Audio...Again

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Deceiving Elvera is now available as an audio book as well as print and e-book formats. Here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/Deceiving-Elvera/dp/B093C89MC7

Let me say something about narrators in general, and Naomi Rose-Mock in particular. They take an author's baby and interpret it aloud, so others can enjoy it. To do this, they must be able to read well; that's a given. But in a book like Deceiving Elvera, there's a lot more to think about. The book is set in Michigan and Thailand, so I had to provide a pronunciation guide (provided for me by someone who lived in Thailand for a time) that Naomi could consult. A third setting is a cruise ship, and the crew comes from all over, so she had to switch accents from Norwegian to Australian to Texan and so on. I would bet that requires a lot of highlighting and pre-reading to be prepared for conversations.

Finally, the narrator interprets the characters and the action. Too much "color" and a character like Elvera can become so irritating that the reader is turned off. Too little, and her assertiveness--and her pain--doesn't come through. Narrators know to how speed up to raise tension and slow down to soothe the reader after an intense scene. They change their voices to suit the scene: comic, dramatic, tragic. They make decisions and take precautions I never thought about before getting involved in audio book production. Listeners shouldn't hear the turning of a page or perceive gaps where a correction was made. Narrators have to decide if they'll leave in or take out the sound of their own breathing. And they have to either attend to the technological aspects of recording or arrange for someone else to do it.

None of that sounds easy to me, so I'm thrilled that companies like Audible, studios like Cerny American, and narrators like Naomi Rose-Mock and Megan Scharlau are around to de-mystify the process.

If you're an audio-book listener, I have codes for my audio books, including this one. Authors are given them to encourage people to try their books in the hopes that they'll leave reviews when they finish. As I've said many times, a review is the nicest thing you can do for a writer, so don't be shy.


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