975. This week, I learned all about audiobook narration from David H. Lawrence XVII, who is launching a new program called "Narrate Your Own Book." If you've ever dreamed of being a narrator — or wondered what it's like — this episode is for you!
975. This week, I learned all about audiobook narration from David H. Lawrence XVII, who is launching a new program called "Narrate Your Own Book." If you've ever dreamed of being a narrator, this episode is for you! And if you're a self-published author who has always wanted to narrate your own audiobook (or feel like you should), this episode is especially for you. We talk about many of the fears that might be holding you back and why they don't matter as much as you probably imagine.
If you want to learn even more, you can watch three free videos (about 40 minutes each) where David goes even more into why and how you should narrate your own audiobook.
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/nyob/transcript
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References for the Aging segment
van Boxtel, W, Lawyer, L. Sentence comprehension in ageing and Alzheimer's disease. Lang Linguist Compass. 2021;e12430.
Payne, B. R., Gao, X., Noh, S. R., Anderson, C. J., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. (2012). The effects of print exposure on sentence processing and memory in older adults: Evidence for efficiency and reserve. Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, 19(1–2), 122–149.
Mignon: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I am so excited because I'm here today with you, David H. Lawrence, the 17th, an actor and an audiobook narrator and coach. And that's why he's here with us today because he has a new program called "Narrate Your Own Book." And when he approached me about it, I immediately said, "Yes, absolutely. I want to do it. And I think a lot of my listeners will want to do it too." So David, welcome and thank you for being here today.
David: Thank you so much. I've been such a fan for such a long time. I can't get through my week without listening to the episode. So I'm so happy to be here.
Mignon: Oh, you're amazing. So, thank you. Well, you know, the timing was so fortuitous because I, on my hard drive, I had the manuscript for the public domain Hardy Boys book because, you know, Nancy Drew isn't in the public domain yet. So I had the Hardy Boys because I have been wanting to narrate an audiobook, but I wasn't sure how to get started.
I was feeling a little intimidated. So then you approached me about this amazing program. So, um, why don't you tell the listeners a little bit more about it?
David: So I've been doing audiobook narration since the late eighties when I used to live in Washington, D.C., and did work for the Library of Congress. And all through that time, Audible was born, and then ACX was born and I started not only, uh, doing books on ACX as one of their first Audible approved producers, but also training others on how to do it.
And it was mostly actors and voice talent, but every so often, every so often an author would sneak into the class and then reveal him or herself like midway through. "Oh, I'm not an actor. I'm, I'm, I'm a writer," and I usually would be like, "Oh, it's too late. You're an actor now." So I figured why not create a bespoke package of training specifically for authors who want to narrate the titles that they've written, their own books, so that they can say, “Read for you by the author.”
Mignon: Right. Wonderful. Yeah. I'm the one crashing here because I won't be reading my own book. I'm going to take the course, but I have narrated my own audiobook many years ago, but you know, when I did it, I was in a studio with a director and, you know, things have changed so much. You can do it yourself now.
So talk about, I think, the things that can hold people back. Well, wait, no. First, let's back up. First, talk about why an author would want to narrate their own audiobook. Why should they have an audiobook out there?
David: Well, first of all, audiobook sales is a huge part of the industry now ever since the invention of the smartphone. Getting an audiobook is so much easier these days than it used to be. You had to fly somewhere. You had to go to a Hudson News at an airport, and pick up a box, and make sure you had a CD player with you.
Or a cassette deck before that. But now it's as easy as thinking, “Oh, I'd like that audiobook.” And ten seconds later, you can be listening to that audiobook. That's how frictionless that process has become. And that has led to huge increases in sales. It's just a hockey-stick growth over the last decade or so.
And as an author, creating an audiobook used to be kind of, "Oh, that's cool." Or for the biggest, now it's almost de rigueur. It's almost expected that you have an audiobook. In fact, I used to say, “You're going to make an audiobook of that new title you're talking about you're doing, right?” And they were like, “Oh, I hadn't thought of that.”
And now it's like, “Of course I am. I just have to figure out how to do it.” The notion of, uh, having an audiobook as part of the different formats of which you offer a reader or listener is really important. And you can do things with an audiobook that you can't necessarily do with a print book. The reverse is true as well.
But this notion of being your own voice, of your own title, is certainly for people who are doing nonfiction books because they want to be considered the subject matter expert, or they want to lead a community, or they're offering a course along with it. There's a number of different ways of doing that, but even for fiction writers, you know, you know this story. You know the subtext. You know not to reveal the gaffe. You know the arcs, and you've lived with these characters as the writer for sometimes. Months, years, decades as you were writing the book. So why not bring those to life with your voice?
