Authors Electric

Have you ever wondered how an audiobook is recorded? The processes involved? While I can’t give you a complete step by step guide I can share my own author experiences. Last month, I had the opportunity to record my memoir at a top-notch recording studio – Monkeynut Audiobook and Sound , in Hampshire. It’s not something you get to do every day, unless you work in the industry doing voiceover work. If publishing your words in book form is the icing on the cake, then recording them is the cherry on the top. After a soundcheck to gauge levels, speed and tone you quite simply you read your beautiful words with expression. But it’s not the same as reading aloud to an audience in front of you, occasionally gazing up into appreciative faces hanging on your every word. Or reading a bedtime story snuggled up close to a child. Although these experiences will undoubtedly have helped me develop my voice. You read from an iPad, to stop the sound of rustling pages and scroll at your own spee...

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...