Notes of a Novice Audiobook Narrator

NOTE: there has been a major update to this post. See below, at the end of the original essay. You might even want to read that first before deciding to read the original post.

If you've been reading Attempts, you probably recall that I am publishing a series of short stories (which, though each is complete in itself, add up to a larger story), called Retcon. It's an SF series, set in present-day, recent-past and near-future Ithaca, New York, and is about a secret time-travel research program run out of Cornell University.

I wrote them to be read, that is, read the traditional way (on paper), or the new way (on pixels or e-ink), but wasn't, as I wrote them, particularly thinking about them as ebooks. I presume if you'd asked me I'd have said, yes, since I want to have them published, and that usually includes audiobooks these days, I'd want them as audiobooks... but it wasn't what I was writing them for. I wasn't writing audiodrama scripts; I was writing short stories.

(Oh, and you should go read them! They're great! You can buy them at my web site, or at Amazon • Amazon UK • Apple • Barnes & Noble • Kobo • Smashwords. I know Substack, anoyingly, keeps asking y’all for money in such a way that a few people have said, “Oh, I'll try to give some when I can…”, but I don’t want that and am not asking: if you want to support my work, buy the books! And hey, you’ll get the stories. Which, as I mentioned, are great.)

But once it became clear to me that the format of the series was.... unsuited to traditional publishing categories, and that the best way to make them available in the way that I thought they would work best (as a serial) would be to self-publish them, the issue of audiobooks became more pressing.

The traditional thing to do, I suppose, would be to hire an ebook reader to do them properly. But I was hoping to at least break even on this project, and while I am sure that it will be Discovered any day now and leap to the best-seller lists and be optioned for a TV show showrun by Damon Lindelof, and all that; but until that time, I need to keep costs down. So I looked around for free labor, and my gaze hit a mirror.

So I am reading them. I am also producing them, recording them, all that stuff.

(So yes, you could also go listen to them, basically all the podcast places except Apple: Amazon; Anchor; Castbox; Google; iHeart; Pandora; Pocket Casts; Radio Public; Spotify; Stitcher.)

A portrait of the author recording “Years Scattered Like Fallen Leaves” a few weeks ago. Photo by Jason Rosewell.

I will admit I have mixed feeling about the situation. However unearned the feeling, I am confident in my abilities as a writer. But I am not at all confident in my abilities as a reader. I think I could do a solid reading in the old author-reading sense, in which what is expected is not professional acting but something more like raw authenticity, and a voicing which provides the parts of a script which are intended but which print necessarily leaves out: where do you pause, what words do you stress, how do you group these words together to make the best possible sense and most euphonious possible sound.

But an audiobook reader is something else, and what this experience has driven home to me is that however skilled I am as a writer, I am not skilled as an audiobook reader. And yet, because of the recorded format, to say nothing of the fact that in recent times I am far more accustomed to hearing audiobooks than I am to hearing authors read their own work aloud, I keep being tempted by the feeling that I ought to be doing an audiobook reading. What results falls, I fear, into an uncanny valley between an author just reading his stories and a narrator performing an audiobook.

Nevertheless, it has been fun, in a tripping-over-my-own-feet sort of way. And I thought I would mention a few things I've learned, or done, or noticed, along the way.

Pacing is About Pauses (and Pauses are About Everything)

I am going to assume that this is well known, not only to professional audiobook readers, producers, mixers, and OCTPWAKWTATAWAHs¹, but also to scientists who study sound, cognitive linguistics, the way brains process the human voice, and recording forensics, and OCTPWAKWTATAWAHs.²

But it really is quite striking. I knew enough about recording to read slowly, although in the way of things I think I sped up as I went along. But if a sentence seemed too fast or too slow, simply lengthening or shortening the pauses—even by fairly minute amounts—would have a huge effect. Nor was it only within sentences: changing the pause lengths between sentences would also have a huge effect on whether it sounded fast or slow.

And it wasn’t only pacing. Sometimes the meaning would change. A passage that wasn’t sounding like the conclusion of a subsection (as you know,³ I am writing these stories in short sections) would sound like a conclusion if the pauses were adjusted. Passages that didn't work would suddenly work.

