How Audiobooks Really Get Made

One insider's trade secrets are revealed.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how an audiobook narrator’s voice and intonations can make or break an audiobook. Authors are often given a few possible choices when it comes to a narrator, and I’ve always been asked to rank my picks for first choice, second and third. It’s always a fun exercise but it can be a little stressful. Choosing the right narrator for your novel is critical, especially with historical reads where a poorly chosen voice can distract listeners from the story, or worse, make the novel feel inauthentic. With the upcoming paperback release of All the Summers in Between, which is set in the 1960s and 1970s, I reached out to narrator extraordinaire Emily Ellet, who read the audio version of my novel.

In addition to reading audiobooks, Ellet is an actress, a singer and she advertises the ability to narrate the following accents for her main characters: French, Russian, Scottish, Irish, British RP, Cockney, American Southern, Appalachian, Texan, Midwest Rural. OMG, I think that’s AMAZING. Can you imagine doing all of those voices?

She can also capture a Jackie Kennedy-esque way of speaking. For my novel, she used the perfect mix of voices to illustrate the two best friends, and the vintage quality to her voice whisks you back in time. She also speaks the way I envision my characters speak: clear, honest and elegant. Since she’s narrated about 800 books, I wanted to find out her secret to making a great audiobook.

Can you guess how many hours it takes to record one? Hint: It might take as long as it does to drive from Martha’s Vineyard to Laguna Beach. Sometimes longer.

Emily Ellet in the recording studio.

What is the process of readying yourself to read the audiobook? Can you walk us through it? How many have you narrated?
The prep process for an audiobook includes skim-reading the book to make a list of speaking characters, along with any descriptions the author has given of either each character's vocal characteristics or general descriptions (for example, if a woman is described as having beady eyes and sharp features, I may then create an overly enunciated, sharp voice sound for her), and/or a list of any words or phrases I need to look up (as with complicated nonfiction) or ask the author about (as with sci-fi or fantasy worlds). Admittedly, sometimes if I'm enjoying the book too much, it's hard to just skim, as in the case of All the Summers! But in general I try to skim so that my experience of the book is as fresh as possible while narrating it.

At this point in my career, I've narrated over 800 audiobooks including my pseudonym's titles and the work I recorded for the Library of Congress's Books for the Blind program, some as short as a few minutes and some as long as 40+ hours!

Was there anything particularly challenging about reading All the Summers in Between? Any part that was difficult to capture?
Perhaps the hardest thing for me was finding Margot's voice and character. She's such a complex character, and I wanted to do justice to all the parts of her - neglected child, rebellious teen, scared adult, and all the parts of her in between. Sometimes when you REALLY care about an element of the audiobook, you overthink it and/or worry about whether you've done a good enough job that it can be hard to just let go and trust yourself. Hopefully where I ended up with her voice captured all of her! As a former foster mom of teen girls, man, did I want to just give her a giant hug.

What was the fun part about reading All the Summers in Between?
That's easy — the music of the period! As a child who grew up exclusively listening to oldies (and watching things like the Ed Sullivan Show highlights) until she was eleven, I knew the groups and music so well that it was like diving back into my own youth. Literally my sisters' and my first boy band crush was The Beatles. My dad pulled the 8x10 photos of the boys from one of his LPs, and we each pinned our favorite's photo up on our respective bulletin boards and did things like kiss their photo on the way out of our rooms. Oh my god, I'm so embarrassed I just admitted that in public.

Once in a while while recording, if I didn't recognize a name offhand, I'd look them up on YouTube and listen for a minute or two to have a clear sense of what the characters were talking about, like Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane (I knew the band, just not Grace!). But I think because that period is so vivid to me, I really "lived" the book in a way that means that several of the locations are now crystal clear in my memories. Which means I'll probably have "flashbacks" for the rest of my life, something that happens when I get too deep into a book I narrate - I get confused about why I have a "memory" of some place or some moment that I only narrated!

Also, since I'm the daughter of two bass players who lived for those music drops each week, I think I really connected with what my mom's life must have felt like at that time, especially because her best friend in high school was named Margot! Though I suspect from the little my mom is willing to share that she and her friend were both more Margots than Theas. :)

How did you get interested in being an audiobook readers? What do you enjoy about it?
Well, the first time it popped onto my radar, I was living in Norman, OK (Go Sooners!), working a bunch of part-time jobs and looking for additional acting gigs. I saw a Craigslist posting for a now-closed vanity publisher in Mustang, OK and eventually was hired by them to record, edit, and master mostly children's books. I had no training in narration and didn't really get any feedback or guidance, so it was...very unpolished, haha. A few years later, living in NYC, a church friend got me a couple auditions for the studios where she worked for the Library of Congress's Books for the Blind program, and once I got accepted as a narrator for the program, I fell in love with the art form.

