The first step in preparing to make an audiobook is for you to begin to treat the Narrator as the main character of your book. From this point onward, you are going to stop “reading out loud” and instead you are going to start “doing the Narrator”.

“But I have a main character!”, you say.

Consider this: When you wrote your book, you had someone in mind as the reader. Maybe a young child, maybe a savvy 30-something, maybe a mystery buff. Whoever it was, you wrote for them. You wrote your book in a certain way, used certain words, in order to reach your reader. You set the plot and decided who the characters would be, what the characters would say and do. But the reader stays in control of the reading process. The reader decides how fast or slow the words come at him. The reader decides if this part of the book is important. And because the reader has this control, he varies the level of attention he gives to the people and events in the book.

This is one of those points where the experience of the listener diverts sharply from the reader. From the very first words on the recording, the listener does not have the control over the audiobook that the reader has over the printed book. He can't make you read faster or slower, he can't add emotion to your voice for you.

And so the Narrator becomes the central character of the audiobook. The listener must allow the Narrator to tell the story at the Narrator's pace, with the Narrator's emotion, with the Narrator's sense of what is important about what he is saying.

The challenge ahead is to stay aware of the difference between reading a book and listening to a book. You need to spend some time considering the audiobook as a listening experience before you start on the path of considering it from the performance side.

Let's cover the basics one more time:

When a person reads a book, the reader is the Narrator. Reading is a bit like talking to yourself, except you are aware that what you are saying to yourself are words selected by someone else, the writer. If you don't like what the writer has written, you stop saying the words to yourself, you stop reading. If you get involved in the book, the reading experience transforms you, puts you 'inside it', to the point that you forget the world around you, because right now, you are on a Nineteenth Century sailing vessel somewhere in the southern Atlantic. Even when the book is told from the first person point of view, you transcend the “person” who is telling the story, and enter it, experiencing the same sights and sounds in your imagination.

When a person listens to an audiobook, it is all different. Now there is always a voice. The listener is very aware of that voice. And that voice, the Narrator's voice, is never an objective witness, coldly describing what he sees and hears. The Narrator becomes a person, just like any of the characters in the book, except that the Narrator is more than just one of the characters. The Narrator is the heart and soul, the core personality of the book. It doesn't matter who or what the story is about. It doesn't matter whether the story is told in the third person or first person. Every aspect of the book comes through that one voice – the Narrator. It is your job to find that voice, to discover the persona of the Narrator.