What To Do When You Feel Pigeonholed by Casting (May require a Substack subscription)

What To Do When You Feel Pigeonholed by Casting (May require a Substack subscription)

Performance

Award-winning narrator and casting director Tanya Eby wrote this excellent article What To Do When You Feel Pigeonholed by Casting.

I thank Tanya for mentioning this site in her comments about performing Public Domain audiobooks.

  • Everyone can access my trove of free resources at my Public Domain Narration Headquarters.
  • NarratorsRoadmap site members also can view my Create Your Own Path video course and my Public Domain Audiobooks and Self-Publishing webinar. Both are available under the Video Courses option after you login, and both include an extensive list of resources not found in my free material.

Note: You may need a subscription to read Tanya’s Substack. You’ll find a discount offer in the Welcome Center.

Author (Rights Holder) DIY

ACX

This article is for you if you’re working directly with the Rights Holder (RH), usually the author, and want the RH to upload the files.

First, be aware that ACX isn’t the only way the author can distribute her audiobook to Audible. She could choose any distributor she wants.

With a membership to NarratorsRoadmap.com, she could review my Audiobook Distributor Comparison Chart, which compares 9 distributors across over 30 categories!

Of course, the RH could choose to distribute through ACX for many reasons. However, they may not realize that that they can contract with a narrator outside of the system.

If you accept an ACX offer from a RH, you will be responsible for uploading the files.

If you want the RH to perform that task instead of you, you would need to negotiate with the RH for them to do it. Once they agree, decline the offer.

Then, you would need a to create a contract outside of ACX. You’ll find contract templates on the Welcome Center page.

I would specify payment details in the contract:

  • I ask new clients to pay 50% of the fee as a non-refundable deposit after they approve the 15-minute checkpoint file.
  • Once I submit the full, retail-ready audiobook to them, I send an invoice for the remaining balance.
  • Payment is due upon receipt of the invoice.
  • The final invoice is based on actual finished time and may differ from my estimate.
  • I would withhold the credits and retail sample until the invoice is paid.

You would proceed with recording, editing, proofing, and mastering the audio. You would share the retail-ready recordings with the author via Dropbox or any other file transfer service you want to use.

The RH can upload the files as a DIY project. This ACX help page lists the steps.

 

Other resources on this topic:

  • Members can watch my webinar Public Domain Audiobooks and Self-Publishing linked in Videos Courses under the Webinars tab. I take you through the entire process of claiming a book on ACX and creating the listing so that it is ready for file upload.

Filed Under: ACX

Should I remove breaths from my audiobook?

Post Production

Breath is life.

New narrators — and particularly new rights holders — who haven’t listened to many (or any) audiobooks often think that breaths should be removed from the recording. Breaths are routinely removed in other voice work such as animation and commercial voiceover. Commercials must run within a pre-set, rigid time of 15, 30, or 60 seconds.

However, we don’t have time constraints in audiobooks. Breaths are the foundation of spoken language and become part of the artistic performance. They affect the musicality and pacing of the story and help convey the emotion and mood of the text.

Hearing an audiobook without breaths feels unnatural and even robotic to the listener. People may feel anxious when they can’t hear the narrator take a breath.

The audiobook industry standard approach is to leave breaths in the audiobook but make adjustments to some breaths in post-production. For instance, loud, gaspy breaths may be minimized or eliminated, especially if they start a paragraph. Breaths should sound natural and subtle throughout the audiobook, with plosives and extraneous mouth noises removed.

While recording, the audiobook narrator must do her part to breathe using good technique. You may need to adjust your microphone position and/or learn to breathe from your diaphragm.

When punching in, you want to ensure you don’t cut the breath as it would stand out to a listener if left in the audio. Your editor would need to cover cut breaths with room tone.

As you prep the book, give thought to places where you want to breathe or slightly pause to enhance the story you are telling.

 

Other resources on this topic:

Where/how can I learn accents and dialects?

Performance

Fiction books often feature characters with a wide variety of accents. It’s important to do your due diligence to determine if your capabilities are in best service of the text. Remember, the back story you imagine and accent you choose for your characters must be grounded in the text. Listen to this 1:40 audio clip from the TV show Hot in Cleveland (s6, e15 “All Dolled Up”) for a humorous example of what NOT to do.

The book’s location(s) will dictate the type of accents needed, if any. The characters who live in the same place wouldn’t hear their accent differently, As narrator and dialect coach Joel Froomkin explains:

In general if the book takes place primarily where the language is native, you do not do a foreign accent because the characters are not speaking a foreign language to THEM. Hence, A Tale Of Two Cities isn’t narrated with a bunch of French accents. The foreign language itself is considered the non-accented neutral.

