The audiobook industry is an $800-million enterprise that is rapidly expanding, and audiobook narration is a field open to new talent. While any voice-over genre is a story-telling medium, your ability to tell a story and maintain listener interest for a long period of time is absolutely essential as an audiobook narrator. After all, you are literally breathing life into an author's words, and you must remain true to the author's intent when telling the story.
If you have facility with accents and dialogue, you may want to concentrate your efforts on fiction books with different characterizations. If accents aren't in your arsenal, you might turn your attention to non-fiction, instructional and self-help titles.
When preparing for any career, the first thing you should do is research the industry, and audiobook narration is no different. The first thing I recommend is that you actually LISTEN to lots of books by different authors and narrators. You can and should read reviews of audiobooks in Audiofile Magazine, which is the top publication of the audiobook world, and Publishers Weekly. Get a feel for what works and what doesn't. Listen to the phrasing, pacing and articulation of various narrators. Audiobooks are available at many libraries, but they are also available for purchase and download on-line
One of the best series of audiobooks ever produced is the one for Harry Potter books. Jim Dale has earned Grammy nominations and 1 Grammy award for his amazing portrayals of 100s of memorable characters in this series. In fact, he holds the Guinness record for the most characters in a single book, with a whopping 134 characters in book four! You may think these books are just children's books, but I can tell you that I and thousands of adults have thoroughly enjoyed each one in the series and eagerly await each new book. Rather than getting each book individually, you can check out the Harry Potter exclusive digital box set and collector's iPod at iTunes by clicking the icon below.
Look back at the beginning of this article at the lists of current popular audiobook titles. If you don't think the series of Harry Potter books would appeal to you, or you don't want to buy a set at one time, you can also download thousands of audiobooks on iTunes.
Simply Audiobooks has a fantastic rental program on audiobooks where they pay the shipping both ways, and they don't charge late fees or have due dates. You can also purchase books through them. By the way, I met the president of the company at an audio publisher's conference just a few years ago when he was launching the company. I'm thrilled to see this company doing so well. Their growth is due in part to the company's aggressive marketing plan, but it's also due the explosive growth of consumer interest in audiobooks.
If you are looking for content related to fitness, self-improvement or spirituality, you might want to listen to products from iAmplify. Some of their content is free, while other items are paid. This site allows publishers to produce and sell content.
Hopefully, you now see some of the limitless and fascinating possibilities that await you in this burgeoning industry. In order to gain skills and experience, you can volunteer to read for the blind in your area. You may also wish to participate on the http://librivox.org site, where volunteers are working together to voice audiobooks in the public domain. You can listen to a story about that site on NPR. Pay close attention to the sound of the samples aired in the program versus commercially-produced books. Can you hear the difference?
By the way, if you want to download the text of free e-books of work in the public domain, head over to the Project Gutenberg site. Any of this work would be fabulous practice material and could even be something you would want to develop as your own projects!
In preparing your book and if time permits, you should plan to read your book at least twice before recording. The first time, you will read the book to get a feel for the material. I take notes on the characters' introductions so that I know whether they are major characters with a lot of dialog or have any sort of unusual accents. The second pass is to mark the copy. I use colored highlighters to mark each character's lines so that I can instinctively flow from one character to another when I am recording the book. I also mark phrasing in the copy and look up pronunciations of unfamiliar words.
As the narrator, you are responsible for ensuring the correct pronunciation of the words. In addition to a good American-based, unabridged printed dictionary, I can recommend these resources for assistance with pronunciation:
Google (enter the word as your search, and click on the definition link to the far right)
Voice of America Pronunciation Guide
Say How? A Pronunciation Guide to Names of Public Figures from Library of Congress
If you really want to work in the audiobook industry, you must concentrate on establishing relationships with publishers. Naturally, we all dream of narrating the Grammy award-winning bestseller. However, you're much more likely initially to work with smaller publishers, especially if you don't live in the NY or LA commuting areas and have your own studio.
Don't send your commercial or narration demo to an audiobook publisher. They want to hear you performing literature, and they are listening for transitions between the narrative and dialog sections in your excerpts. You'll fare much better if you send a custom audiobook demo that demonstrates you are familiar with the publisher's product line, such as a children's book demo for a publisher of children's book.
Many publishers pay per finished hour. You can easily invest 60 hours to produce a book with a 10-hour run time. A good rule of thumb would be 2 hours of recording time to produce an hour of audio, and 2 hours of editing time would be needed for every hour of audio.