Introduction
My wife, Jern Tonkoi, is writing fiction and we’re publishing it ourselves, using Amazon and Kobo, etc, and being someone who likes listening more than reading, creating audiobooks seems a natural direction to go in. Even if it wasn’t, the potential for more visibility and more sales is always going to be attractive, and so off I went.
I have already recorded one, the bittersweet romance Lanta, and whilst I was happy with the product for reasons that will become apparent, I also wanted to do better, and so I embarked on a long-term project to level up. But first, let’s get to the crux.
Why record my own audiobooks?
No one is ever going to be able to tell Jern’s stories exactly how Jern wants them to be told. Now, I’m not saying they couldn’t do a good job. A great audiobook narrator is an actor, someone who takes a story and interprets it, making it their own. And a bad audiobook narrator sucks all the joy out of the story.
No one is ever going to be able to tell Jern’s stories exactly how Jern wants them to be told, but as her husband, I can get pretty darn close.
I am passionate about the project, I love the characters, I have inside knowledge of their thoughts, and I love the characters. I believe that I can tell the story with the care, the feeling, and the authenticity that they deserve.
Also, our alternatives are limited. We could pay for a voice actor, but a bad one is costly, and a great one is more costly. Maybe good value, but costly. AI voices can do the job, and with heavy direction can do a very good job, but… It’s not the same. And they need heavy direction still. In the end, though, I just wanted to do it. Maybe just because they are Jern’s stories. And I love the characters.
The Time Commitment
This is big. Let’s say a moderately-sized book like Murder in Treggan Bay, at 62,000 words, comes in at 8 hours of audio. Assuming I can just walk in and record, that’s going to take me about 10 hours to record if I’m lucky. I then need to edit it, which will take 5-10 hours. I’m not sure how well I can optimise that yet. This is getting rid of breath noise, pops, distractions, as well as removing those 2.5 hours of mistakes that I recorded. That’s why my 8-hour book took 10 hours to record. I then need to listen to it all again to make sure the final version doesn’t have any errors in it.
So, that’s 30 hours of time commitment for a moderately-sized book, assuming I can just walk in and start recording. It seems reasonable that I should be able to do that, but it’s not that simple.
In my other life, I have been speaking publicly for many years, I also have hours of YouTube spoken content behind me, and I even learned to sing. Yet, coming to record audiobooks, I have needed to really spend time working on my technique. Things like the physical setup of the room and microphone are one thing, but there’s also posture, breath control, intonation, vocal presence, and fatigue to consider.
I could have tried to refine my technique as I read, but then some chapters would be higher quality than others. And if I spend 5 hours recording, then suddenly realise a small adjustment makes a big improvement, do I go back to the beginning?
A Cunning Plan
Or, do I enact a cunning plan instead? What if I don’t record an audiobook first, but instead do smaller projects, articles for a podcast, say, that I use to perfect my technique? That’s what I am doing here. I hope I am providing valuable content for people, and I am producing each and every article to the best of my ability, but I am always learning. And if the fourth article sounds way better than the third, that’s great for everyone.
So, the tip here is the same as in so many areas of life: don’t start with a mega-project, start small. Start with steps that you can use to perfect your technique. I’m not going to record 15 articles, then sit back and say job done.
I’m creating one article. I’m then listening to it, analysing to find out what went well and what could be improved.
I’m then creating a second article and applying my learning to that mini-project. Then analysing it, and so on.
I’m practising, but keeping the truth in mind: practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.
This is a major project that is important to Jern and me, so I am committing the time to do it right.
I’ve actually got a real-world example, and I’m only 3 articles in. I had begun to notice that whilst my audio quality was high, I seemed to have a lot of breath noise: sharp intakes of breath getting picked up. You won’t have noticed, because I went through editing them out. I did some research and found out that the delightfully comfortable Ikea Poang that I had praised in my Shure microphone article was likely the cause. So, for this article, I am switching to a standing position. I’d love to tell you the result, but since I haven’t edited yet, I can’t. Actually, if I record two conclusions, I can just leave the correct one in.
