Speaker 1: So I'm here to talk about preparation. I work a lot with the narrators for the coordination aspect of things, when we get their scripts out, from their scheduling, contacting authors, all that stuff. So basic question, why prepare for your book? And basically all of the slides that I'll go through kind of focus back to kind of these main just general ideas and points. First being, you want to make everybody happy, both the author, the fans, and ultimately yourself, if everybody else is happy, you can be happy with your product. You make the authors happy, they're going to want to work with you more. Same thing with the fans, they'll seek out your work, they'll look for the work, and If you can get everybody happy, though, that doesn't always happen. In the long run, it's just everybody is better. So save time. If you're not prepared, a lot of things that can go wrong in the studio, you got to end up going and fixing. Again, if you're not prepared, you'll run into words, characters, and maybe you don't know how to pronounce them, maybe you haven't given much thought in their voices, how they should act, just kind of like all the general ideas of making your recording session go a lot smoother by just having all the stuff written out, documented, in your mind, you know what everything is going to be like, and you can just get in the studio, get going, and you're not wasting your time. And then finally, deadlines. Everything runs on deadlines. Whether it's auditions, the book's date, incremental things. I know you guys need to sometimes hit incremental parts for ACX. Everybody expects the deadlines, and when you start missing the deadlines, some people get nervous. So not on this slide is also communication with the author, with the publisher. I'm not sure who, you know, sometimes you might have contact with the publisher, other times it might be the author. Whatever it is, it's always great to, if you have that ability, really reach out. If things are going wrong, give them a heads up. It just keeps everybody more kind of comfortable with your whole production. So schedule and accountability. When you first take on a project, and this goes for anywhere, whether it's for Audible, ACX, think about what you're currently working on and the book that you're looking to take on. How long is it going to take? Do you already have two or three books kind of in your docket? And give an idea of how long is this new project going to take? What are their expectations for when deadlines are going to start needing to be hit? And just be honest with everybody. One of the worst things you could do is just take on so much work, and then you start falling off on everybody. Everybody starts to get upset that you're missing deadlines. And if you just be honest up front, usually you'll even find that publishers or authors are more than willing to work with you on new timelines if everything's going well. Add office time. Basically, anything. Think about just kind of what's coming up in your next month or two. Maybe a little longer, depending on the project. And just give a real good assessment on should you... Everybody likes to turn down work, but sometimes in the long run, if you turn down work, it can get you more work later on by not upsetting lots of people. So on preparing your book, step one is obviously read your book. Not everybody does that sometimes, you'd be amazed to find. If you do nothing else, I would suggest just read your book. And if you do none of the steps later on down the road, read your book. You'll be a lot happier, both... Not even just for yourself, because it happens... It's been in the studio. I've been in the studio when I used to do more recording. And you get to three quarters through the book, and you hit some character. And all of a sudden, there's the one line where maybe the guy's Irish, and you had no idea. You've recorded all of his voices. And after minutes of lots of cursing and throwing things, you finally realize that I now have to correct all this person's dialogue. And that's not... That's really no fun for anybody. It's not fun for you. You don't wanna spend all your time going back, fixing all that. And it's a hassle, but you gotta do it. So if you read your book, hopefully you catch most of those issues. Now, when you're going through your book, pronunciation, it's always a key thing. Make a list. If you're using an annotation program, you can make your notes in the margins or whatever you might happen to be doing. But anything that you don't know, it's always handy to just make a list of things that you're gonna research later. So you can read through your book, and then you're just pulling out the words while still going through your book. And in the end, you'll have a list of things that you want, that you need to look up. Even if you're 50-50 on something. It's happened before. Somebody's like, well, I've heard this word before. I'm pretty sure this is how it's supposed to be said. And then it comes back from the editor, and you have to read... Maybe it was a common word in the book, and you gotta do 300, 400 corrections. And again, you're back into that point where if you just read... Set aside that time and really were thorough with your research. You're just gonna be happier in the end, not having to redo all that. With that, make notes of your characters. Not so much in a non-fiction book, doesn't really matter too much. But if you're doing a fictional title, lots of characters, it's good not even to, when you're thinking about your characters, to make a fit for them. How are they gonna act? What are the voices gonna be like? Are they gonna have accents? Are they not gonna have accents? And not only is it helpful for your own mind, but then you're going through the book. If it's a long book especially, it's gonna be maybe several days worth of recording. By the time you get to the third day, the fourth day, the fifth day, you may... If the person only popped up once earlier in maybe day one, here you are on day five and the person comes back, you can go back and look, pull up that audio and listen to it again. And we do that. Some narrators like to hear themselves again to really get it down. But a lot of people just... If you make yourself a good note to where you can just read that quick note when you're there in the text, and it can just click on, oh yeah, this is what I did for that character, you can just keep going. Again, saves you time, more efficient, then you can make sure you get consistent characters throughout your book, regardless of whether it's day one, day five, six, you could just keep going on with it. And then kind of a third list, whether you wanna... Everybody's different in how they wanna set up their research and all that, but a fictional word list is good, especially fiction pieces, and you have that author contact. Pull those words out, because a lot of times, especially if the author has a lot