'Your throat hurts. Your brain hurts': the secret life of the audiobook star
Here's an interesting article about narrators:
Quote:
As the business booms, narrators talk tricky accents, lonely shifts and tackling 100 pages a day
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.”
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