Quote:
Originally Posted by arjaybe
I can see where you'd leave things out if the audiobook is done as a performance, but not if it's a simple reading. I'd think a reading would use all the words, wouldn't it?
I'd love to hear about some of the "tricks of the trade" in recording books.
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I've never been part of that trade. I participated in the forum as a listener. Wait, I mean reader.
This forum was active for more than a decade and some of the participants were top narrators such as Frank Muller, George Guidall, Simon Vance, Will Patton, Scott Brick, Anna Fields, Grover Gardner and Barbara Rosenblatt. Most of these participated daily.
There were recording engineers and representatives of the publishers. The guy who handled Stephen King's books was a daily participant, although I can't recall his name. I should because he was nearly always angry at me.
Anyway they discussed things like how to change the very least in a book to make it a palatable audiobook. I don't remember a lot of details about that but it mostly involved removing things like "he said" and "she said" when they were superfluous and made the narration awkward.
Another favorite topic was the pronunciation of names. There were a lot of problems associated with names, especially in situations where a place name is a common word but is pronounced in an uncommon way by local people. I ran into an example of that yesterday when someone mentioned a neighboring county, Saline County, pronouncing it as though it meant salt. Everyone around here has a different pronunciation and she was corrected. The strange thing is that now I have saline as in salty in my mind and I can't recall the locally correct pronunciation.
I found that to be a fascinating forum; one of the best I've been in. It was very active and never let up. There was always something going on. There were often heated discussions but they always stayed friendly and polite and that never took monitoring to achieve. It just sort of happened.
They didn't have rules there about discussing piracy or even advocating piracy, although being a publishers association sponsored forum there weren't many there who would advocate that. I once mentioned that I always made copies for my own use of Audible books with the DRM removed and I quickly received a call from an Audible lawyer who politely insisted that I not mention that again. I didn't.
Unfortunately the Audio Publisher's Association decided to shut it down. I think that was because of a new officer in the association but I didn't know enough about their internal politics to really know if that was just a rumor.
It was a beautiful thing while it lasted. I still miss it.
Barry