Mignon: Right? And I have heard authors talk about being disappointed with the way something turned out in an audiobook. The narrator didn't quite understand the character or something like that. Yeah.
David: I don't doubt that, uh, writers have in their head what they think the book should sound like. Again, because they've lived with it for so long. Sometimes writers are, "Oh my God, I had no idea that that was what was going to happen with the book in a good way."
And other times, not so much. I mean, actors make choices just like writers make choices and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. But if you're an author of a book, you get to make that definitive choice.
Mignon: Right. Right. So, you know, let's say there are some authors listening or people who want to sneak in and just narrate audiobooks, and they have that manuscript sitting there on the computer, and they're looking at it thinking, "I don't even know where to begin." I'm sure that's something that holds people back. So talk about, like, where do they even begin?
David: Yeah, it's a great question. People have this finished product for the print world. I'm going to ask them, you know, if they take the training to make a couple of adjustments to that finished product to make it more accessible to a listener. We hear people, uh, narrating audiobooks all the time saying phrases like, "As you read this book." So one of the first things that we ask writers to do is take a pass on the manuscript and do what I call "audiobookifying" the manuscript, uh, replacing phrases like, "As you read this book "with, "As you listen to this audiobook," or removing, references to visual imagery, like "in the map below, you'll find the path that Napoleon took," you know.
We also talk about adding a related PDF, which is something that you can do with Audible where if images and diagrams and code and maps and other visual items are really germane to the book, you can put it in a downloadable PDF that people can grab right when they buy the book. I did a book a few years ago. I had no idea it was going to be as big a seller as it was called "Secrets of Screen Acting," and there were a lot of line drawings of the framing of actors as they were doing their work. That was really important to understanding how to do the work in the book, and it worked out really well for the author to do that related PDF.
Mignon: I wouldn't have thought of that. That's a great idea. Wonderful. Yeah. You're so full of good ideas.
David: I want to know if that answered your question either. I want to make sure that, that's one thing to do at the very beginning. Where do they start? They have to start with their book being on Kindle.
Mignon: Right. Yeah. I guess that was one thing I was wondering is like, you know, I'm sure some people don't know. "Okay, even if I narrate it, where do I put it? What do I do with it, this thing?"
David: Sure. And we base the course on, uh, the author who's got a book on Kindle in ebook format. It's easy to then create an account on ACX and claim that title off of Kindle. In fact, that's why ACX was actually created, because there were all of these Kindle authors, hundreds of thousands of Kindle authors with millions of titles, none of which had been created as audiobooks in 2010-11 when ACX was first created.
And Amazon was like, "I'd like to sell those as audiobooks. Let's create a path for people to do that." So they created this dating service between narrators and authors or authors who wanted to narrate their own books called ACX. And that's really where you start. And it's a really easy process to do.
Mignon: Does ACX stand for something?
David: It does, it does. It stands for Audiobook Creation Exchange. And I guess that's because acx.com was available. Not ace.com, but, uh, ACX is now over 10 years old. It has just changed my life in terms of another way for me to apply my trade as a performer. And for authors, it's a tremendous production platform that makes doing your audiobook so easy to manage.
Mignon: Wonderful. So I imagine another thing that holds people back or that they might wonder about is like, "Okay, so I want to do this thing, but you know, okay, Mignon, she's a podcaster. She already has the microphone, and she's recording. Like, I don't have a studio. Like, how am I going to, how am I going to do this? It sounds hard.”
David: Yeah, it's one of the challenges that people have that kind of holds them back. But the truth is I have clients who live out in the country, and it's nice and quiet. They're on the end of a cul-de-sac in a suburb and it's, you know, they have to watch on Saturday afternoon for the kids playing, but that's about it.
But I also have people living in the heart of urban areas, Midtown Manhattan, Downtown Los Angeles, and they find places in their homes that are either already quiet enough to do this work or that can be made quiet enough to do the work. And then what gear do you buy, right? How do you know what to use?
And we solve that problem for you as part of the course because we actually give you the gear that I use every day for my work. In fact, I have the microphone that I use every day. This is it. Uh, the AT2020 USB plus with my mic sock. This gets sent to, along with the other gear, the earbuds and the mic stand, to all the clients, all the students in the class, so that they have gear that works, gear that actually makes a difference and is great sounding, you know, easy to set up, easy to travel with if they want to do work on the road.
Uh, and that kind of checks a box that a lot of people get kind of weirded out about, like, “What do I do? How do I do this?”
Mignon: Yeah, yeah, we talked before, and I was kind of surprised you're using the same software that I use to create the podcast, but you told me a way to do things that is so much better than what I've been doing with my software, like lo these 17 years. So, you know, I already ... we aren't going to talk about the technical details today. Nobody listening probably cares about the details of audio editing, but like, I will say, I already learned to use my equipment better just by talking to David last week.
