Show don’t tell Writing Podcast: Episode #87 Audiobooks Demystified

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If the idea of having an audiobook edition of your book is overwhelming, this two-part podcast episode series is for you! Suzy sits down with audiobook producer and the founder of Snowdog Audio, Jenny Hoops to start with the basics and get you up to speed on all things audiobook!  

🌟 Grab your spot in Suzy’s Inner Circle at www.suzyvadori.com/innercircle

Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)

87. Audiobooks Demystified Part 1 Transcript

Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Show, don’t Tell Writing Podcast with me, Suzy Vadori, where I peel back the layers of how to wow your readers with your fiction, your nonfiction. Anybody can bang out a first draft, but it takes a little more work to make your book as amazing as it can be. Join me as I share the step by step writing techniques you could apply to your writing right away.

As I host successful writers who share a behind the scenes look at their own [00:00:30] writing lives, and as I live coach writers on their pages giving practical writing examples that will make your own writing stronger. Nobody is born knowing how to write an engaging book. There are real and important skills that you need to learn on this show.

I cut through the noise and get you all the info you need. I can’t wait to see how this information is going to

Jenny Hoops: transform your writing.

Suzy Vadori: I am excited to have on the show today, Jenny [00:01:00] Hoops. Today we’re gonna talk about audio books and demystifying it. In fact, I had invited Jenny Hoops when they met her. I was like, oh my gosh. You have all the answers that writers ask me about all the time, and we talked so long about it that there’s a part one and a part two, so make sure that you listen to them both.

Jenny Hoops is the founder of Snow Dog Audio. She’s an experienced audiobook producer whose greatest joy is creating audio additions that authors can brag about [00:01:30] with training, audio engineering, and a passion for literature. She’s worked with authors and narrators to bring over 100 novel, yes, a hundred books, nonfiction books and poetry collections to life.

She’s an engaging studio director, working with authors, professional speakers, and voice actors to help them bring their authentic voices to their audiobook. I met Jenny because she was working with one of my authors who had recorded in another studio, but as is typical in [00:02:00] most places in this space.

That’s where the help ends. Uh, Jenny actually goes one step further and helps her clients do all the uploading and know what to do with those files. It’s one thing to just get the files, but to know what to do with them. So that’s why I wanted to talk to Jenny about all things audiobook here today so that you could learn about it.

Her first career was as a science technologist in Alberta, followed by a 14 year gig as an international motivational speaker. That guided her to working with professional [00:02:30] speakers and self-published authors. She understands both the craft and the business of publishing so that her clients are not only proud of their audio edition.

They learn how to market it too. Jenny actually lives with her family near Brag Creek, Alberta, Canada, which is pretty close to me. It’s in a neighboring town. And who is the snow dog of Snow Dog Audio? It’s her mascot and her family Golden Retriever. Welcome to the show, Jenny. It’s so good to see you.

Thank you. Yeah,

Jenny Hoops: too. [00:03:00] You too. You’re looking awesome today. I

Suzy Vadori: thank you. I’m, I’m being, we were just talking about the fact that even if we’re at home in our own studios, we, we need to dress up for work. Jenny is better at that than I am, but, but it’s great, right? Like everybody has their own process.

Jenny Hoops: It’s all about the mindset.

Like how do you. Go to work. And for me, I have to, I have to put on the clothes, I have to put on the makeup. I am, I am ready for work when I’m dressed with shoes and, and I’m ready. [00:03:30] That’s when I consider,

Suzy Vadori: yeah, you just said that. I am, I’m gonna admit I’m not wearing shoes and that’s okay. Right.

Jenny Hoops: I’m in my own

Suzy Vadori: home.

I’m an editor. I read for a living and I need to be comfortable. Okay. But first of all, welcome to the show. We’re gonna talk all about audio books today. And we wanna start with an easy question, maybe, but some of our listeners. To some of our listeners, this is really new, right? So Of course, yeah. What’s an audio book?

Just set us all. [00:04:00] Set us up. What is an audio book?

