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...

I first ventured into a recording studio aeons ago when I was working in a pain management clinic. I was using a technique of induced deep relaxation with the patients and wanted to give them something helpful to use between sessions. There was a recording suite in the teaching hospital and they had a whole library of royalty-free music I could add. Soon after we began, the technician stopped me and asked if I had anything on under my sweater. Eh? Apparently, there was a synthetic-material-rubbing sort of noise, undetectable to the human ear but picked up by the microphone. Luckily, I had something decent underneath, so peeled off the top layer and we started again. I’d been pre-warned to keep still and not to rustle my script, so was feeling quite tense while trying to maintain a soft soothing voice...’Stop!’ said the technician, ‘there’s a rhythmic background noise. We think you might be clenching your buttock muscles.’           Sc...

     (The illustration features the author depicted in the act of recording at what has become a mixing deck, and listeners who are either inspired to dance or deafened by his music. It is by Isla Kirton whose rates are very reasonable.)      A recent suggestion was that we use some of these blogs to offer tips on perhaps more 'technical' aspects of writing. For me that narrows the topic range significantly but I have done plenty of voice-over work, so my own suggestions are about audio recording.       Using audio opens up different possibilities through trailers, extracts or even whole chapters. The more courageous might try entire books but that's fraught with lots of difficulties too numerous to explore here. This advice is for anyone who wants to  record a sound track for a trailer or  try making a short reading to post on SoundCloud and/or their website.      First, if y...

Have I ranted about free books before? I promise I won't again. I know that offering your books free works for a lot of people, so who am I to argue? What do you mean I always argue - with anybody, about anything? But the free I want to talk about now is the unintentionally free. The rip-off free. The pirating free. The illegal free. If I buy a paperback book, I own that book as a physical entity - the paper it's printed on and the physical copy of the story on its pages. I don't own the content of the book. The story itself remains the property of the author and I've just bought the right to read it as often as I like. And lend it to other people too. But ebooks don't have a physical presence. An ebook is a digital file stored on a server somewhere. When I buy an ebook, I buy the right to download it to a reading device and read it as often as I like. The fact that Amazon apparently has the right to remove it from my device without warning or compensation i...