- So, what I found is that by standing and being conscious of my breathing, I dramatically reduced the breath sounds.
So, what I found is that by standing and being conscious of my breathing, I still had a problem with breath sounds.
Physical Setup
Let’s get into what’s needed to record an audiobook, at least for me.
Throughout all of this, try to keep in mind that the goal is to make the noise as low as possible and your voice as loud and clear as possible in the recording. You can go for a gruff, barely understandable voice if you want, by the way, but you want a clear recording of it.
Low noise simply means that if you record with your head as you would near the microphone and don’t say anything, the recording should be silent. That’s not possible, but it’s the goal. When a car drives by outside, silent. When your wife sneezes in the other room, silent. When you breathe in and out, silent.
Loud and clear means that your voice is picked up and sounds loud, but sounds right. No distortion, no weirdness, no echo. Just how you want it to sound. If you want it to be gruff and impossible to understand, that’s fine. I’m just saying you want that recorded perfectly.
Those are the ideals, and it’s worth remembering them, because your first task is to get as close to them as you can. You have a few things to play with, so let’s look at them.
The key ingredients are the room, the furniture, the microphone, and your head.
Key factors in the room are to be able to isolate yourself from other people. For most people listening, that essentially means a room that other house members can stay out of, and that often means the bedroom. This can work well, with soft furnishings helping to stop echo. You can then get complicated with foam and whatnot, but don’t be too hasty. Sound is a pernickety thing, and hard to engineer. Have a listen first. Record yourself. You might find it is a beautiful environment without any change. You might be lucky.
You can increase your odds with a few simple things.
- Close and seal any doors or windows. You won’t seal perfectly, so don’t get too demanding until you know you need it. A problem with sound is that it is logarithmic, which has the effect that even if you remove half the sound, it doesn’t feel like it. It’s hard to block sound. Really hard.
- Don’t get too close to flat surfaces. The typical ones are a wall in front of you, a wall behind you, a wall to your side, or, and this catches lots of people out, a huge flat monitor with your text on it. The problem with all of these is, they reflect sound into the microphone, so it picks up your voice twice. The reverb could end up being beautiful, but probably won’t. I record facing into the room so I don’t get echo. My laptop display is on a music stand and angled slightly towards the ceiling, so that my voice reflects upwards and not towards the microphone, which is below my mouth. I’m about half a metre from a wall behind me, which could cause reflections, but seems okay. My nearest side-wall is one metre, which seems fine, too.
- Position yourself away from the main sources of noise. I have outside noise from animals to the south and from a road to the east. I positioned my setup away from those walls. I also face the south-east. This means that the microphone, which picks up its signal mostly from in front of itself, is pointing away from the noisy southeast. It helps a little, I think.
- Notice when it is quietest, and record then. I tend to get more noisy motorbikes during the day, and food sellers, etc. I also get cicadas in the early evening and Asian Koels (which are particularly loud cuckoos) as the morning chorus. Recording is by far the best after 6.45 pm, so I do it then.
- Use the right kind of microphone. If you are blessed with a wonderful recording studio, well, can I ask why on Earth are you listening to my advice? Sorry, I mean, if you are blessed with a wonderful recording studio, you might like a condenser microphone. These pick up sound wonderfully and give crisp and clear audio. But they also pick up noise and are generally a bad choice for anyone who is going to pay attention to this article. A dynamic microphone tends to be more selective, with the type you want being designed to pick up sound only from in front of it. These vary greatly in cost and design, and I have extremely limited knowledge, but having used an iRig condenser microphone and a very good Mackie shotgun microphone, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Shure MV7+ if you can afford it. If you are even considering spending real money on soundproofing, spend your money on this first.
- Practise your voice technique. Strength of voice, projection, and breath control go a surprisingly long way.