of fans and they have a rapid fan base, being able to confirm these words, they have sometimes their own little world that everybody knows... Nobody outside maybe that world knows how these things are actually pronounced and if you're going in there and kind of doing on your own thing, you haven't consulted with the author, people will get angry with you. Once the book is released, they will... You'll hear it, so nobody really wants that. So on with contacting your author, even if it's a basic non-fiction book, you don't really have much to say, you understand the concept really well, there's nothing really outstanding that you really wanna clarify with them. If you have the ability, we ask all of our narrators to reach out. We usually have either the publisher's contact or the author's direct contact, and we have everybody reach out unless we're told explicitly not to. If you have that ability, absolutely do it, even if you... Again, if you have nothing to ask them, reach out to them. They may have something that you didn't even think of, maybe there could be a certain way they want maybe a chapter to sound, or anything that you didn't think of. And if not, a lot of them are just happy, hey, my narrator reached out, they showed me their respect and courtesy to reach out to me. It helps that relationship between author, publisher, narrator, and just keeps everybody being happy. Phone calls are great, you don't have to do it, we don't mandate anybody do it, but a lot of our narrators that I've talked to, they'll schedule a phone call or even a Skype like video chat. It helps a lot, especially if you got a lot of weird words to pronounce, or maybe things that maybe are outside of your language, and you need... It's good to get that audible phonetic, if you start asking these words and they can read them off to you. And even if you have the ability to have them record those snippets, and you can save those snippets later on, so when you're in the studio and you can't quite remember how that's supposed to be, and the phonetic's not really helping you, you can just pull up the way that the author said it, that they may know correctly how to say it, and it'll help you out tremendously. And when you're talking to the author, that's the great time to, the fictional word list, have them get... You can have them say it if you talk to them, or just get the phonetics from them, a lot of people do all that. And then, if you wanna run your character choices by them, sometimes you might have an idea, maybe you got a certain feel for a character while reading through the book, and they have something completely different. It helps to talk about, maybe... It doesn't mean that you necessarily have to go with what they're thinking, but if maybe after they tell you that, this has always been my idea for this character, maybe it will make sense and that will actually click with you, and hey, that's an actual good idea, you end up going with it. And again, non-fiction stuff, they're usually a really great source for proper name pronunciations, especially when you get back to historical things, and maybe it's hard to find certain pronunciations. Sometimes they know it, so it's great to ask them, and you might be surprised with... They just saved you a lot of time and headache trying to find pronunciations for locations or people, and it'll save you a lot of time. Time management. I don't know how many people do a lot of their own editing. That's always the biggest time drain on a production. Recording average two to one. Some people, faster. Some people are slower. Once you get in the studio, though, if you're well-prepared, the average narrator can do... Takes them about two hours in the studio to do an hour of finished punch-record recording. Usually get better as you go on, but then you get to the editing. For Audible Studios, we have our target ratio for a really well QC-edited product is it's a three to one on the edit, and then 1.5 to one on the QC. In total, you're talking a four and a half to one ratio for a properly edited and QC product, and that's with editors who have been doing it for years. That's the time that we allot them. Between the recording and editing alone of people who have been doing it, it takes... It's a six and a half to one ratio, so it's gonna be 65 production hours to finish a 10-hour book, and that's before. That's not including mastering. It's not even including pickups, which we usually find is a minute per pickup, so if you have 60 pickups, we schedule sessions for an hour. It doesn't cut too much into the production time, but when you look at that for a 10-hour book, it's a lot of time, and you should plan for it. It means a lot, especially once you get to the editing and the QC, for somebody to really go through. You're gonna have good edits. You're gonna make sure that your pronunciations are good. Maybe there's something you missed that that person knows, if they're really good at what they're doing. And then again, in the end, your overall goal is a really quality audio book, and that makes everybody else happy, back to the main points of what you're shooting for. Now, as far as your documentation organization, character lists, as I said, always great to just have on hand, but even if you... It's great if you can find a way, whether you had it written out and you digitized it, or you did it all digitally, store those away somewhere, especially if the book ends up being a series. It will save you all sorts of headache to just be able to go back three years later, say book two of a series comes out, and you have all of these notes that you gave yourself that will click all these character voices back in your head to what you did so you can be consistent. Everybody likes when you start changing a character's voice after book one, or even anywhere in a series. Everybody likes to... They have the characters that they've now associated with, so the best thing you could do to be able to remind yourself in the future of this is only going to be for the better for everything. I'm not sure... I brought this up just the other week when I was initially going through these slides. If we're doing a series and we're bringing a narrator back, book three, book four, we'll offer them to listen to some of their old audio so they can actually listen to some of the audio of their past characters. We offer it... Anybody who's doing a series. It's definitely worth it if you have the ability to look at... Go back, listen to that audio. You don't have to listen to the whole book again, but maybe if you still have your notes, you might know where certain characters recur in that book, and you could easily quickly jump back, okay, what did I do in book one? Listen to it. You just get that mental recharge, and you can go on, make sure your characters are great, and everybody's happy about it. Annotation software. Back before iPads, everybody used to make their notes all