Jenny Hoops: It is the text of the book, read aloud. Yeah, perfect. That’s it At, its at its most basic, uh, it can come in a whole bunch of different forms, like used to be books on tape. And I remember my, a blind great aunt who would get these massive boxes of tapes from the CNIB and uh, and she would play these like reel to reel tapes.

And [00:04:30] now it’s gone through video and cassettes and, and all this kinda stuff. And now almost every audiobook is a digital download. So there are no physical audio books anymore. It’s all a file that you download off the internet.

Suzy Vadori: Amazing. We’re gonna, and if that sounds daunting, we’re gonna talk all about that.

It brings me right back. I know growing up we wouldn’t have listened to like War and Peace or something tape, but certainly children’s books before you could read that was really common on cassette [00:05:00] tapes. Right. And then they have the little chime when you turn the page and you kind of pretend that you’re reading along and look at the pictures.

Yeah. Well

Jenny Hoops: I’m going, I’m a little older than you, so I actually had records, you know. 30 threes and 45. Oh, I

Suzy Vadori: had records.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah. Not 45.

Suzy Vadori: So like

Jenny Hoops: full. Full. And you followed. Yeah. So you’d listen to it and you’d follow along, turn the page when it would go ding, and you would turn the page. And, uh, I,

Suzy Vadori: I remember that.

This has been a long time coming, right? So this is not a new concept, but. Who should consider [00:05:30] creating an audiobook, and why? Why should writers even consider doing an audiobook these days? Back in this century?

Jenny Hoops: Yeah. Well, yeah, in the, in the new century. I actually don’t think it’s an option anymore to do or not do an audiobook.

Uh, just because there have been so many advances in publishing these days, and now the audio edition is just. One more edition that you’re expected to produce, uh, along with the print [00:06:00] and the ebook and the, like, the Cobo reader and the audio. There are a couple of exceptions, cookbooks and how to and dictionaries.

Make awful audio books, and

Suzy Vadori: I would imagine Yeah, we don’t wanna be listening to that.

Jenny Hoops: Well, some people do. Uh, there are blind people who must have these read out loud and so

Sure.

Jenny Hoops: And so they do have, but uh, yeah. Cookbooks and, and dictionaries make really bad. Okay.

Suzy Vadori: So we’re starting with the premise. If [00:06:30] you’re listening, Jenny’s advice is everybody that is producing a book needs to produce an audiobook.

Okay. So we’ll start there. Yeah. I know that the. When eBooks first started coming out, I talked to lots of writers who would say, I’m thinking of doing an ebook, and they, it felt like something so different, right? I’m like, well, isn’t it just your book, but like in a different format,

Jenny Hoops: right? It’s your book.

Suzy Vadori: A little bit different

Jenny Hoops: format.

Suzy Vadori: It’s right, it’s your book in a different format. You’ve done the work. Let’s make it accessible [00:07:00] to lots of other people. How is the audiobook market changing behavior in readers? That’s, I mean, it It is changing, right? Readers are changing. Oh,

Jenny Hoops: completely. Yeah. So it’s interesting because audiobook listeners tend to be a whole new market.

So if you have traditionally sold to a lot of people in print edition, or you were like really big, you had a huge audience in eBooks, your audiobook listeners. Are probably not in that same group. [00:07:30] They are people who, I mean. It used to be 40, 50 years ago that it was blind people who only listen to audiobooks, and now it’s really switched.

So it’s people who are busy, and that’s really just about everybody because what we’re doing is we’re listening to audiobooks in the car as we’re commuting. There’s a lot of professional drivers, uh, truck drivers. They’ll listen to audio books because they don’t wanna just listen hour after hour to, you know, the radio.

[00:08:00] So they’re, they’re learning that way and a lot of people like to multitask. So you ha you know, you’re sitting there cooking dinner and listening to an audiobook. You’re doing a lot of things while listening to your audiobook and it’s portable. You, you just have it on your iPhone and, and you listen with earbuds.

So it’s personal, it’s private, and it’s portable.

Suzy Vadori: I often do it. I often, I mean, I listen to tons of audio books. Yeah. Um, I also read books, but I read for a living and [00:08:30] so, you know, at the end of the day I’ve switched over almost exclusively for my pleasure reading because my eyes are tired and it’s like Paula, as I get older, uh, audio books.

