This week, I have been listening to audiobook auditions. This was not just some weird new hobby I’ve picked up, Torquere Press are going to be turning Labyrinth of Stone into an audiobook. It is very exciting (so exciting, in fact, that when my contract was emailed to me I announced it to everyone in the room…or, as some people call it, the public loo where I was having a wee), but it is also a bit weird.

 For a start, I have a pretty thick Northern Ireland accent. It’s softer than the Belfast accent, but it is culchie as hell. I once tried to tell people in England that I had seen a lovely mirror at a market, and my rendition of ‘mirror’ is apparently so bewildering that I ended up having to mad lib it out. ‘It’s like a glass, a reflective glass that you look in? A looking glass?’ Now, I don’t really notice it, but when I write I hear the narration in my voice. I guess. I never really thought about it before.
Weird as anything to hear some dude reading out my words and not sounding like me at all. Honestly, the first time I tried to listen to them I couldn’t get through the pizza-tro (if you don’t know what that means you haven’t read my book, so go do that and then come back) for giggling and flailing my hands about in excited flusterment.

Plus, not to sound arrogant, but dammmmmn…I wrote some good words. As a writer, you – or, as usual, possibly just me – don’t really notice most of the time? You aren’t trying to write something clever, you just want to get across what you see in your head? Sometimes there’s a line or a wisecrack that works so well you take a minute to appreciate it, but usually what you – or, yes, just me – want is for the words to be industrious little building blocks for the scene.

Then, during the edit, you spend so much time folding, spindling, and trying not to multilate the narrative that there is no time to really appreciate them? Yes, you’re happy with the book as a whole, but you don’t think about the words so much.

When you hear someone else reading them though? It is like they are that ex you broke up with, and at the time all you could see was a relationships worth of farts and unflushed toilets. Then you run into them six months later, and suddenly you can see their social face again.

So, short story long, there I was sitting in the car park at work going, ‘man, this sounds like a real book!’
In the end, the whole process was so bewildering that I enlisted some friends to lend me their age. They were awesome, by the way, and thanks! Turns out that I suck at picking audio voices and my tentative list of ‘maybe this guy is slightly better than that one? But they are really all very good’ was completely wrong.

It’s ok. They were right. After I listened a second time to all the auditions I agreed with everything they had said. My problem was that I had been thinking about how people speak and not how people read.

It is kind of like the difference between stage acting and tv acting? On stage, because you have to capture even the people way up at the back, every gesture has to be BIG and easily readable. Translate that style over to TV and it can look stagey and inauthentic. Audiobooks are look like the stage, the diction has to be crisp and the cadences defined because the voice is doing all the heavy lifting. Usually, in speech, body language and facial expressions pick up a lot of the slack. Without those everything has to be done in the lift of a vowel or the rasp on a full stop.

Oh, and also, if someone is mispronouncing a character’s name you can tell them. I would have let it go, because I am almost neurotically nonconfrontational – even about minor things, but I was assured that people would actually want to know!

Anyhow, that is what I learned about auditioning readers for audiobooks. There are more elements to consider – does the voice suit the genre, is the voice too similar to the reader for another series similar to yours – but for a first time I think I did pretty good.

I am getting an audiobook! How cool is that?