The author Bill Bryson is sitting before a lectern in Audible’s London headquarters, narrating his latest book, a disquisition on human biology called The Body: A Guide For Occupants. Seen through the window of the recording booth, Bryson’s face is largely obscured by the microphone in front of him, but his voice is clear and measured. On the other side of the glass, Bryson’s producer follows the text on an iPad, adding cryptic marks to the margins with a stylus.
Bryson makes steady progress until he runs into the word glomerulonephritis, which he can’t get his tongue around. He backs up to the beginning of the sentence, as if preparing to charge at a thicket, but when he reaches the word it defeats him again. “Fucking hell,” he says, under his breath.
Bryson’s audiobook experience goes back 20 years, when he was living in New Hampshire and the nearest recording studio was in the neighbouring state of Vermont. “Now I’ve probably worked with five or six producers,” he says, “and they’re all really kind, and they’re always very encouraging, but I can’t help feel that I should be better at this, that I should be able to pronounce the words in my own book.” Does he not realise by now that when he commits a word like glomerulonephritis to print, he will eventually have to record it? “You would think so, but no,” he says. “You know what it’s like when you’re writing – you don’t think about anything, really, except trying to get words right to yourself on the page.”
In the two decades since Bryson recorded his first narration, the audiobook market has grown from a publishing industry side hustle into a huge global business. In a climate where print and ebook sales are stagnant, the UK audiobook market rose to £69m in 2018, an increase of 43% on the previous year. In the US, audiobook downloads generate revenue of close to a billion dollars annually. This growth has largely been driven by the rise of Audible, the Amazon-owned platform that dominates the digital audiobook market through its subscription streaming service, though there are other players, including Storytel, which operates largely in Scandinavian countries. In the 1990s, before the iPod was launched, Audible was selling a proprietary digital media player that held about two hours of audio downloaded from its online library. Today, Audible’s catalogue contains more than 400,000 titles; in 2018, its members downloaded nearly three billion hours of content.
But while technology has transformed the industry, it still relies on an army of audiobook narrators to meet the demand. “I’m so impressed with professional readers,” says Bryson, “the Martin Jarvises of this world, or people like Stephen Fry, who can really bring extra dimensions to it.”
The real professionals, however, are people you might not have heard of. In the US, 81-year-old actor George Guidall is considered narration’s undisputed heavyweight champion: his baritone voice has graced more than 1,300 audiobook recordings, including works by Dostoevsky, Jonathan Franzen and Stephen King. Some of the biggest British voices in audiobooks belong to faces you might not recognise, but may well have seen – on stage, on Coronation Street, or in any number of Carry On films.
Narration may sound like an easy way to make money – you just sit there and read – but I can assure you, it isn’t. I narrated my own audiobook in 2014, an experience that I described at the time as being akin to an exorcism: three long days in a dark room, tripping through the minefield of my own words. All I could think was: if I’d known I was going to have to say this whole book out loud, I would have written a better one. Or maybe I wouldn’t have written one at all.
I’ve done two more audiobooks since – most recently, last spring – with the gently increasing confidence that comes of never, ever listening back to previous recordings. The first time, I agreed to the challenge only because I was assured it was not unusual for a first-person, non-fiction book to be read by its inexperienced author. But I never met anyone else like that in my three days at the studio. I met only professionals.
Clare Corbett isn’t sure, but she thinks she’s narrated about 300 audiobooks since she left drama school to join the BBC’s Radio Drama Company. “That started my passion for radio, and for mic stuff,” she says. “Then I went into TV and theatre, and [audiobooks] just carried alongside it, beautifully.” She was one of three narrators of The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins (the book itself features alternating narrations), which won an Audie award for best audiobook in 2016. More recently she narrated Flights, The Man Booker international prize winner by Polish author – and now Nobel prize winner – Olga Tokarczuk. “Approaching that was very difficult,” says Corbett. “There was Russian and Polish language in it, and Russian, Polish and Croatian pronunciations.” In the end, she contacted some other women from her local area who spoke the languages and could guide her through the pronunciations. “I’m meeting my community at the same time,” she says.
Most professional readers are also trained actors – as early as 2013, Audible’s founder Donald Katz was claiming his company was probably the largest single employer of actors in the New York area – but narration comes with its own peculiar constraints. “What’s different is, you’ve got to stay still,” says Corbett. “When I first started, I was very animated. I was told to stop.” Any movement in the booth creates extraneous noise: fabric rustling, chair creaking, foot tapping. Before the introduction of the iPad, even the turning of pages was an editing headache.
Beyond keeping still, there are other considerations. “If you’re narrating in the first person, I find it’s much more like doing TV or theatre,” says Corbett. “You can enter into it as if you are that character.” If, however, the book has a neutral, third person narrator and several speaking characters, reading becomes a complex mix of acting and storytelling, requiring tremendous concentration and plenty of preparation. “If you’re a good actor it doesn’t always mean you’re going to be a good narrator,” Corbett says.
Finty Williams, who has been reading audiobooks for about 18 years, agrees that narration is a discipline distinct from acting. “It’s to do with rhythm, and understanding how we naturally speak,” she says. “When we get to the middle of a paragraph we speak slightly quicker, and then we tend to slow down.” While experience helps, she’s not sure it can be taught. “It’s a knack,” she says. “It’s a knack that my mother doesn’t have.” If her eyes contain a flicker of irony as she says this, it’s because her mother is Dame Judi Dench. “The only audiobook she ever did she had to leave after the first day, because she couldn’t string two sentences together,” says Williams. “It’s about the only thing she can’t do.”
I meet Williams a few days after her run in Night Of The Iguana in London’s West End. Like a lot of readers, she combines audiobook narration with acting work, though not, if she can help it, at the same time. “I did do one, when I was doing a show in town,” she says. “This box arrived at the stage door; it was the paperback version of the book, which was about 800 pages long.” The book – Citadel, by Kate Mosse – is actually 976 pages in paperback. “It had Latin in it,” says Williams. “And German and Spanish and Medieval French. So I spent a whole day doing that, and then I went to the theatre, did the play and went home. I woke up the next morning and burst into tears and said, ‘Please don’t send me back!’ But we did get it finished.”
- The Guardian
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