If the author states a character is from a certain place with a distinctive accent like London and doesn’t indicate the character has no accent, you should give that character an appropriate accent based on the location and the character’s socio-economic background and status.

However, if you can’t convincingly speak in the accent of the main character(s), you shouldn’t do the accent. The goal is to sound like a real person, not a caricature. Sustaining an accent throughout the book grows even more difficult if you have not lived there or at least had significant experience in speaking with the accent.

On the other hand, if you say you can do an accent, you need to do it WELL. You don’t need to be at the level of fooling a native speaker, but you do need to be respectful, convincing, and consistent.

Usually, hinting at the accent is enough to satisfy the listener. Barbara Rosenblat, who is known as the Meryl Streep of the audiobook world, wrote in her book Audiobook Narrator: The Art of Recording Audio Books:

Clarity is key…Your first responsibility is to be understood….

When I refer to “nuance”, I mean giving a good dollop of the flavor of the character so that you place your listeners firmly in the world you want to share with them without blowing them out of the room.

The resources on this page can help you hear accent traits and the musicality of the language, which is essential for a more authentic performance. Of course, listening to an audiobook from a native speaker certainly gets the musicality of the language into your mind! For instance, listening to David Tennant perform How to Train Your Dragon helped me perform a few lines of Scottish in one book.

Language repositories:

  • The British Library’s free database of British Accents and Dialects has recordings representing different accents and dialects in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Specialty recordings, like British prisoners held in Germany during WWI, are found on this page.
  • The International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA Dialects Archive) is a free site containing around 1500 sample recordings of native speakers from around the world speaking the same passages in English, often as a 2nd language.
  • A regional US map and links to vocal repositories are included in this Lifehacker article. Of the sites linked in the article, linguist Rick Aschmann’s site discusses US and Canadian accents and is particularly useful because he catalogs YouTube clips with good examples.

Language apps/sofware with native speakers:

Your library also may have courses in popular languages produced by Berlitz, Living Language, and Pimsleur.

This KB article on pronunciation includes links to several sites with native pronunciations.

Radio Stations:

You can also listen to radio stations in the country to aid your musicality. I’ve found that WordRadioMap.com is a good choice because you can quickly pick a country and city from drop-down menus and then click on a station to start listening.

The Radio.Garden site lets you search for a station with text or by “spinning” the earth and clicking on a dot representing a station. Narrator Madeline Mrozek alerted me to this site, which also has an iPhone/Android app.

With some Google searches, you might find radio stations in other countries with programming in English. You can also search the Apple and Google app stores for other radio apps.

Movies:

Some narrators like to watch dubbed movies with sub-titles. Narrator Jennifer Blom offered this handy tip for Netflix users: Login to Netflix and go to this page. Select the language you want to see programs available in that language.

 

Other narrators have recommended the specific resources below for the accents listed.

Australian

British

Italian

Korean

New Orleans

Polish

Queens/Bronx

Russian

Welsh

 

Other resources on this topic:

  • The PronunciationStudio.com blog has a number of articles with sound clips about types of regional British accents such as Received Placement and this article about differences between American and British English. You can search the blog for articles like the Polish one linked above that discuss mistakes native speakers of the language make in English. I saw French, Greek, Italian Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Thai.
  • Narrator and coach PJ Ochlan offers techniques for perfecting your accents in this ACX University video.
  • Siiri Scott, head of Acting and Directory in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre at Notre Dame University, gave a presentation at APAC 2019 about creating dialects. Her slide deck is available on the APA site under Resources/APAC 2019 Presentations.
  • You’re not limited to your local library’s resources. This article discusses benefits of obtaining a non-resident card for 1 or more other libraries.
  • Dialect coaches and recording packages are listed in the Welcome Center.

 

Standards for silence in the book

Best Practices

Here are long-time Audible standards for the seconds of pasted room tone to use in each file:

.5 at beginning of file

2.5 after chapter announcement

At least 2 and no more than 3.5 for mid-chapter section breaks designated by ####, ****, ———, or blank space in the text. Even when the text does not include these visual cues, you may need to add this transitional silence to alert the listener of a scene change. The narrator’s pace and type of story can cause this time to vary, but 2-2.5 seconds usually works well.

3.5 at end of file

Some rights holders will ask for a musical interlude or sound effects between chapters. They also may ask for longer pauses than those shown above and/or request that the narrator speak slower throughout the book so that the finished time will reach a certain threshold. Say NO to these types of requests.

