Great questions about the voiceover business continue to come in from The Magazine of Santa Clarita readers. Here’s a recent one:
Q: I’m an avid audiobook listener and I’m interested in finding out what it takes to be an audiobook narrator. Are there classes you can take to train you to read audiobooks? Do you have to be a trained actor? Could I make a demo of my narration skills and submit it to audiobook publishers? —Bob A., Stevenson Ranch, CA
Bob, thank you for your question. Audiobooks are very popular these days and narrating them is a very specialized and competitive field, but audiobook publishers are always on the lookout for talented readers. The thing is, though, that narrating an audiobook is an area only for a seasoned, experienced voice actor. An apt analogy would be that if 30 and 60-second commercials are the 50 to 100 yard dashes of voice acting, audiobooks are the 26K marathons. Audiobooks are recorded in four to five hour blocks a day (with a few breaks, of course), for several days in a row. A voice actor has to have myriad skills to successfully execute narrating an audiobook: understanding how to pace themselves, maintaining a constant and consistent energy, having excellent articulation, having little or no mouth noise, having solid breath control, being able to take direction, being able to read text cold, having a good ear and an aptitude for enunciating foreign words, having excellent eye-brain-mouth coordination, understanding the arc of a story, being able to break down characters in a fiction book, and, of course, being able to act. If you’re interested in narrating audiobooks, I’d strongly suggest taking a voice-acting course to see exactly how good your narrating skills are. If it’s something you excel in, you could eventually put an audiobook demo together that would demonstrate your talent, something that you could submit to audiobook publishers. Good luck. I’ll be sharing more voiceover questions and answers in the coming months.
For more information, please contact Marc Cashman at cashcomm@earthlink.net or at his website www.cashmancommercials.com .