More About
Producing Audiobooks
May offers full service audio production to publishers, independent authors and thought leaders. As the audience for audio programming continues its rapid growth, there are more opportunities to create audio content: from traditional single voice audiobooks to full cast recordings with sound effects, to podasts, audio editions of ebook originals, or programming for the corporate, trade or general consumer space.
Producing an audio program for a client always starts with Preparation: giving the project a thorough reading in advance of in depth discussions with the author, agent or publisher. Over the years, May has gotten a lot of practice sharpening her analytical skills. What she loves most is diving deep into books, taking them in and then taking them apart. As a trained actor, book editor and former story analyst for MGM UA, what she looks for is how to get emotionally and intellectually connected to the text.
Research into the subject area of the book, its setting, actual persons who are part of the story, and pronunciations, comprise aspects of her preparation. In nonfiction works that include illustrations, graphs or sidebars, presentation of this content in a listener-friendly way is considered. And then, in discussion with the publisher and/or author, arriving at the perfect approach for each unique project, from number of readers (single reader, mulitiple readers or full cast to be employed) to the possible use of music and sound effects.
Next is Casting. Who is the best person or people most suited to tell the story. May collaborates with authors and publishers to share her ideas and answer that question. She solicits auditions from suitable actors or coaches an author reading their own book for the first time.
Estimating the amount of time it will take to record a project and coordinating among all the players to Schedule recording sessions (with talent recording from home studios or third party state-of-the-art recording studios) comes next, followed by in-studio or remote direction. Directing requires laser focus on every aspect of a performance: from intention, emotion, pacing, tone of voice, consistency, text accuracy, pronunciation and extraneous noise.
When a recording has been finished, an editor puts it together. Editing is a precision art and is all about shaping the sound. No matter how experienced a reader is, there are starts and stops, pickups, and going back to re-record a section or character voice to make it more perfect. There are clothing sounds, mouth noises, clicks and pops that need to be removed. Cleaning up transitions, conforming room tone, honing the pace, and making any given program sound like it was recorded flawlessly in one go, is always May’s goal.
Once the editing is completed, the audio program is Mastered and moves into the final Quality Control or QC stage of production, where a fresh set of ears listens to the completed program to ensure that a perfectly clean, polished final product is delivered to the client.