TALKING ABOUT AUDIO BOOKS

There are so many other elements that go into making a good audio book besides the writing. As my audio publisher said at the Las Vegas Writers Conference, "a good narrator can make a bad book sound good and a bad narrator can kill a good one."

I'm going to take that one step farther. You can have a decent narrator whose voice is not suited to the project. That also does not work because it lacks credibility.

I recently finished an audio book written by an author I really like who has so many books in print it makes my head spin and it was published by a big-name audio publisher. So I expected nothing but the best. I found glitches in the story, but as an author I'm more aware of looking for them. I probably could have dealt with that, but the protagonist is a divorced woman private eye who wants to strike out on her own with no assistance from her tough ex-husband and cop father.

All well and good. The problem is the narrator's voice sounds like a very young girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, although I know she's a grown woman. Somehow this "teenescent" voice does not lend itself to you picturing her acting like a badass. It sounds more like a little girl playing make believe. Maybe I'm too critical. Maybe it's just me. But I want my characters to at least have a ring of reality in an audio book.

I've heard this narrator before and the minute I remembered the voice I remembered that my reaction was the same. What's this little kid doing telling the story?

Once I met a woman in her forties who did voiceover and was astounded when she opened her mouth to speak. She sounded like a five year old and that's what she was cast as for her voiceover work. She said directors loved working with her because although she sounded like a little kid she was a grown woman who took direction in an adult way.

Another thing that bothered me and interrupted the flow of the story was an inordinate number of "he said," "she said," "I said." Hey, I know who's supposed to be saying it. Particularly in the audio edition, I should be able to tell by the voice. After a while you try to blank all the "saids" out. But there should be a policy of reducing the amount of those tags in an audio book. It is REALLY annoying.

Arliss