Proof-listening before you publish
You would not publish the paperback without reading a proof copy. The audio edition needs the same step, and it is the one most self-published audiobooks skip.
It goes by several names — proof-listening, a QC pass, a listening check. It means one person listening to the finished audio at normal speed, start to finish, with the text of the book in front of them, marking everything that is wrong.
It is slow: an eight-hour audiobook takes considerably more than eight hours to check, because you stop, rewind and write things down. Treat that as production time, because that is what it is.
What you are listening for
Five categories, roughly in the order of how much damage each one does.
Words that differ from the text. Dropped words, added words, substituted words: "a" for "the", a plural made singular, a clause quietly gone. This is the most common fault by a wide margin, and it is close to invisible to the person who read it, because a narrator who substitutes a word almost always hears the word they meant to say. Only someone following the text catches it.
Mispronunciations. Character names, place names, invented words, anything from another language, and any term of art in a nonfiction book. A name pronounced two ways within one book is worse than a name pronounced wrongly but consistently, and both happen. Send a pronunciation list before recording starts — before the audition, in fact, as Finding and auditioning a narrator argues — then check against that list rather than against your memory of it.
Character voices that drift. A voice established in chapter two is subtly different by chapter nineteen. A long book is recorded across many sessions over weeks, so drift is a scheduling effect rather than carelessness, and it shows most on secondary characters who vanish for a hundred pages. The recording session is largely about keeping that from happening in the first place.
Audio faults. Mouth clicks, a breath left too loud, room tone that changes mid-chapter where two sessions were joined, a level jump between chapters, a distant siren, a chair. A listener wearing headphones on a quiet train hears all of it, and the automated check at upload hears some of it too — see Editing, mastering and hitting the spec.
Structural faults. A missing paragraph. A missing section. Chapters out of order. The same chapter delivered twice under two names. The wrong file entirely. These sound too obvious to happen, and they happen on any project with enough files in the folder — and a partial listen never finds them.
How to do it properly
At normal speed. Listening at 1.5x is how you miss a dropped word, and how you fail to notice a level is wrong, because everything sounds slightly unnatural at that speed anyway.
With the final text in front of you. Not the draft the narrator was sent, if anything changed since — the text the printed and digital editions actually carry. Otherwise you will log faults that are really late edits, and miss real ones. Follow it on paper if you can: the same trade-off set out in Proofing on screen or on paper applies here, and a page you can mark beats a file you have to click into.
In chunks you can concentrate through. Three quarters of an hour, then stop. Attention is the whole tool here, and five hours in one sitting is five hours where the last two found nothing.
Note a timestamp for every single fault. This decides whether your notes are usable. One line each: file or chapter, timestamp, what is heard, what it should be. "Ch 09, 12:41 — reads 'walked', text says 'waited'." An engineer acts on that in seconds. "Something sounds off near the start of chapter nine" costs them ten minutes of hunting, and you will be charged for those minutes.
Finish the whole book before anyone fixes anything. One consolidated list, one round of pickups. A half-corrected audiobook is how projects end up at four rounds.
In the tools. We do not make audio, and nothing here records or edits it. What the tools give you is the thing you listen against: one manuscript produces the print PDF and the EPUB together, so the text you check the recording against is the same text the other editions ship with. Start your book → · about the tools
Who should do it
Not the narrator. They cannot hear the gap between what is on the page and what they said; that is the same reason you stopped seeing your own typos around the fortieth pass. Some narrators and studios include a QC pass by a second person. Ask, in writing, whether yours does.
Ideally not you alone, if you narrated it. If you wrote the book and read it aloud — the route weighed up in Narrating it yourself, or hiring someone — you are the worst-placed person alive to hear it accurately. Pay someone, or trade the job with another author. If it has to be you, leave at least a week between finishing the recording and starting the listen.
What is worth fixing, and what is not
Every correction means a pickup: the narrator returns to a matched setup — same room, same microphone position, the reason Where to record, and what you need tells you to tape the floor — re-records the line, and an engineer drops it in so the seam is inaudible. That costs money and calendar time, so triage the list rather than making it exhaustive.
Worth a pickup. Anything that changes meaning: a wrong word, a missing line, a mispronounced character or place name, a sentence stressed so that the sense flips. Structural faults, always. Noise a listener would notice on a first pass.
Usually not worth it. A breath you caught on the fourth listen. A reading you would have phrased differently. A sentence stressed one word off from how you hear it in your head. That last is the trap: it feels like an error and it is a preference, and rewriting a performance to match the voice in your head is an unbounded budget.
The test is simple. Would a listener hearing this once, for the first time, notice? If not, leave it.
Agree the pickup terms in advance
Before recording starts, settle in writing — it belongs with the rest of the terms in Finding and auditioning a narrator — who pays for pickups arising from narrator error, who pays for changes you make to the text afterwards, how many rounds are included, and what turnaround to expect. Terms vary by narrator, studio and contract, and the time to find out is not after you have sent a list of ninety items.
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: Getting an audiobook into stores · More: Should you make an audiobook? · The proof checklist, front to back · Proofreading your own work, and when to stop