David: That's great.
Mignon: Yeah. So, you know, and this, here's where I got hung up, not knowing how to move forward. I, you know, I narrated my own nonfiction audiobook.
I was even nominated for an Audie Award, the awards for audiobook narration. But when I looked at a fiction manuscript, I thought, “I have to do all these characters. This isn't just reading. This is more like acting,” and I started to feel really intimidated. So, you know, and you told me like, maybe, maybe I shouldn't worry about that.
David: Yeah. I think people do worry about it a lot. First of all, they have the examples of all these great actors who have narrated audiobooks and what a wonderful job they do. Um, but I think sometimes we don't give ourselves enough credit. For being the human beings, the storytellers, the innate actors that we are, uh, we don't sit there and consider ourselves incapable of sharing a story from an online source or a newspaper with a friend or a family member.
We just do it. And we do it because we have a hundreds of thousands of year history of being that kind of a creature. One of the things that I like to do in the course is make sure that people are aware of how good they actually are. You know, one of the very first things that people worry about is their voice. The quality of their voice. Is it deep enough? Is it rich enough? Is it professional enough? Nothing that has to be worried about. We just, we just don't, and drawing characters, you don't have to draw characters the way a trained Broadway actor or thespian from the UK does it. That's not you. What you want to aim for is authenticity.
You know these characters, you've heard their voices in your head as you were writing your book. In your case with the, with the, the public domain of the Hardy Boys, you have an idea of what the brothers all sound like, you know, individually and collectively. And it's more about the content of what they're saying.
One of the phrases that I use a lot when I'm coaching people is, don't be afraid to let the words do the heavy lifting. You know, these have been written, these have been rewritten, these have been edited and honed and refined and dropped into the manuscript in, in a way that is very considered. And so they carry a lot of weight and a lot of strength and you don't have to worry so much about how you actually say certain words or how you put emphasis on things. It's about telling that authentic story and everybody has that in them.
Mignon: Yeah, I think authenticity is really an important part of it. And I think as a listener myself, you know, I always like when the author reads the book themselves because, you know, it makes me feel even more connected to them. And this sort of leads me into one thing that people might be wondering. We've heard a lot about AI lately, and, you know, as a podcaster, I've been really keeping up on what's happening in the world of AI voices and, you know, people may be wondering, can I just have AI narrate my audiobook? And I think today there are two reasons that you wouldn't want to do that. I mean, one is that I don't think the voices are there yet. They aren't good enough, but also they're lacking that authenticity. That is going to be there when you use your own voice. Is that, yeah, is that your take too?
David: Yeah. It's not just my take. It's been the reviews of people who have purchased books made with virtual voice, which is the offering that Audible gives to its authors. Hey, you want us to do it for you automatically for free? The reviews have roundly been horrifying. In fact, I'm doing a series of dramatic readings, in my little shorts on YouTube and on Insta, of some of these reviews specifically, stating “Authors, you don't want these kinds of reviews. You just don't.”
And it's not just the lack of options that, virtual voices have or AI synthetic voices have, but it's also knowledge that they could never actually acquire about the story. I mean, think about a mystery. You're revealing something at the very end that you've spent the whole book misdirecting your readers or your listeners about.
Do you think that an AI voice is going to be aware of that? You know, um, the AI voice sees the word spelled D-O-E-S and instead of saying, “he does not,” it says, “He dose not.”
Mignon: Mmm
David: Mispronunciations are all over the place. I had, I listened to a sample where they were a nonfiction sample about finances and they were talking about a SEP IRA.
Well, it's not spoken as S-E-P-I-R-A. That's not how it's done. Right? So there's a lot of work to be done in that space, and you want your listeners to be connected to you. Yeah, it's a lot easier, and it's absolutely free to have an AI voice do your work, but you kind of get what you pay for.
Mignon: Yeah. I mean, they're just, they're just not there yet with those intonations. I do use them. They have their uses. I actually use them to read my scripts to me for proofreading now. I used to use a computer generated voice, and it does ... it sounds much more human. But it's still not there with all the emotion and intonations that you would want in an audiobook. You have some, some great anecdotes about people who have taken your courses. You shared one with me about, um, one of your friends who's done something like 20 books now. I'd love to hear some more of those stories.
David: Oh, I, you know, it brings a tear to my eye when I talk about my students, one of which is a lovely lady in her mid-eighties who's now working on her 24th audiobook, and she and I are repped by the same agent for television and film work. She's lovely. She is the reason that whoever you are listening to this thinking, “Oh, I can't do this. I don't have the skillset to do this.” I want you to remember that Carol Herman can do this, and if she can do it, you can do it.
