Authors Electric

It’s been a long road, this process of converting a novel into an audiobook. So far, it’s taken me over two years to get to this point. Looking back on my AE posts, I started way back in June 2014 , when I met my first narrator. How does one meet a narrator? On ACX – one of the biggest sites/distributors (and yes – you’ve guessed it – part of Amazon. Isn’t everything these days?), it’s a bit like a dating agency. Authors upload samples of scripts and hope to get picked by narrators; narrators upload samples of their work and hope to get picked by authors. Each can search listings of the other, filtered by genre, book type, voice type, gender etc etc. People make approaches and get rejected. Eventually you meet somebody whose voice/story you like the sound/look of, they feel the same way about you and think you can work together. It really is like a dating agency … So way back in 2014, I met Cliff. He was a singer with a great voice and liked my novel, and we signed a contract...

For about twenty five years from the mid seventies to the turn of the new millennium, I wrote for radio. I have more than a hundred hours of produced radio drama to my name, including many original plays, series and serials as well as dramatizations of classics like Ben Hur, Kidnapped and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Because most producers want the playwright to be there for the duration of the production – studio time is always tight, so you’re expected to do rewrites on the hoof - I’ve spent weeks in radio studios. Kidnapped and Catriona in ten hour-long episodes involved so much time in a small, stuffy Edinburgh studio with no natural light, that the producer pinned up a quote from Kidnapped on the wall: day and night were alike in that ill-smelling cavern . We knew how poor David Balfour felt. Although the hot scones sent up by the canteen at tea time were excellent! I’ve worked with some wonderful producer/directors and equally good audio technicians. I’ve seen huge changes...