It’s National Novel Writing Month, and since my area of expertise is in audiobooks, I thought I’d give you authors some things to keep in mind in case you decide to go full publication on your WIP. If you are an avid audiobook listener, you may already be aware of some of these, but if not, here are 6 tips that can help your novel become a great audiobook:

1. Don’t write dialogue for characters whose identity is a mystery, or if you do, make sure you do it in a way that doesn’t spoil the secret. For instance, if the murderer is the only one in the book with a Scottish accent, the narrator will have to do that accent whenever they speak. If the mysterious killer is calling the main character and leaving scary voice messages, the narrator has to stay true to the character and will inadvertently reveal the murderer.  

2. Get your books edited. I recently attended a writing panel with a best selling author who said you need three different types of editors. This is obviously important so your book will be well received by readers, but speaking as a narrator, the one that really matters to me is a copy editor or a proofreader- preferably both. Mistakes really stand out when they are spoken, and most narrators don’t want to have to deal with a script that isn’t ready for audio, and they may turn down the project after reading the manuscript if it contains too many errors. Don’t rely solely on an AI grammar check. It will miss a lot and have many false positives. And don’t put the burden on your beta readers. Even if they do catch grammatical and spelling errors, if they aren’t being paid, they probably won’t take the time to notate them all. 

3. Make sure that dialogue sounds like dialogue. Unlike in narrative text, sentences don’t need to be complete, and contractions are essential to making the dialogue sound conversational. It isn’t as important when people are reading your work in their heads. Many readers skim and will probably read words as if they are contracted anyway. An exception to using contractions is when you have a posh character who never uses them. 

4. Use all the commas. If punctuation guidelines are hard to remember, read the sentence out loud. Do you need to pause in a certain place for the sentence to make sense as you read it? You probably need punctuation there. I sometimes run my blog posts through a text to speech app in order to catch missing punctuation. A robot, no matter how advanced, won’t understand your intended meaning. It just reads the words on the page. If it runs straight through the sentence and it sounds as though the “reader” misinterpreted what you were trying to say, you might be missing a comma. 

5. If budget is a concern, be aware that multiple points of view may require multiple narrators, especially if the book is written in first person. The actor’s union (SAG-AFTRA) recently started requiring extra payment for most dual or multi-narrator (multiple POV)  projects so that narrators can be compensated for the time spent reading and prepping the book before recording, since their final pay will only be based on the actual recorded time of their own voice in the audiobook. This means that for each character point of view in your book, you may have to pay an extra $100 flat fee. The idea isn’t new, since many production houses have been using this rule for awhile, but now the union is requiring it under their contracts. Multiple narrators can also increase the cost of post-production. 

6. And most importantly, use dialogue tags sparingly! A book reader will quickly learn to skim past the “he said/ she saids”, but too many of them can ruin the experience for an audiobook listener. I have given up on listening to a series before finishing book one because of too many instances of “Sara said”, or “Jack asked”. 

Thanks for reading!
Rebecca H. Lee
Audiobook Narrator

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