Many indie rights holders have not listened to many audiobooks and do not know the norms of production. They also may be unaware of listener expectations. The audiobook’s pacing will be organically derived in the recording sessions and depend on the narrator’s normal rate of speech, acting choices, and complexity of the text. If a narrator speaks too slowly or adds unnecessary pauses, the listener can give up in frustration, leave negative reviews and ratings, and possibly even return the audiobook.

 

Other resources on this topic:

  • Check out the Knowledge Base articles about music and sound effects in audiobooks.
  • This article contains instructions for estimating your finished time and amount of real-time hours needed to produce an audiobook of that duration.

What rate should a newcomer charge?

Auditions/Career

The audiobook industry doesn’t have a “beginner” rate. The ACX union minimum, which is a professional rate, is $250 PFH to produce a retail-ready product. If you don’t feel your skills are at a level where you are comfortable charging that rate, you will want to get more training and do more volunteer and royalty share projects to gain experience.

If the book runs less than 1 hour, bill for one hour. Otherwise, invoice for the exact time. Enter the audiobook’s finished length in this time to decimal calculator. Multiply the resulting decimal number by your PFH rate to determine the cost.

_________________________________________________________________

Thanks to sound engineer Amanda Rose Smith for her permission to re-publish the following information that she originally posted on Facebook.

Let’s talk rates, people.

So, for context, for any new people who don’t know me, I’m not a narrator. I’m the head of a small pub’s audio department, and hire narrators on a regular basis.

Here’s the deal.

No one worth working for is going to be offering you $75 PFH. That’s not a thing. No successful business that you want to be associated with, or who will have any projects that you’d want people to see in your portfolio, is going to pay you that little.

Around $200 PFH is the BOTTOM of what you should be asking for, for clean, punch-recorded audio.

This does not include:

  • mastering or editing (beyond the clean, punched audio)
  • a proof listen against the script to catch errors

If you need to deliver final audio, you should be aiming for $250-300 PFH, at LEAST.

And just to pre-empt some questions and excuses that always come up —

1) “But I’m just starting out, and need experience!”
If you aren’t ready to do pro work, you’re not ready to be taking on ANY projects. There’s no “bad work” discount. If you’re doing bad work, you shouldn’t be doing paid work. Practice. Volunteer to read for blind people. Get coaching. Don’t put bad work out into the world for cheap.

2) “But no clients will pay that!”
Yes, they will. I am living proof of that. If you can’t find clients to pay those rates, you’re looking in the wrong place for work. A lot of successful ACX narrators bring their own authors onto the platform. Look into that. Or get some business coaching. Marketing yourself and networking are separate skills from narrating

3) “Mind your own business. If you don’t want to work for the rates I work for, charge higher, and let me charge what I want!”
Oh, alas, if only we all worked in a vacuum. But we don’t. Every time you take less than a living wage, you’re telling your client that’s okay, and that’s what they should pay everyone. You’re hurting your colleagues just as much as you’re hurting yourself.

4) “Well, at least it’s better than working for free with RS!”
RS isnt supposed to be free. If you’re not getting paid for any of your RS titles, you’re doing that wrong, too. It’s not free work, and it’s not a total gamble. You shouldn’t be taking RS titles that you don’t have some reason to believe will make your standard PFH rate, at minimum, over time.

Look — If you come at a career from a place of scarcity, you’ll always lose. No one values people who don’t value themselves — and why should they?

You know yourself best. If you think you’re worth less, I’m going to believe you.

Joining this field doesn’t come easy, and it doesn’t come quickly. It’s ok to spend a few months or more, just training and learning, before going all in.

And if you do it right, you’ll be up and running within a year. I’ve seen it happen over and over and over again.

It’s not magic or rocket science or luck. It’s just starting a business thoughtfully.

 

Other resources on this topic:

  • This article and its comments provide additional explanation about the formula for estimating finished time, the work involved in producing a finished hour, and considerations for your rate calculations.
  • Narrator Tanya Eby wrote about this topic in her article How Do You Price Yourself When You’re First Starting Out. Note: You may need a subscription to read Tanya’s Substack. You’ll find a discount offer in the Welcome Center.
  • Royalty share contracts are a deferred payment for the cost of production, which is paid through the royalties earned on the audiobook. While some of the info in this article and its comments are dated, you can learn some ways to improve your chances of earning your fee over time through RS contracts.
  • You’ll find several more useful articles about RS in the Payment Options and Narrators Views About Royalty Share Projects section of my AudioForAuthors.com page.
  • Narrator and casting director Tanya Eby discusses rates in these 2 articles. Note: You may need a subscription to read Tanya’s Substack. You’ll find a discount offer in the Welcome Center.
  • You may want to look into some business coaching from one of the pros listed in the Coaches Directory in Audiobook Village.