Finding and auditioning a narrator
Authors hire narrators the way they buy a service: collect names, compare rates, listen to a demo reel, pick the one who sounds professional. Every step of that is reasonable, and it produces the wrong voice often enough to be worth naming.
Hiring a narrator is casting. You are choosing the voice a reader will spend eight or ten hours alone with, and a voice that is good by any measure can still be wrong for your book. A reel proves someone can read; it does not tell you whether they can read this. Whether to make an audiobook at all is a separate decision, covered in Should you make an audiobook?, and whether to hire at all is settled in Narrating it yourself, or hiring someone. This page assumes you have decided to hire.
Where narrators are found
Audiobook marketplaces attached to distributors. Some audiobook distributors run a hiring marketplace alongside the publishing side: you post the book and narrators audition. The agreement and the payments run on the platform's terms rather than yours, so read them before you post.
Voice-talent sites. General marketplaces where voice actors take every kind of work: commercials, e-learning, games, audiobooks. The pool is larger and far less filtered, and a thirty-second read is a different skill from a ten-hour narration, so look for audiobook credits.
Narrator directories and professional associations. Narrators keep their own listings, and audiobook and voice associations in most countries publish member directories. Membership usually requires demonstrated experience — a floor, not a ranking.
Authors who write what you write. The best source, as with editors. A narrator who has done three books like yours already knows what your readers expect. Ask what it cost in weeks as well as money.
The audition is the whole game
Never hire from a reel: it is a narrator's best four minutes, edited by them, from books chosen by them. Ask for an audition from your own manuscript, and send every candidate the same passage so you are comparing readings rather than material.
Choose a passage that is genuinely hard. Authors send their favorite paragraph, the one that already works on the page. It is easy to read well and tells you almost nothing. Send something that can break:
- Dialogue between two characters of the same gender, with few speech tags. This is where narrators separate. Keeping two men apart in an argument, without either turning into a cartoon, is the craft.
- An emotional beat. Grief, fury, a confession. Underplayed it goes flat, overplayed it goes soapy, and you will hear at once which way a narrator errs.
- A page thick with names, invented words, or a language that is not yours.
Send the pronunciation guide before the audition, not after
Write the list first: invented names, place names, characters whose names have a chosen pronunciation, foreign words, technical terms, and anything a sensible person could say two ways. Spelled-out syllables are enough.
Sending it afterward wastes the audition and hides what you most wanted to test: whether the narrator reads the guide and uses it. Someone who returns your invented names correctly on the first take has told you how they will handle the other four hundred pages. Keep the list on your style sheet; the next book needs it too.
What to listen for
Pace against the book. A thriller read at a measured literary pace is a slow thriller. A quiet novel read briskly loses the pauses it was built on.
Characters distinguishable without being cartoonish. You should always know who is speaking. If you know because one of them is doing a funny voice, that is a fault, not a feature.
Your names, handled correctly, against the guide you sent.
Eight hours of it. The question that finally decides. Play the audition while you are doing something else, because that is how the book will be heard, and a voice that charms for ninety seconds can grate over an afternoon.
In the tools. Nothing here records, edits or narrates audio; we make no audiobook tools and do not sell narration. What we do is the print and ebook editions the audio is cut from, so the manuscript your narrator works from and the book a reader buys come out of one source file. Start your book → · about the tools
The two mistakes
Casting the voice you like instead of the voice the book needs. These come apart more often than authors expect. A warm, reassuring voice is lovely, and wrong for a novel about a liar.
Casting for the first chapter instead of the whole book. The narrator who opens brilliantly is not always the one who can play what your protagonist becomes by the end. If the book changes register, audition a passage from late in it too.
Agreeing terms
Do this in writing before anyone records. An email you have both replied to is enough.
- Scope in finished hours. Narration is quoted and scheduled by the length of the finished audiobook, not by hours worked or words in the file. Get that estimate written down; it sets cost and schedule, and it is the number How an audiobook earns its money back runs a break-even on.
- Who pays for pickups and corrections. Pickups are re-recorded lines, generated by the listening check described in Proof-listening before you publish. Agree how many rounds are included, and separate a narrator error from a change you made after approving the text; the second is normally yours.
- The delivery format and specification. Name the distributor you intend to publish through and require files meeting its current requirements — what the check actually measures is in Editing, mastering and hitting the spec. Do not write numbers into the agreement; specifications differ by distributor and change.
- The deadline, both ways. When you deliver the final manuscript, and when they deliver audio. Narrators book months ahead, and an author three weeks late loses the slot.
- How they are paid. Three models: a fee per finished hour paid up front; a royalty share, with no money up front and a share of what the edition earns; or a hybrid. Fees and shares vary by narrator, market and platform, so collect quotes rather than a number from a blog. Where a share is involved, what matters is how long the arrangement runs and whether you can end it — a share is usually tied to one platform, so it can decide your whole route to market before you have read Getting an audiobook into stores.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: The recording session · More: Should you make an audiobook? · Marketing an audiobook · Working with an editor without wasting the money · The style sheet: how a series stays consistent