Hey, it’s Susan Berkley with this week’s inside voiceover video training blog. We’re going to talk about audio books this week. It is a hot niche. It’s exploding. Everybody’s doing them, and everybody’s talking about it, but they’re not right for everybody. Let me give you some criteria, and you can make the decision about whether you want to pursue this further. So the first thing is you have to be a listener of audio books. You have to understand what you’re dealing with here. Sometimes people say they want to do, but they’ve never listened to an audio book. You’ve got to fix that first. Go on Audible, download some books, start listening, go to the library, take them out, and get familiar with the niche. There are many different genres. There’s fiction, there’s nonfiction, there’s children’s literature, there’s Christian books, there’s sci-fi, there’s medical stuff. It is endless. You just have to start by familiarizing yourself.
The second thing you need to do is like to read aloud. You have to be fluid, which means you can’t break down a lot. Otherwise, this isn’t going to be torture for you. You’re going to spend a lot of time in the studio. The average book has a running time of eight, to 10, to 12 hours, and it didn’t take that voice actor 10 hours to 12 hours to read that book. It took multiples of that amount of time, because you break down, you stop, you start. You do need to have the time to do this. The top audio book narrators who were churning them out might be working four maybe six hours a day on this. That’s about the most you can do without straining your voice. Other narrators are given months to complete a project, so they might work one, two hours or more a day. You got to think about whether you have the time.
You also need a great sounding home studio that’s soundproof. You’re going to be doing a lot of recording in it. You’re going to be spending a lot of time, and there can’t be any background noise. Your audio quality must be excellent. You need to know how to edit or be willing to pay a little bit to have somebody else do the editing for you, because there’s going to be a lot of that. If you’ve got acting skills, that’s wonderful. You’ll be able to put them to use. If you don’t there are plenty of narrative niches as well, such as business books that you could do. I hope I peaked your interest. We’re going to have a lot more audio book training coming up for you here at the Great Voice Company. I’m back next week with more inside voiceover.