Now it’s true that to some extent, breaths are indicated in a typescript: the ones after commas are shorter than the ones after semicolons, which are shorter than the ones after periods. And so forth. And this has been more strictly true than I would I have imagined. I don’t think I can quite set a specific time to use where each piece of punctuation goes… but it’s closer than I would have guessed. Getting those right, however, are essential.

As is knowing when to change them.

It turns out that human speech is far more dependent on the sounds of silence than I would have guessed.

Audio Can Do Cool Things (But Also Has Limitations)

Yeah, I know: duh. But like so many things one does, it is striking how noticing it in another’s work pales compared to noticing it when making your own.

I’m not saying I’ve done that much cool stuff, incidentally; mostly I’m just reading. But for the second story, “Years Scattered Like Fallen Leaves”, there were a few things I had to figure out.

The most obvious, yet thus far (to my knowledge) not decisively solved one, is footnotes.

Footnotes are one of those things that just work in print.⁴ They don't work quite as well in ebooks (and some of the formatting choices are better than others, and these are not always up to the author or publisher,⁵ at least if the publisher is small potatoes). But still they work pretty well even there.

But how to do them in audio?

In the introductory dribble⁶ to the audiostory version of "Years" I surveyed some of the possibilities:

I've heard various ways of dealing with footnotes in audiobooks. Some just leave them out. The old audiobooks of Terry Pratchett books—which are a lot of fun as audiobooks, by the way, it really draws out the humor—they just read the footnotes without distinguishing it from the text. I've heard that there are new Pratchett audiobooks coming out which will have a different reader for the footnotes, which is a very elegant solution. But what I've decided to do is just put in a little blip, like so: <blip sound>.⁷ When you hear that, it means the start of a footnote, and when you hear it again that means the end. It's easier to hear than to explain.

I expect that some listeners—perhaps all—would, at least having heard the footnotes themselves, say I could have left them out. They are such that most—perhaps all—readers will likely dismiss them as mere pedantry the first time around. And I certainly wouldn’t deny that they are pedantry in part (although I hope they have some amusement value in their own right). But mostly I want to make sure they were included because, should anyone ever reread the series after it has been completed, they may find in them a Clue.

On the other hand, audio can do cool things, too.

At the end of “Years” I start playing with text on the page more seriously than I do elsewhere.⁸ And when I went to do it in audio, I found that that particular passage (unlike the rest of the story) translated very well into an audio format. Indeed, it’s possible the audio version is better? I don’t know. Why don’t you go read it and listen to it and then make up your own mind, and tell me in the comments?

If Reading Aloud Is the Best Way to Write, Reading to Record is the Best Way to Read

When I teach, I always tell my students that the best way to write is to read aloud. You catch things you never do otherwise—not just typos and grammatical stumbles, but infelicities and missed meanings too. And (it should go without saying) I take my own advice, and often read aloud as I write, and usually as I rewrite, and always at least a few times before calling a story finished.

Yet when I sat down to record “Zero Second”, after already submitting the book, I found that I kept wanting to change things. Some sentences had magically revealed their infelicities on this reading after eluding all other readings aloud; in other cases typos or simple mistakes stood up and were counted. (Of course I edited and resubmitted the ebook; all the typos I found were fixed before publiation, although a few that others found were only fixed later.)

I don’t know why I saw them then when I had missed them before. Is it simply that one both notices and misses a bunch on each pass, and that this, being another pass, made me see some that had eluded me before? Or is it that I was, more than reading out loud, reading out loud and recording it which caused a level of self-consciousness and attention that let them be extra visible?

I’m not sure. But I’m no fool. No, wait, of course I am. But while I am a fool, I am not that sort of a fool, so when it came time to do “Years” I read it aloud and then submitted the ebook.

It’s Pronounced “Alpha-Time” and “Beta-Time”

As readers of the stories know, I occationally have the characters refer to time_α and time_β, for reasons which I think are completely clear in context; less often—if memory serves, in neither of the stories I have yet recorded—I have them refer to other units of measurement in the same way, so that we have (for instance) weeks_α, decades_β, earlier_α, and will_β (as in I will do that).

I hadn’t ever thought, however, precisely how it was to be pronounced. I think I imagined it as it might look in a scientific report rather than as it would be said in conversation. But reading it aloud brought the issue to the fore, and made me think about how to pronounce it. And I find that saying “alpha time” works much better than “time alpha”.