And it took me a while to actually get into it. And I hear this all the time. Oh, I don’t process it auditory, you know, it’s hard for me to listen to audiobooks. It takes practice, right? So if if it, it does,

Jenny Hoops: I’m actually a, a terrible person because, uh, I have, I also have, I don’t believe

Suzy Vadori: you’re a terrible person, Jenny.

Jenny Hoops: I, [00:09:00] I have a hard time listening to audio books more because. I am so involved in the production of them that I, when I listen to an audio book, I am listening for the mistakes, the editing errors, the background noise. Like I am listening like a professional.

Suzy Vadori: Fair enough. It’s like,

Jenny Hoops: it’s

Suzy Vadori: like how writers read and, and that makes sense too.

You know, I mentioned when I want to consume a book for pleasure, uh, the last thing I wanna do is open a paper copy of [00:09:30] the book these days, A girl up in bed. ’cause I’ve been reading all day, in all likelihood unpublished manuscripts from many of our listeners.

Jenny Hoops: My eyes are tired

Suzy Vadori: and so that makes sense to me.

Yeah,

Jenny Hoops: yeah. My ears

Suzy Vadori: are, but that makes sense to me. This is, this is what you do for a living, and so it’s not fun anymore. It’s like turning your hobby into a job. That makes perfect sense to me and listening for the mistakes. I mean, as we were setting up here, Jenny’s like, Hey, you should be doing this with your mic.

It was great. Um, and, and hopefully we sound [00:10:00] terrific today. Oh, you’re sounding awesome. So, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s your job and you’re excellent at it. But I could totally see this, but for those who are listening, going, oh my gosh, like I have a book coming out and it wasn’t gonna do an audiobook. When in the process should they be thinking about doing an audiobook?

Jenny Hoops: Well, there’s the ideal and then there’s like whatever you can do. So if you are already thinking right from the very beginning, you know, you’re writing your book and you’re, you’re thinking with the audio edition in mind, [00:10:30] the time to actually start. Doing things like if it’s fiction and you wanna cast a narrator or a a couple of narrators, you’ll be thinking as you’re writing your book and editing it, uh, who, who do I picture being the voice of this book?

If, if it’s self-help, if it’s, uh, nonfiction, then it should be the author reading it. And, and frankly, you should be reading your text out loud anyway, because [00:11:00] that’s how you know if it makes sense. If you’ve had this really. Horrible structure of a sentence and you can’t read it without stumbling. Well, maybe that’s the time to go back.

So during the editing is often the best place to start thinking about the audio. When you actually wanna start producing it. You need to have the finished final edit. And so between the time you like, hit okay, I’m done. And the time you publish. In those, [00:11:30] hopefully a couple months, you’ve got some time before your launch, and that way you’ve got time to read the final edit of the book.

So,

Suzy Vadori: yeah.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah. ’cause it, it takes some time. I mean, when I have to do a full audio production, including, you know, casting and, and getting narrators and doing it, if really pressed, I can get it done in three weeks. But boy, oh boy, I don’t do anything else for those three weeks. Uh, it, it is, it is really tough.

[00:12:00] Preferably if you’ve got a couple months and that gives you time to put out the casting call, listen to some, some narrators and their auditions, and decide which ones. Go back and forth a little bit with the narrator on, you know, the tone and the, uh, the character voices that you are really excited about and, and say, well, I have a particular voice in mind when I was writing this book.

I, this is what was in my head. And so if you’ve got some time that that [00:12:30] would be ideal, a couple months to do it. You send it to the narrator, they produce it, it gets back, you get to proof it. As the author, you get the final say. You know, go through it and say, okay, yeah, I like this. I don’t like it. And then we, we upload and it gets published.

It’s pretty straightforward. Great.

Suzy Vadori: So there’s so many concepts in there and, and so if you’re a little bit lost casting and narrators and, woo, this sounds like a lot of work, Jenny, but we’ll go through all of that. I mean, the question was, and I think we got [00:13:00] the answer, but I wanna call it out here, that you are suggesting, and I know that your advice is to put the audio book out out the same day as the rest of the formats, right?

