Creating an audiobook is hard work. Maybe harder than writing, but it’s similar, too, in that the work must go through several revision cycles. You can simply listen to a recording to catch errors, or you can listen and follow along in the manuscript or the book. But neither is a guarantee you’ll catch all of the audio flubs. As with a book manuscript, you’ll need to review it again and again. Believe me.
So it wasn’t until I was listening to the sixth audio revision of my latest novel Anarchy that I noticed a particular character’s voiceover just wasn’t quite good enough. The character was Miss Caitlin Dugan in Chapter 7. (By the bye, that chapter is entitled “A Reading at the Fictional Cafe, a doubly fictional coffee house in New York City, which Caitlin manages.) To make matters more complicated, Caitlin is from County Clare, Ireland, with an accent (I imagined) as thick as Guinness stout.
So thank heavens I found Ana Clements, a voiceover artist and narrator of many works long and short. She lives in the U.K. and was quite familiar with the County Clare accent. Ana did a masterful job of creating the persona of Caitlin. I was so impressed with Ana’s skills that I asked her to do an interview with us, which we conducted on Zoom, and here it is.
I’ll not get into anything instructional about creating audiobooks here so you can spend the next 30 minutes enjoying Ana’s stories. But if you have questions about my experiences – this is my fifth book-to-audio – please write me in the Comments section below. And my novel, Anarchy, in which Ana appears, should be up on Audible within a week. ~ Jack