She's hardly a tech consultant. She has learned enough to get the job done and get it done really well. I have among my clients, about two dozen Audie nominees, a couple of Audie winners, multiple Audie winners, in fact, and it just, we tend to sometimes be our own worst enemy when we approach something that we're not familiar with, or that seems really daunting, and audiobooks have been daunting to people because they're big products. They take hours to listen to. Sometimes double digit hours to listen to. And that leads us to think, “Oh, it must've taken hundreds of hours to produce it.” Or you have to sit there for 10 hours straight to narrate a 10-hour book. And I think once you understand how the process works, and you're given a strategy and a set of tactics that make it easy to do, small, repeatable moments that you can do over and over again, it becomes much easier to wrap your head around. And then you find these examples of people like Carol who are just killing it, and doing so every day.
Mignon: Right. Yeah. I'm so excited. I can't wait for it to start. We're recording this a little bit ahead of time, but it's starting soon. I'm gonna give you the link right now. This, this is an affiliate link, but I want you to know, like, I would have done this anyway. I'm totally doing this class.
So it's narrateyourownbook.com/grammar. And this is coming out, I believe, April 2nd. So what's the next thing when you, I think you have like a free introduction course or something like that. If you can tell people sort of what's coming up that they can participate in right away.
David: Sure. April 1st, Monday, April 1st, will be the first lesson of a free class that I'm going to be doing on everything you need to know to narrate your own audiobook. What the process is, what the procedure is. I'm going to drop some of my best stuff from the Narrate Your Own book course, and it's going to be absolutely free.
Use Mignon's link to go there. So we know who you are and we know where you came from. You'll learn all the things that you're asking about here and so much more. You'll learn what the process is, the steps that you need to take to get your book in position, to do the work. How to do the work, how to set up your studio at home. How to perform both fiction and nonfiction.
We get Grammar Girl geeky about things like first person versus third person, third person limited versus third person universal versus third person omni versus, you know, second person on occasion because some self help books use second person. You're gonna wanna do this. And it, and as I was doing those lessons, I have to share this with you, I had you in my head, because I was like, “What would Grammar Girl think of this?”
What would she think about what I'm saying here? And so I'm really excited about that. Then we talk about the whole production process, how ACX helps you do that. It organizes your stuff. It tests your stuff to make sure that it meets the standards that you need to meet to be on audible.com and all of their marketing partners with your final product.
We even give you software that you use to master your stuff to make sure that it sounds that good. And then we show you how to market and promote your audiobook once it's up. And should you want to take what we've taught you in Narrate Your Own Book and use it for, I don't know, other authors, other platforms. Maybe you fall in love with being an audiobook narrator. We want to help you take that and extend it and expand it out to other opportunities.
Mignon: Right. So even though that happened on the 1st, people can still get that even if they're listening to it later, right?
David: Oh, yeah, yeah, those free lessons are going to be up all throughout our registration period and all throughout that week, and I'll leave it up so that people can catch up. They're really easy and adjustable and hopefully they're going to open people's eyes up to just how simple the process is, and how easy it is to move from grabbing your title to setting up your studio once, and then using it for all of your titles.
If you're a multi-published author and then doing the actual work and not worrying about it, but worrying or being concerned less about how good you are or how technical you are and just paying attention to the story. That's what I want you to use most of your sensory abilities for is just being able to tell that great story that you've already written
Mignon: Right. So, and those are three free lessons, right? That people can, will participate in before they can, to help them decide if this is something they want to do.
David: Well, you know, look, I want people to see how I teach. I want people to be able to ask questions. We'll take questions underneath the videos that'll be online of these lessons. You can ask questions and I'll actually answer them in the following lesson. What I'm doing is I’m waiting for questions to be asked for each lesson and then I'll jump on camera and answer those questions.
I want people's questions to be answered. And if you like what you see, we'll make an offer and you can take the full course.
Mignon: Yeah. No, you're great. I love your social media too. You always post the most helpful things. So just really great. So again, that URL is narrateyourownbook.com/grammar. And I'm just so looking forward to going through this program and I will tell, I hope I will tell you when I have the Hardy Boys book finished and ready for people to listen to. And it'll all be because of you, David.
David: Okay, so it will all be because of you. And for those of you listening, it's you. You have everything you need inside of you. When you start off a new process, you know, when Mignon first started her podcast, when she first started speaking in front of people, when she first started writing books, it was a new thing.
And it was scary. It was like, well, what if I fail? What if I succeed? Oh my gosh, you know. Like we, we have these fears that are easy to overcome if you have someone to hold your hand and say, “Hey, don't worry about it. I gotcha.” And that's what I hope to be.
Mignon: Wonderful. Thank you. Well, David H. Lawrence, the 17th. Again, that's narrateyourownbook.com/grammar, and I will see you there.