on paper, and we all did it on paper. Once we started shifting to PDFs and digital copies, it really made things, I think, a lot smoother, both in the booth, because you don't have to deal with a big stack of paper or turning pages, but also just the way people are now able to annotate and mark up their scripts. You can highlight characters. I've seen all ranges of... Some people just have a couple little notes. That's all they need. Some people highlight every other sentence, and whatever works for you, but it's great to get into a system. Re-learn some of your annotation software. They all can do a lot of stuff. There's no really one better than the other. It kind of depends on the platform. Some people will even do it on their computer and load it on. There's no one way for everything, but if you learn a lot of your basics, it helps you out. You can embed audio files, so again, if you can get clips of the author saying something or somebody, if you have somebody who happens to know languages and you have record snippets of them, you can load it in your script, and you can basically embed audio files within your text, and when you're reading through your text, you can just tap on it. It'll play it, and again, you're saving yourself time in the studio by having this stuff right at your fingertips. Pseudonyms. The sooner the better for pseudonyms. Usually it's what we ask. Some people like to talk to their authors in their pseudonym because they really want to protect their name if they're doing a risky title, but the sooner the better because you want to reach out to the author pretty early. Before you start recording, you want to reach out to them. If you really want to reach out using your pseudonym, that's why it's great to read everything beforehand and then you know exactly what you're getting into, and you can plan everything from there. Some people don't mind working with their authors and just using the pseudonym on the title so it doesn't show up in searches online. Whatever is your preference is fine, but it at least helps if you do want to go by the pseudonym completely that that's not going to get broken along the line somewhere. For planning for issues, which will kill your deadlines and any goals that you may hit, technical issues, health issues, communication, regardless of what kind of issue it is, is really the best thing that you can do, whether you're working for a publisher, working for an author. If you run into an issue, let them know right away because whether they have expectations of a certain goal being met, we've found that usually they're fine if you think you're definitely going to miss a deadline. They're usually fine to adjust. If you've been coordinating with them, everybody's getting along and everything, they're willing to work with you a lot, we've found, to just make sure things get hit. The last thing anybody wants to do is you're two or three weeks past maybe something that they expected, a deadline, whether it's to listen or a final audio, and it's not there, they can't get in touch with you, you're totally radio silenced because you're all nervous and you don't want to upset anybody. That's the worst thing you could do, so being up front is really great. Technical issues, pre-planning. You could go either way about it. You don't have to ... Hardware failure, everybody has. A lot of our narrators that work at home studio, especially when they first got started, I told everybody, if you have a problem, call me. Everybody has my desk number. Quite a few people have my cell phone number. I would get calls weekends or nights. I would encourage them to do it because you can lose a lot of time by ... It doesn't even have to be major or catastrophic. It could be you accidentally turned your phantom power off and you're getting no audio and you could lose days of work because of that, whereas a simple phone call where if you know somebody, if you reach out, just like a go-to person that's always in your back pocket, something happens, give them a call, they may be able to fix your problem in a two-minute phone call. More major hardware is something that can't be fixed. Just have ... The more you pre-plan, the more you can just keep working. Same thing with software failure. Sometimes things don't like to behave well or if you update something and then it breaks something else. It's a nightmare for everybody, but again, if you have ... Whether it's the same person as the hardware, I tell the same people who were new getting into Pro Tools, if you're having an issue, give me a call, doesn't matter, day, night, weekend, call me up. It's probably something that can be fixed in a few minutes just by a little setting somewhere that maybe you're just not quite familiar with yet. It's great to make those connections with technical people and just to have them when you need them. A few uncontrollable issues, which actually pops up quite a bit. Construction around your building, within your building, neighbors, loud neighbors above you or below you. There's not too much you could do about it. Some people will record overnight. If you can have a plan in place, it all goes back to just pre-planning. Hopefully you never have to use it, but if you do, you're not going to kick yourself out of work for an indefinite amount of time while you just wait for a three-month construction project to go to finish up. Some people have gone over to friends, alternative locations. Maybe you have other narrators who live by you. What's their recording schedule like? Maybe you can record around their schedule and use their booth. We have people who have gone over other people's houses. Maybe they had a big failure, big construction project. Hey, let me use your booth for a couple weeks. Usually, if you have those friendships beforehand, again, it's just going to help you. You don't have to lose your mind just because something goes wrong. You can keep level-headed and just go on about your work, which nobody wants to be out of work just for a few things like a noisy neighbor. Health issues, nothing you can control, but there are kind of seasons that I've noticed go around. Everybody talks about cold season or allergy season. There are some people who every year, year after year, cold season hits. They're done for like two weeks until they get medicine in their body or it passes. It's a cycle that happens every year. If that happens to be you, think about that when you're taking titles or looking at deadlines, talking to your authors. Hey, I'm probably going to get a cold. It always happens. Build that into the time that you're planning for. Same thing with family. If you know you're going to be out of town for a while, let people know. Everybody usually will work with you. If you can be upfront with everything, again, you're not upsetting any relationships, especially when you're looking to get work in the future. People will want to keep coming back to you.