I have really enjoyed listening to, and re-listening to, and getting lost in those stories. I can look back on that as a moment when I thought – yeah- I want to do this! I wanted to give other people the same experience I’ve had listening to audiobooks. That’s why I do it.

What was the most unexpected thing about narrating audiobooks that you didn’t foresee going in?

Before I started a few years ago, I didn’t realize how much time was involved. Maybe, if a book is 12 hours long or whatever, I assumed that was just how much time the book took to produce. You know, some actor went into a booth for a couple of six-hour days and voila, all done! I assumed there would be some editing, but not much.

At least the way I do it, it’s not like that at all. I record for an hour, and then spend another hour or two editing to get 30 minutes of finished, polished audiobook performance. It’s getting better as I do it more, but getting a good product out of it is pretty time-intensive. At least for me.

Is there anything you learned about yourself or life in general after completing production of Heart of Gold?

Funny – I was just thinking about this – during the recording and production of Heart of Gold, I realized just how much I enjoy doing audiobooks and although I have a perfectly fulfilling job, I would be perfectly happy to just create audiobooks as my full time job for the rest of my career.

That wasn’t really something I expected to ever think.

What are the top three pieces of advice you would give to an aspiring voice-over artist?

I’m far from an expert, but here’s what I wish someone had said to me before starting:

1. Be patient. It took the author a really long time to get every word right. You’re not going to come in and be One-Take Charlie. You will have redos. You will make mistakes and mispronounce words, and breathe in the wrong place, and cough. You have to go back in and fix those things. So patience is a virtue.

2. Get clean audio. The cleaner your read is, the better your final product will be. That means not trying to record right after a meal – but also not if you’re too hungry – or you get mouth noises and all sorts of noises. It means not trying to record on a pretty spring day when your neighbors are mowing the lawn, which you can still pick up through the walls. And it means recording in a room that has as little background noise as possible.

You can cure a lot of ills with editing tricks and noise-reduction plug-ins, but the less of that stuff you have to do, the better, because it’s really time-consuming. So, a clean read up front is best.

3. Don’t read. Perform. This is the big one. Anyone can read words off a screen. The trick is not to let them sound like words on a screen. You have to inhabit the characters, and remember even the narrator is a character. You have to become them in a way. Their hopes and dreams and desires become yours, and once you allow that to happen, it gets a lot easier to put the right em-PHA-sis on the right syl-LAB-le. Or something.