IN HER NAME: EMPIRE

My Foray Into Making AudioBooks

October 10, 2011 Michael Hicks Blog, 5

I’ve been asked by a number of readers if my books were ever going to be available as audiobooks. The short answer is “yes”. Getting there, though, has been an interesting journey so far!

While my book sales have freed me from my former day job (I hope permanently!), I’m still not at the point where I feel I can afford to pay a pro to do the voiceovers. Maybe someday I’ll be able to hire James Earl Jones, but I suspect that’s not going to be any time real soon!

And, like many things (other than electrical and plumbing stuff, which I never mess with!), I’m sort of a do-it-yourselfer. Partly because I’m cheap, but mainly because doing something myself is always a great learning process. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do the thing, and you will have the power…as long as it doesn’t involve electricity, plumbing, or power tools.”

Being a gadget addict, I was initially focused on the gear. It’s always about the gear, right? At least until you know better. Anyway, I had a Blue Snowball microphone I’d gotten a while back, and I made a couple of test reads of passages from IN HER NAME: EMPIRE, which I’ll be offering as a free audiobook when it’s done, here in my junk-room-turned-office.

Okay, I’m not an acoustic genius, but I could tell the audio quality in this room sucked. So, I looked around a bit for potential solutions. I didn’t want to build a sound booth, so I settled on the Porta-Booth Pro, which is also something I can take with us when we go out in the RV (actually, the latter is the main reason I got it).

I set the thing up in my closet upstairs, plugged my Snowball into my MacBook Air, brought up EMPIRE in the Kindle app of my iPad (yes, yes, I’m a cheap gadget freak – go figure!), and off we went with a chunk of chapter 1.

That’s when I discovered what’s REALLY important in a story told through audio: HOW it’s told. How you present it to the audience. The first take sucked. I was just reading in a monotone, same cadence throughout. I could’ve been reading the phone book, and it would’ve been just as interesting (or not).

So, after taking the advice of some friends (thanks, Celia and Spyros!) and reading up on voiceovers a bit so I had half a clue about what I should be doing, I took a couple more shots at it. I was much happier with the third take. I forced myself to slow down, emphasize pauses, add inflection, change volume, and tried to “get into character” more. No, I’m not going to say it’s anywhere near what a pro voiceover artist could do (because, my friend, it truly IS an art!), but it won’t put you to sleep in the first two paragraphs, either!

Recording and editing was pretty straightforward (keeping in mind, again, that I’m a rank amateur). I recorded the audio in Garageband and just let it run while I was reading. When I made a goof, I just hit the “P” key to insert a marker in the timeline, then I backed up a sentence and started again. That made the recording session go very quickly, and made editing easy: I just went to the markers, trimmed out the bad, spliced in the good, made sure there weren’t any obvious gaps or other oddities, and off we go.

The one big problem I encountered was hiss. From what I’ve read, it looks like this is an artifact of a cheap microphone (the Blue Snowball is around $100; many pro microphones are thousands of dollars) combined with a direct USB connection, and without any sort of preamp. I was able to eliminate most of it by playing around with the tons of filters in Garageband (that right there was a whole day of entertainment!), but I’ll probably wind up getting better gear. I don’t have thousands of dollars to spend, but I’ll see what I can find, and I’m always open to suggestions!

If you like, here’s the new and improved chapter 1. Also, feel free to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll get new chapters as I add them, and pass it on to any of your friends who like audio books or podcasts.

The bottom line, though, is that I really started to enjoy it. I thought it was going to be a chore, but after I started getting into it a bit and let my hair down, so to speak, it was a lot of fun.

Eventually, all my books will be available through Audible.com and other audiobook retailers. I hope to have EMPIRE done by the end of this month.

AudioBooks, IN HER NAME: EMPIRE, Podcasts