So what

Jenny Hoops: if Absolutely.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah. And, and why is that?

Jenny Hoops: Well, because when you launch your book, you have got a big splash. So you are doing all, you know, the interviews, you’re, you’re making sure everybody knows about your book. You have the splash, you want the launch,

Suzy Vadori: right? Yeah,

Jenny Hoops: yeah. But you want the launch. And so if your audiobook comes out [00:13:30] after the launch or long after the launch, then you’re, you’re trying to let people know, oh wait, there, there’s also an audio edition.

You’ve already missed that, that audience that was eager to, to get a first, like a, a really early edition of the audio. It’s just that when you have an audio edition that launches like quite a long time after, uh, so a lot of people, even a year or two after the book launch, they will say, [00:14:00] oh, I’ll do the audio now.

What you’re then doing is you are trying to promote the audio edition of a backlist book. So it’s the buzz is gone. The, the

Suzy Vadori: an uphill battle, right?

Jenny Hoops: So

Suzy Vadori: yes,

Jenny Hoops: uphill

Suzy Vadori: battle. Yeah. If you’re in this and, and you have any control, the suggestion would be delay the launch of everything else and do it all together versus get an out and, and that, I mean, that’s always the advice I give to authors as well is have that three to four month [00:14:30] runway between the time that you finished your book and you’re launching so that you can actually promote it.

Because otherwise you’re missing out on a huge thing. And even, I mean, authors that are the most successful sometimes have a year. Or more

Jenny Hoops: long

Suzy Vadori: time, and we’re always, you know, so quick to say, oh, I just have to get it out. But here’s the thing, whether you’re publishing nonfiction or fiction, the fact that you have a book coming out next year and you know the date and you can tell them how it’s being published and everything else, you could [00:15:00] still talk about that, right?

Yeah. So as soon as soon you set that launch date, you are. A viable commodity, but it’s much different to say, Hey, I had a book come out 10 years ago or last year. Right? So milk it. Give yourself that runway, delay that, launch that gratification as long as you can because you’re gonna be better off. And so if one of those things that you know that you want to do, Jenny’s saying everybody needs to do it.

I know that to not all authors, not all authors feel that way. And that’s okay. [00:15:30] And it depends on the book, right. But if you think that you would like to produce an audiobook, definitely delay the launch and get it right. Right, right.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah.

Suzy Vadori: I just see this so often that writers are just so eager to hit publish that they want their book out in the world, that they don’t think about this piece of it

Jenny Hoops: and to, you know, they do a disservice to, to the audio.

Listeners who, who actually wanna hear the book because they wanna get the full [00:16:00] picture. They don’t want to, um, miss out. Just because the audio wasn’t ready yet. Yeah. You know,

Suzy Vadori: and as you mentioned, there’s, there’re often different readers, right. People who like audiobooks are not going to read your hard copy.

Right?

Jenny Hoops: Yeah. And actually most the time, or not necessarily. Yeah. It’s, um, I, I want to work, I’ve been working this year with an author, she lives in Edmonton and she has been the most prepared author. I, I have met. [00:16:30] You were saying a full year before she launched her book? Yeah. She was putting everything in place, so I mean, getting the funding for, you know, applying for the grants, but also setting up the audiobook so that it would all launch at the same time.

Yeah. Getting, yeah, it’s a

Suzy Vadori: really smart strategy if you have the patience, which I would say you should. Okay. So, but what if, what if writers are working with a publisher? How does that work? Most of this is assuming that they have full control over their audiobook, that [00:17:00] they’re, I mean, that’s what we’re gonna talk about today, but how does it work if you have a publisher and they’re, you know, what are you seeing publishers doing these days with audiobooks?

Jenny Hoops: Um, the really big publishers, like, I mean, penguin and, and. Big Five.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah,

Jenny Hoops: the big five. They all have their own audiobook production arms, uh, like they have studios galore and they will, they all take the rights to the audio, the rights. So they, they,

Suzy Vadori: and that’s typical. I mean, five years ago you could [00:17:30] still ask to keep your audiobook rights and that is not the case anymore.