I love so many things about this career: the flexibility of being my own boss, connecting with listeners and hearing what books impacted them, and especially exploring so many different stories and worlds and characters. One of my favorite experiences is falling in love with a character you've narrated. Sometimes you're more of a conduit than a creator, and so you end up surprised and delighted at the person that comes out of your mouth. (I've heard it's similar for authors!)

My all-time favorite character that I've voiced is this little kid with a lisp named Stubbins in this collection of The Best Christmas Stories You've Never Heard. He just popped out of my mouth so full-bodied and adorable that I was head over heels instantly and cannot take credit for his charming exuberance.

Do you listen to books or read them more often?
I'm a visual processor more than an aural processor, so I can't really listen to books unless I've already read them. I also love the feel of holding and curling up with a physical book, which I can't really do with an audiobook, haha (or an ebook for that matter), so I primarily read physical books. I have to admit that ever since my narration career became full-time, I haven't really had time to read for fun anymore. It's pretty much just on vacation these days!

Who are the audiobook readers that you enjoy most? Or is there an audiobook you particularly enjoyed the narration?
I really loved listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks alongside my sister (who is a voracious audiobook listener of 20+ years) when we were in high school and college, since I'd already read the physical books by the time we listened to the audiobooks. Stephen Fry's performances are phenomenal, but something about Jim Dale just feels like a warm cup of tea in my hands under a soft blanket, if you know what I mean.

More recently, I loved Julia Whelan's Thank You for Listening, narrated by Julia herself. I was tickled with her character voice for one of the grandmother's nursing home friends - a raspy smoker's voice with a lot of old-lady sass. I couldn't get enough, haha.

What would be your dream assignment when it comes to narrating audiobooks?
I would love to narrate more YA sci-fi. I narrated Brandon Sanderson's Skyward for the Library of Congress, and I am STILL obsessed with that series. To narrate something like that, with a spunky, gritty heroine and a found family and lots of cool sci-fi worlds and plenty of action....that's my dream. I was super honored to get to be the voice of Rachel in the Animorphs audiobooks, as someone who grew up reading that series, so some more of that, please!

There were a couple of other books I narrated for the Library of Congress that I'd love to narrate similar things to now: The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt (a fascinating collection of fictionalized fragmented documents about gender politics in the art world and the unreliability of memory - very thought-provoking but deeply moving) and an incredible translation of Valerie Perrin's Fresh Water for Flowers, which was more along the lines of All the Summers in a (very French) way. I don't do a ton of these kinds of literary fiction books nowadays, which was why All the Summers was so delightful!

What would surprise people about reading audiobooks?
It's so much more work than you'd imagine, logistically, emotionally, and especially physically! You have to sit very still or the mic picks up your movements (you can learn to do some movement without being heard, but it's not instinctive - and you have to have silent clothing!), so it's very taxing on your body, counterintuitively. And the two separate skills of feeling and then expressing the emotional states of the characters are also a lot of work.

At the end of the recording session, it's not uncommon to be exhausted, especially if you had anything really emotional to narrate. And that doesn't account for the sheer anxiety that some of us (hi, it's me) experience when having to do any kind of foreign accent. I'm just not naturally gifted at accents (can someone explain why my musician brother is?!), so I sweat like CRAZY whenever I have dialogue with accents.

In addition, a lot of people who think my job sounds so simple and easy ("I'd love to just read books all day!" is a comment I often hear) forget that it's a business. I have to source my own work, and there's never a guarantee that the market wants my particular voice, so it's a constant hustle auditioning and checking in with casting folks and talking authors through how we can produce an indie project together. Plus, I have to wear a lot of different hats: studio engineer (it's a lot of very expensive equipment that can be infuriating to troubleshoot when something goes wrong because I didn't get a degree in that!), accountant (budgeting, invoicing, tax prep, etc.), sales and marketing, social media manager, chief executive officer (strategic planning is an important part of owning a business!), just to name a few. I love it - but it's definitely WORK.

What else? Is there anything fun you want to add?
I have so many favorite oldies songs these days that I can't definitively say what's My Current Fav, but my fav when I was a kid was, at any given moment, Neil Sedaka's "Happy Birthday Sweet 16", Carl Carlton's "Everlasting Love," or The Beatles's "I Need You." Also, we watched the Beatles movie Help with my dad an awful lot growing up, so I can (and do) still quote most of the movie with my siblings. And if you've never watched the Ed Sullivan Show highlights movies, it's TOTALLY worth your time - what a treasure trove of incredible performances!

Thank you so much, Brooke!!!! This was a total blast.

I agree. It was so great having you on DF. I hope we work together again soon! You are such a talent and I LOVED hearing your voice narrating my words. If you have a question for Emily, leave it in the comments!

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