How do you pronounce “Ryo?”

So, I like TUYO enough to actually take the (for me) big step of figuring out how to create an audiobook edition. I’m intimidated by learning new stuff like this, but I tackled it this week.

You can make audiobooks, in case you’re curious, via ACX, which is a division of Amazon that makes audiobooks and then makes them available via Audible. Rather than laying out a relatively huge amount of money to pay the narrator, you can split future royalties with the narrator. That’s the way I’m doing it. I don’t know what other options may exist for making audiobooks, except there’s a relatively expensive way to do it through Draft2Digital (I looked at that some time ago, and at least at that point, you had no choice but to pay the narrator up front).

So … what you do, if you’re working through ACX, is set things up and then post an audition script, which (ACX advises) should be 2-3 pages that includes dialogue by all the major characters. The tidbits included in the script need not be contiguous in the book, but in fact I used a bit from the first chapter, where Ryo first meets Aras. I feared that absolutely no one would audition because the book is really quite long, so it’s kind of a big project, and it’s a new book with a tiny handful of reviews.

[Good reviews so far, and if you’ve left one, thank you so much!]

But in fact two narrators auditioned in the first 48 hours, so I can now say with certainty that there will be an audio edition pretty soon. Also, I’m now a lot less intimidated by this whole thing, so I expect I’ll make audio editions of the Black Dog books this year too.

Now, you provide suggestions for the potential narrators when you post the script. I said, two major characters, both male, very different speaking styles, the first-person narrator is nineteen, the other protagonist is in his fifties, Midwestern American accent is fine, straightforward speaking style is fine. I also said there isn’t any romance because if *I* were going to narrate a book, I would definitely like to know whether there were any steamy sex scenes so I could decline to audition for those books, so I thought narrators might like to know that. I didn’t provide any suggestions about how to pronounce character names because I didn’t care about how the narrator pronounced those at this stage.

However, having listened to these two auditions, I do note that the two narrators pronounce the words “Ryo” and “tuyo” in a slightly different way. So … how do you all prefer to pronounce them?

Ryo = Rye-oh

Ryo = Ree-oh

Slight accent on the first syllable or something else?

Tuyo = two-yoh

Tuyo = twee-yoh

Slight accent on the first syllable or something else?

Does anybody know exactly how to pronounce “tuyo” in Spanish so I can perhaps suggest a different pronunciation? Other than not wanting to sound like “tuyo” is Spanish, I have no firm commitment to a particular pronunciation, so I expect I will go with whatever pronunciation seems to be most popular.

Let me add, in case this interests you, that the two narrators so far are quite distinctive.

Narrator 1: deeper voice, slower speech, very clear diction, no obvious attempt to distinguish between characters by altering the tone or depth or speed of speech. I think this narrator would be acceptable.

Narrator 2: lighter voice, quicker speech, clear diction, more of an effort to distinguish between characters. This is the narrator I prefer so far.

I never thought about this kind of thing much at all before. Even when I listen to audiobooks, I don’t think about this. I like some narrators better than others, but I’ve never thought about why. I think after doing this, I’m going to.

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