THE AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR'S GUIDE by Douglas Edmunds

Table of Contents

Foreword - Why read this book?

Part one - Planning and preparation

• Core concepts - Discover the narrator's voice.
  • You have many voices to pick from
  • Do the narrator's voice
  • Keep yourself out of it
  • The listener's burden Minimize it!
  • Be patient You're in it for the long haul.
• Your vocal toolkit - Exercises to develop your voice.
  • Your listener's expectations
  • Important guidelines
  • Gather up practice materials
  • Tools in your voice toolkit
    • Physical voice controls
      • Volume
      • Pace
      • Pausing
      • Pitch
    • Get inside the minds of your characters
      • Your characters' attitudes toward life
      • Your characters' emotions
    • Create voices
      • Dialects, accents and foreign languages
  • One week before you record
• Prepare your text - Mapping out your performance.
  • What is narration markup?
  • Re-read your book first
  • Start with a fresh printout
  • Converting visual clues
  • Punctuation
  • Pauses
  • Emphasis
  • Dialogue
  • Change of pace
  • Pronunciation
  • Getting unstuck
  • Point of view
  • Create images of your characters
  • Chart your character relationships
  • Making a pitch chart
  • How to remember character details
  • Some trivia
• How do I handle THAT?
  • Voices
    • He said He said He said
    • "Wait," he said slowly
    • John sneezed
    • The doorbell rang
    • I'll get even with you, John thought
    • The unknown speaker
    • We want out! shouted the prisoners
    • Talking signs
    • Through whose eyes?
    • Which voice controls
    • Accents
  • That's not a word
    • Dots and dashes
    • Abbreviations and acronyms
    • Numbers
    • Foreign phrases
    • Breaks between paragraphs
    • Illustrations
  • The stuff around the edges
    • Copyrights
    • Acknowledgments
    • Introductions
    • Music
    • Miscellany
    • Adding comments
    • Do I have to read EVERY word?

Part two - Session planning

• Assembling your team
  • Your sound engineer
  • Your production monitor
  • Tips for monitoring
    • If you don't have a production monitor
• Structuring multiple sessions
  • Develop reasonable expectations
  • Plan the sessions
  • Sequence of chapters
  • Prepare the front matter

Part Three - On the mic

• Final preparations
  • Have a quiet night before
  • What to wear
  • Postpone if you have to
  • Make session notes
  • Avoid the sound of paper
  • Make test recordings
• Minus 10 and counting
  • Get your internal focus
  • Get your external focus
  • Positioning yourself in relation to the mic
• While you're recording
  • Don't move around
  • Stay in the moment
  • Take breaks
• Retakes
  • Why retakes are necessary
  • A retake is your friend
  • How to sound the same as you did before
  • Notepad for retakes

Wrapping it up - Putting it all together.

About the author Douglas Edmunds: B.A, Northwestern Univ.; J.D., John Marshall Law School