So while it remains written as time_α and time_β, it is said alpha-time and beta-time. Just in case you were wondering.

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So I don’t know if all this inspires anyone to want to go listen or not. If so, you can hear me read the stories (with all the caveats that implies) here: Amazon; Anchor; Castbox; Google; iHeart; Pandora; Pocket Casts; Radio Public; Spotify; Stitcher.

Or, of course, you could go read the stories… the way God, and I, intended: as text.

UPDATE

Embarassing as it is to say after writing a post like this, I am afraid that my novice outings will remain all I will do for the foreseeable future; I have reluctantly decided to suspend the podcast presentation for the present. (This is only the podcast version of course; you can go read Retcon as ebooks, just as always intended.)

Why am I doing this? The short answer is time. I have actually enjoyed recording the audiostories. I have learned things from the process, and in fact the stories have even improved the first two stories (Note for those who skipped to the end: that is, of course, what the above essay was about.) But what I cut out of this essay was material talking about how time consuming this process is. The stories are long, recording them takes a long time, and then editing them takes even more time. We're talking nearly a full work week for each story, maybe forty hours. Maybe not quite that long, but close to that.

And I simply don't think I have time time to do everything. I am still preparing the text stories for publication, designing and photographing the covers, planning and writing the future stories in the series, and publishing an essay every week on my substack, not to mention multiple family responsibilities and other bits of life. And thinking it over, I don't know that the best use of my time is the audiostories. I don't know if anyone has listened to them. And I am not, I think, as good an audio narrator as I am a writer. Maybe that's delusional about my writing skills, but anyway that's what I think. I am a writer first and foremost, and secondarily a photographer (that dates back to my graphic novel, which you can learn more about on my web site if you're curious). The audio aspect was yet a third thing, and I think in the end it was just too much. I was simply over-committed, and this is the obvious place to cut back.

I am sorry that this is true. As I said, I am sorry because I have enjoyed doing these recordings, even if I don't feel I am particularly skilled in this area. But of course, above all, I am sorry for anyone who has been listening and is disappointed. When I planned the publication version of this project, I knew that I had to get ahead of the stories publication date, which is to say I needed a fair number ready to go before I published the first one. But it didn't occur to me that the same would be true of the podcasts. In retrospect it's obvious; I don't know why I didn't think of this, but I will chalk it up to the fact that I am, as I said, a writer, I know writing, and I know how long it can and does take, whereas I was and am a novice at recording. Not leaving extra time is just one example of that.

So that's why I am pausing. I am calling it a pause, because I would like, in theory, to get back to this some day. So if anyone actually did listen to the first two episodes, wants me to continue, you might send me an email and say that. If I heard from even a few people that they were enjoying the audiobooks, it would significantly increase the chances of my getting back to this at some point. At the moment, I have felt like I was speaking into the void, which has lessened my impulse to do so. If I am going to communicate with the void, I want to focus on my preferred medium, which is the written and not the spoken word. But if anyone is out there actually listening, and actually would like it if I continue, do make it known and it will definitely shift my thinking on this issue.

Otherwise, I hope you'll continue to read the stories as God and I intended: as texts.

1. other-categories-that-people-who-actually-know-what-they-are-talking-about-would-add-here.

2. Oh, you didn’t look it up the first time, but now that it’s used again you need to know what it is? Bah, humbug. Go read footnote one.

3. Right?

4. Note I am saying “footnotes” not “endnotes” here. Clicking through—like you, Diligent Reader, just did—is less elegant, although it’s better than any audio equivalent (that I know of).

5. Let’s just say that readers who purchase “Years” from Amazon or my web site will have a slightly smoother time of it than those who purchase it from Apple and Smashwords.

6. Listeners who heard the introduction to “Zero Second” may remember that that is a technical term in this context. Or at least a reference.

7. I wanted to embed the sound right there in the paragraph, but it resulted in terminally bad formatting. So here it is (perhaps appropriately) in a footnote:

8. This is difficult to exactly reproduce in the standard ebook formats (either epub or in the various formats used by Amazon). If you want to see precisely what I intended, you can look at the pdf, which is part of the purchase package on my web site. Or, if you already bought it as an ebook, shoot me an email and tell me and I’ll send you an image of the last page.