You published your novel! That’s huge. Now your art is out there for everyone to read. Still have a little bit left in you? Grab your momentum and add the audiobook. In addition to being good business sense, you’re also making your book more accessible. Plus, you’re reaching an audience of busy people who can’t sit down by the fire with a new hardcover but will devour your work during their commute. Everyone wins! Still, you need a narrator to cross this finish line, and it has to be exactly the right person who will breathe life into your characters, and make the narrative unfold as though it were a dream. Here are my tips on how to hire an audiobook narrator.
How do I hire an audiobook narrator?
Of course, you’ll want to chat with your publisher early on to make sure the both of you are on the same page. Ask questions like, do they do their own production or have a production house or platform that they generally work with? Is there a standard contract in place? All of those things will point you in the right direction. Or maybe you have published your work independently, and you know you want to create an audiobook with Pink Flamingo, The Audio Flow, Spoken Realms, Findaway, or ACX (or others!).
Here’s a few steps that I want authors to take when they reach out to me, with a couple of helpful tips thrown in.
Make a list of key characteristics
Every book comes with a short list of must-haves for a narrator, things like race, gender, or nationality. Of course, if your story is about a young girl from China arriving in America, it’s important to hire someone who can more intimately and culturally know what that would be like, and how she would feel. But even beyond that, there may be a specific background or extra knowledge that you want. Maybe your book takes place on a submarine, or is a biography of Tom Brady, in which case having a narrator with knowledge about U-Boats or the greatest quarterback of all time would be in your (and the book’s!) best interest. Realizing those key characteristics will help you reach out to the right people.
Talk to your Casting Director or post your job
Keep your whole team in the loop by sharing your thoughts and specific asks with your producer and publisher. Include information about characters the narrator needs to feel comfortable with (a Southern Grandpa? A deep-voiced alpha male wolf shifter? A little girl?). The Casting Director will give you options to listen to, or you can ask for a short audition from their suggestions.
If you are going the Indie route, you’ll still use those specs for your post when you put your book up for auditions. You’ll also need to know how many finished hours your novel will be in length and the time you expect your narrator will take to record, which will be longer with a lot of main characters or a wide variety of accents.
Research your candidates and production companies
I generally recommend first-timers look at all the resources for authors on ACX even if they don’t end up going with that platform. There are also some terrific articles for authors by narrator Karen Commins, creator of the website The Narrator’s Roadmap. But you can certainly do a little Googling if that will help you along. We narrators all have demos on our websites and you can take a peek at those. Contact a narrator directly if you want them to narrate your book–I have had that happen quite a few times! If they are interested/available, you can request them, no matter what platform you work with.
Listen to auditions
OK, the tricky part is done and you have some submissions. But wait? What am I looking for exactly? First tip, don’t imagine that a demo will sound exactly like the person narrating your novel. It won’t. If you are working with a production company, you will only have a few auditions to choose from. But if you are going indie, it could be over a hundred. Don’t worry—you’ll be able to eliminate some right off the bat, even though the voice actor is very good, for not being quite the right fit.
Jot down your initial feelings after the first listen and remove any instant no’s from the list. Then take another go at it, writing down or talking through your responses. What do you like about this narrator and what doesn’t quite fit? Don’t cross off an actor based on something you could give mild feedback on. All of us get notes all the time and we respond to them really well. So something like, “I want this accent to be Tennessee Southern rather than Savannah Southern” or “this character should speak more quickly” are all easy fixes. Eventually, you have to choose someone, and a lot of time it comes down to instinct. Who sticks with you or feels right? That’s your person.
Make sure to sign a contract
If you’re going at this mostly alone, you won’t necessarily have a contract on hand and ready, but you need something to lay out the terms. There are a few different ways to pay narrators including: Royalty Share, Royalty Share plus a stipend, and PFH (“per finished hour”) rates. There’s the base payment for it to be SAG-AFTRA eligible, and sometimes you pay the production company, sometimes you pay the narrator, and sometimes you pay a paymaster.
Hopefully, you aren’t too overwhelmed at this point.
Truthfully, choosing the perfect narrator should be lots of fun. You get to collaborate and talk about your amazing work together! Besides, nothing beats hearing a new fully energized interpretation of the piece when your audiobook is finished. No matter how much extra time you had to put into securing the right person, it’ll be worth it in the end.