It’s very rare that. People will buy the print rights. A a neat thing that I’m seeing sometimes if you’re lucky, if your book is really awesome and you’re self-publishing or hybrid publishing or publishing with a publisher who doesn’t produce audiobooks. ’cause they do. I mean there’s lots of publishers who don’t.

Quite, quite a

Jenny Hoops: few. Yeah.

Suzy Vadori: Still like mid list publishers or small publishers. It is possible to sell those rights on their own. So pay attention. I mean, if, if your [00:18:00] publisher’s asking for the audiobook rights, but they don’t actually intend to produce an audiobook, push hard, keep the rights and then you can do what you want.

Jenny Hoops: Want push really hard. Yeah. Um, now a lot of the, those mid list and, and smaller publishers, what they do is they farm out the audio to audiobook producers. So there’s a lot of production companies like mine who all we do is work for publishers who. You know, so they are not them producing the audiobook in-house, but they [00:18:30] are assigning it to it.

So it’s a contractor kind of job. And uh, and there’s lots of independent audiobook contractors who work for publishers, large and small, and. It’s a little bit easier for small publishers to work with a contractor because then they don’t have to have people on staff or,

Suzy Vadori: well, and they, they aren’t putting that many out in a year either, so they can’t justify having people in house Yeah.

And, and building that expertise.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah. [00:19:00] That, that makes sense. Yeah, exactly. But tell you the truth, there’s a lot of publishers who, who really don’t wanna get involved with. With audio. And so if you ask, they will certainly revert the audio back to the author. And then the author is free to do whatever they want.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so we’re convinced we need an audio book. So what, what do we need? Okay, so when we’re producing a book, you need the manuscript, then you need to get it formatted, then you need to design a cover. And then you need files, like all the things, [00:19:30] right, that, that’s for like an ebook and or for published book.

For a physical book, what do we need? Like, what does it mean to make an audiobook? What are the, what are the things? I’m so

Jenny Hoops: glad you asked. I, I have this list, so there’s like a checklist and

Suzy Vadori: it’s longer, right? Like it’s way more complex than, than doing a print book in my, in my view. Let’s hear it.

Jenny Hoops: Not, not really because, uh, what, what you do need is feel like

Suzy Vadori: it, you’re here to demystify it For us, the

Jenny Hoops: final manuscript.

You cannot [00:20:00] keep editing the manuscript after you’ve given it to a narrator because they’re gonna read the words that they were given and then you can’t afterwards have it narrated and go, oh wait, no, I changed that. You’ll have to rerecord. So for sure you can’t keep fiddling with the manuscript after you.

Suzy Vadori: Okay, so we have that.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah.

Suzy Vadori: So once you have the manuscript, and then what else do we need?

Jenny Hoops: Well, while you’re getting your cover art made, have that artist also make it in audiobook format [00:20:30] because an audiobook cover is square 3000 pixels by 3000 pixels, and it’s so much easier if you just get your cover art done.

Make, make both additions at the same time, and then you’ve got them both ready. It’s

Suzy Vadori: pretty fast for the cover artists. They might charge you for that, but they might not right to just produce that extra thing. But after the fact, you’re gonna, you’re gonna struggle to get

Jenny Hoops: it right. A after the fact. It’s a pain in the butt because you have to go and find the original artwork and make sure you can [00:21:00] edit it and, and all that you need to have.

Uh, and I tell every author this, you should have your own ISBN number. For your audiobook. So audio, every edition, every format gets its own ISPN. In Canada, you can get them for free. Every author can just go apply for an ISPN. In the United States, they go through a company called Bauer that will issue I ESPNs.

If you don’t have an ISPN one can be issued for you through [00:21:30] voices by in audio. Will assign an An ISPN, but it’s not as useful as one that you get yourself fly

Suzy Vadori: through n So just stopping you for one second. So for those that are listening, going like, what are you talking about? What is that? ISPN is the number that’s going to be on the barcode, right?

That’s right. So if you have a physical book, it’s on the barcode, but we have those numbers assigned. It’s a unique code in the world. That will identify the sales for your audiobook. So you need that number. It’s assigned by country. As Jenny mentioned, if [00:22:00] you are in Canada, those are free. Although make sure you order them in advance because uh, that process somehow is slow now.