If, after all that, you have a problem, you should at least now be able to properly identify it, and hopefully address it directly.
Computer Hardware and Software
I’ll keep this brief because I already mentioned the Shure MV7+ and reviewed it elsewhere.
I use a Mac, but you could use anything that the mic will plug into. Most devices will record with a high enough fidelity. My Shure MV7+ plugs in via USB, and I just use Audio Hijack to record because I own it and it’s rock solid. I’ve also found Audacity to be rock solid on Mac and Windows, and that’s free. Just choose something you are comfortable in, and set it to record in mono at 44.1 kHz and 32-bit Float quality so that you can edit without losing anything.
Oh, and make sure you are not clipping the audio. Clipping means that the volume you spoke at was too loud for the microphone. It means your voice has lost some of its dynamism in the recording, and it sounds harsh normally. There’s absolutely no need to even risk clipping, so dial it down. How you do that depends on your setup.
I also suggest a pop filter, which is typically a nylon sheet mounted in a frame. It sits between your mouth and the microphone and basically stops bursts of air speeding from your mouth and hitting the microphone. Think of it as being like wind noise caused by your mouth. The pop filter stops these bursts, but is almost invisible to sound, so lets that through. It really helps.
Once you have your audio file, you’re going to need to edit it. Again, Audacity is the great, free option. It lets you remove long breaks, or fluffs. You can even create markers while you record if you’d like, to help the editing later. I did when I was starting, but as I make fewer mistakes, I’ve stopped bothering.
We’re now moving into the realm of audiobook production, but that’s the topic of my next article, so I’ll curtail this thread.
But another important aspect is what you put your script on, the text of the book, in my case. A computer, most likely, and I used to use Word or another viewer. This worked, and I could scroll through easily enough, but a recent change has, quite unexpectedly, made a dramatic improvement.
I now put my document in a teleprompter app, specifically the free version of Teleprompter Pro by Teleprompter Apps Ltd. I have no idea yet if this is the long-term choice for me; I just wanted to try one and see if it was useful, but baulked at the prices.
Boy, is it useful.
Putting my book in the app and having it scroll automatically has magically cut my error rate to a fraction of what it used to be. It turns out that having my eyes stay fairly steadily in the centre of the screen as the words scroll makes fluffs less likely, even though I was manually scrolling before. I was genuinely surprised by this, but for me, the difference was night and day.
The free version still does what I need, I think, but if it didn’t, I’d be buying, no question asked. The time savings of not having to edit out fluffs will add up to something significant over hours and hours of recording.
Recap
Whilst getting into recording our own audiobooks in this burgeoning age of AI may seem like poor timing, I think of it more as a labour of love. We’re going to get products we want to spend our own time with. If you don’t feel that way, or you don’t have the considerable time available to commit to it, other routes are available.
If you do go down the path of creating audiobooks, position yourself to be lucky. Choose a good room, do basic sound blocking, position your microphone sensibly, and record with a strong, controlled voice. This is best done sitting up straight or standing, so that you can control your diaphragm and hence your breathing.
When you start, make sure you iterate by listening to your recording and thinking about what’s good and what’s not so good. Make adjustments and try again. As you repeat, you’ll improve and then get to the product you like.
And for hardware and software, be sensible, but also consider if your microphone is suitable for the task. The computer or device you record onto is less of a concern, but if you can’t get decent results with your microphone under ideal conditions, well, there’s only so much that post-processing can do. It will polish your sound file, not transform it. And once you know you are doing this for good, try out teleprompter software and see if it helps you as much as it did me.
In the next article, I’ll get into the production of the audiobook, but for now, if you want to ask about any of this, you can find me, Eddie Tonkoi, and all the other NosillaCastaways at podfeet.com/slack. I’m also on Instagram @tonkoibooks, or you can pop over to see what is going on over at tonkoibooks.com.
Happy recording, and happy reading.