“Narrating audiobooks is one of the fastest growing niche areas of voiceover!”

This is a quote from Hilary Huber’s Audiobook panel materials for her Friday, June 4th Breakout session. On hand were Scott Brick and Pat Fraley to discuss what skills you need to actually work in this area.

The biggest hurdle for many people with aspirations of recording audiobooks is the simple fact that you have to read aloud for a LONG time. Most people THINK they can do this, but when faced with 500 pages of book – with multiple characters of different genders, ages, ethnicities, etc. – the reality is that it takes much more than thinking about it.

If you have gotten to the point where you can comfortably read for several hours a day for several days, without an excessive number of stops and starts or abundant mouth noise, then perhaps you are ready to market your services.

The current trend for demos (and this is not an exact science) is at least three – 1 minute excerpts with a slate before each. Pick from familiar books – good books, but not best sellers done by well known audiobook narrators. Although it was suggested that you could send a specific producer a snippet from something they have produced. This would require several demos customized to each producer, of course. Your demo should also have pristine sound – rent a studio if necessary – and use a director.

Got your demo(s) done – look for a publisher who will take a chance on you – probably not the big houses, but the smaller publishers.

Some links for researching audiobook publishers:

http://audiopub.org/

http://www.audiofilemagazine.com

http://www.booksontape.com/

One final thought from the panel…

“Slow down on action scenes.”