And it used to be instantaneous.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah.

Suzy Vadori: Um, and if you live elsewhere, then there, then, then look up the guidelines. But you need to have a unique number so that your sales can be tracked so that we know when you hit the best seller list. Right? Yes,

Jenny Hoops: that’s right. And

Suzy Vadori: how to pay you.

Jenny Hoops: Every store gets lists that are all based on the ISBN number.

So you, you want to be in catalogs, and [00:22:30] if you don’t have an ISBN number for your book or for your audio book, you, you don’t appear in most of the catalogs either. So it’s, uh, yeah.

Suzy Vadori: Okay.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah.

Suzy Vadori: So we need, we need

Jenny Hoops: discoverability,

Suzy Vadori: we need a cover. We need the finished manuscript, we need a cover. We need the ISVN.

What else?

Jenny Hoops: Your launch date and the price

Suzy Vadori: launch date. And price.

Jenny Hoops: And price, yeah. Well, price is something that you kind of set afterwards and we can talk a lot about how prices for audio is [00:23:00] set. It’s, it’s a bizarre, arcane system, and it’s based on how long the book is rather than like the page count and the the minutes.

And

Suzy Vadori: by how long? You mean how many hours,

Jenny Hoops: how many hours recording it

Suzy Vadori: takes to listen

Jenny Hoops: to it? Yeah. So for example, on Audible, which is the world’s largest distributor of audiobooks, it’s the Amazon affiliate that does audiobooks. Audible does not let you pick the price for your audiobook. When you upload it, it [00:23:30] gets assigned to you based on the genre and how long your book is.

Suzy Vadori: So. Which is kind of nice in some ways. And I’ve gotta say, I wish that that were true in other ways because the prices stay pretty high, right? Yes. Um, comparatively to eBooks or to print copies, audiobooks actually sell for more. And if you have subscriptions, of course you can get a certain number for free and things like that through Audible and other subscription services, but that actually protects you [00:24:00] from.

Writers who are coming out and making them all free, and then you feel like you have to make yours free to compete, so, so there’s Yeah. Good things and bad things about that. Right. Okay.

Jenny Hoops: Well,

Suzy Vadori: that’s question. So we’ve got these things. What else do we need?

Jenny Hoops: You need to find somebody who knows what they’re doing.

Suzy Vadori: Fair. Hey.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah. Yeah. Because it is a technical skill. It’s like everything. Once you know the system and you know how it works, you can do it really easily and probably pretty quickly. But if you don’t know what you’re doing. There’s a lot of places [00:24:30] where you can do it wrong, and it, it’s, it’s a lot of effort for not very successful feelings.

It, it can be very frustrating, so

Suzy Vadori: well, and you can either produce a low, number one, you’re gonna waste a lot of time and have a lot of frustration and maybe even waste a lot of money depending on how much you’re outsourcing. And also you might end up with a really poor quality product.

Jenny Hoops: Interestingly, there should be no poor quality products.

If, and, [00:25:00] and I say that if, if you’re doing it yourself, by the time you get to try to upload it, if the quality is bad, that’s where it stops because it will just get rejected by all the distributor platforms. Mm-hmm. So at some point. It’s,

Suzy Vadori: so I’m saying though, if you do it

Jenny Hoops: yeah. And you

Suzy Vadori: do it quote unquote wrong and you wanna put it out there, you, you can’t.

Right.

Jenny Hoops: You

Suzy Vadori: really can’t. So you just wasted all that, all that energy. Okay. So we’re gonna find somebody who knows what we’re doing.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah. Find somebody who knows what they’re doing and can help you. And

Suzy Vadori: [00:25:30] then what,

Jenny Hoops: then you record the book. So if you’re recording it yourself, if, if you’re nonfiction author or a professional speaker with a book.

You can record it either in your own home, just, just like you’re doing right there with your microphone. That that is how a lot of speakers I work with, uh, a lot of authors and speakers record. Or you can go into higher it, usually it’s a music studio, uh, local studio in town and they will tend to also do audio [00:26:00] books or you hire a narrator and they do it for you.

