Catching Up on the Audiobook Edition

An exchange with a friend from high school brought my attention to the audiobook edition of The Road to Concord.

It’s available through Audible and through Apple, and perhaps other channels.

I started to wonder about the audiobook narrator, Douglas R. Pratt. And it turned out there’s an interview with him from FangirlNation. That page not only lays out Pratt’s varied career but also how he made himself an audiobook narrator:

Audible opened a service called ACX, the Audible Creators Exchange. Essentially, if you own the rights to a book and want it narrated, you can list it with ACX. Narrators can search the listings and submit auditions to books that they would like to narrate.

Again, most of the time you send in an audition and nothing happens, but if the rights holder likes your audition they offer you a contract to produce the book. I got an offer after a couple of months of trying, a self-published self-help book. After a couple of those I attracted the attention of an actual publisher. Now I am in the happy position of getting lists of titles from a couple of publishers to pick and choose from. . . .

I look through the Amazon listings of titles that I’ve been offered, and I usually buy a copy. Authors need royalties. If I get the contract I generally get a gratis copy on Kindle or PDF as part of that, but I don’t consider buying books a waste of money. Anyway, I will read the first few chapters, and if my initial impression was correct I’ll ask for the chance to narrate it.

If I get the contract I read the whole thing, making notes as I go as to words that might be hard to pronounce (usually names). I usually get the author’s email address so I can verify those words, or I look them up on the Internet. . . .

It takes about three hours to produce an hour of finished audio. I record the book, usually a chapter or two at a time, and do an edit pass to cut out the mistakes. I re-record and edit in any sections that need it; I’ve gotten pretty good at making edits seamless. Finally, I give the whole thing one more listen to make sure I haven’t missed anything. I have enjoyed learning to do my own editing and post production.

It’s striking how much technology has changed the audiobook industry from just a few decades ago, when I was in book publishing and also making long drives with binders full of cassettes from the library. Digitization has spread out not just the distribution and consumption but also the production.

Pratt’s other narrations on Audible include Gary Wheeler Stone and Mark Lender’s Fatal Sunday, John S. Pancake’s This Destructive War, Patrick Spero’s Frontier Country, Kevin T. Barksdale’s The Lost State of Franklin, and Ian Macpherson McCulloch’s John Bradstreet's Raid, 1758, if you’re eager to hear some eighteenth-century American history.