Often Fiction, you want to work with a professional narrator. Just because they’re able to do the voices and the get the emotion of the text going.

Suzy Vadori: They’re professionals and unless you’re a professional actor.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah.

Suzy Vadori: But you know, if you’re, if you’re Chris Culver and you wrote Right, like, I think that’s, that’s an audiobook series.

That’s amazing. ’cause he’s an actor and Chris Fer who did the land of [00:26:30] stories, he did his own audio books. Even though they’re fiction because he is an actor, he is amazing. An actor. And it was really cool because. My oldest was really into that series, you know, when she was 10, 11 in her tweens, and then we went on a long family vacation with lots of car rides, and we listened to the audiobook.

She was like, mom, it’s like he’s brought it alive again, and I’m listening to it in a whole way. So

Jenny Hoops: much theater. Oh yeah.

Suzy Vadori: But if you don’t have that skill, consider if you have fiction, consider hiring somebody who does. Right. And in nonfiction, as you [00:27:00] mentioned. I mean, I listen to a lot of non-fiction self-help, like things on writing and things on business.

Right. And things on like lots of things.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah.

Suzy Vadori: And it’s amazing to hear it. From the speaker, from the writer themselves, because it’s like you’ve just gone through a 10 hour seminar with them as your personal coach. Exactly. So it’s really, yeah. Yeah. It’s difficult if you, it’s difficult to outsource that and get that same

Jenny Hoops: experience.

And you know, it’s funny with, um, and especially with professional speakers or if [00:27:30] they’re nonfiction authors who, who. Sell courses or, or somehow, and the book is supporting all that they do. Then you’re looking at the brand of that person is their voice. They, so to have another narrator read that nonfiction book for them, it’s not on brand anymore and it, it makes it sort of a side product that isn’t promoting their whole.

Suzy Vadori: [00:28:00] Exactly.

Jenny Hoops: Yeah,

Suzy Vadori: I totally agree. Okay. Whole

Jenny Hoops: thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Suzy Vadori: So you mentioned a few things here, so we now know all the different, and then you end up with files that get uploaded, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. Yeah. Does an audiobook have to be the same as the manuscript?

Jenny Hoops: No, and that’s actually a controversial answer, believe it or not.

Suzy Vadori: I agree. Yeah. Yeah.

Jenny Hoops: I’m

Suzy Vadori: excited to hear your take.

Jenny Hoops: Well, I, I’ve been doing audiobooks now for 11 years, and in that time went from thinking it had to be 100% true to the [00:28:30] text. So you couldn’t use contractions, you had to include everything. Now, probably last couple years, I have come to realize that. You don’t actually have to be that tightly bound to the text because it’s a whole different edition.

So there’s things like if you’re referring to something further down the page. You would have to say a few minutes ago or in a, [00:29:00] in a second, I will talk about this. So you have to, to recognize that it’s a different medium that, that you’re listening to the book rather. So I just feel that you, you have to have some leeway there to make the audio not just a literal reading of the book.

To recognize that people are hearing it and therefore you’re, you’re gonna change a few things. You’re going to describe [00:29:30] any drawings or pictures or photos. You’ll use an audio description of that. You will talk more about time rather than place in the book. So a few chapters back, we talked about this at the beginning, and so there’s, there’s a lot of ways to adjust that.

In particular, especially with fiction, I find it really difficult when the narrator can’t [00:30:00] sound conversational. Sometimes the, the dialogue is written for, for reading, not for not for hearing, and I think there has to be some leeway there so that you get the same. Impression from the words, whether it is in print or in audio, you want that same feeling in the person receiving it, listening or reading.

So [00:30:30] I, I really think there’s gotta be a way to adjust so that you’re taking the medium into account and not just reading a, a straight, straight audio book. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s great.

Suzy Vadori: Thanks for tuning into the show. Don’t Tell Writing podcast with me, Susie Vadori. It is my absolute honor to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or the book that you’re planning to [00:31:00] write. Please help me keep the podcast going by helping people find us. You could subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening.

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