Where to record, and what you need
You have decided to narrate it yourself — and if you have not, Narrating it yourself, or hiring someone has a twenty-minute test that settles it before you spend anything. The first purchase most authors make is a microphone, and it is the wrong first move — not because microphones do not matter, but because the room matters more, and the room is the part nobody sells you.
The room beats the microphone
An expensive microphone in a hard, reflective room sounds worse than a modest one in a treated space. A good microphone is more sensitive, so it picks up more of the room, and the room is what is wrong. You cannot remove reflections afterward; no processing takes a bathroom back out of a voice.
This is not an aesthetic point. Distributors reject audiobook files for measured faults — room echo and noise floor among them — and never for the brand of microphone. Spend on the space first and the microphone second.
What "treated" means, and what it costs
Treatment and soundproofing are different jobs. Soundproofing keeps outside sound out, and means mass, construction and real money. Treatment stops your own voice bouncing off surfaces and arriving back at the microphone a fraction of a second late, which listeners hear as boxy, hollow or distant. It is cheap and often free.
What you want is soft, irregular surfaces close around you, and no two hard parallel surfaces facing each other.
- A closet full of clothes is the cliché because it works: hanging fabric absorbs, the clothes are irregular, and nothing travels far.
- Blankets and duvets on stands, in a rough three-sided box around where you sit, with one over the top if you can manage it.
- A rug on the floor, and something soft behind the microphone as well as behind you.
- Not a kitchen, a bathroom, an empty spare room, or anywhere with a hard floor and bare facing walls.
Clap your hands once and listen to the tail. If a ring or a slap comes back, add fabric and clap again. You are aiming for a clap that sounds dead and slightly disappointing.
Hunt the noise before you record, not after
Noise floor is the level of the quiet parts, and a recording that sounds fine on laptop speakers can still fail on measurement. Almost all of it is findable in advance, with the microphone running and headphones on.
The usual suspects: the refrigerator compressor cycling, air conditioning or heating, plumbing, traffic, a flight path with a rhythm to it, neighbors, your own laptop fan spinning up during a long take, and the chair that creaks every time you lean into a line.
Record two minutes of silence, turn it up loud, and listen to all of it. Then fix what you found: unplug the fridge and put your keys inside it so you remember to plug it back in, turn the heating off, move the computer as far from the microphone as the cable allows, and find a chair that does not speak. Record at the quietest hour your life permits, usually early morning.
In the tools. Nothing here records audio, measures a noise floor, or makes an audiobook — we do not build audio tools. What we do is the print and ebook editions alongside it, so the text you read from and the book you sell stay one project rather than three drifting copies. Start your book → · about the tools
Equipment, by category
Every category below has good options at several prices, and the choice matters far less than the room.
- A microphone. A large-diaphragm condenser or a good dynamic. A condenser captures more detail and more of the room, the right trade in a treated space. A dynamic hears less room and is safer in a space you cannot fully tame.
- An interface, or a USB microphone. A USB microphone plugs straight into the computer and is one fewer thing to understand. An interface plus a separate microphone gives better preamps and lets you change one part later. Either is a legitimate start.
- A pop filter. The cheapest thing here and the one that saves the most editing, because plosives — the burst of air on P and B — are hard to repair and easy to prevent.
- A stand, not the desk. A microphone on a desk picks up every tap and bump through the surface; a floor stand or boom arm isolates it.
- Headphones, for checking rather than for monitoring. Closed-back, so nothing leaks into the microphone. Listening to yourself live changes how you read, and not for the better. Use them to check a take and to hunt noise, then take them off and perform.
The technical targets are your distributor's
There are real numbers — loudness, peak level, noise floor, file format, sample rate, and how much silence sits at the head and tail of each file. They are not the same at every distributor, and they change.
So read your distributor's current specification sheet before you record a word — not a blog post, and not this page. The check is automated and the outcome is binary: the file passes, or it is rejected until you fix it, and Editing, mastering and hitting the spec goes through what each measurement means and why room noise is the fault that cannot be fixed afterward. Knowing the targets first also tells you what to listen for in a test recording, which is the difference between finding a problem in an afternoon and finding it after narrating the whole book.
Set up your body, not just the gear
Script at eye height. Reading down at a desk or a tablet compresses your throat, and you can hear it. Put the text on a stand at eye level, and turn off anything on screen that can make a sound or move.
Water at room temperature. Cold tightens the throat, and dairy and sugar make mouth noise worse. Keep it within reach so you are not leaving the spot.
Mark your spot. Tape on the floor for the chair and the stand, and a note of the microphone height and distance. Recording a book takes weeks, and a listener notices when chapter eleven sounds like a different room than chapter ten. Returning to the same position tomorrow is what makes you sound like the same person — that discipline, and the rest of what a recording day contains, is The recording session.
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: How an audiobook actually gets made · Should you make an audiobook? · Writing by dictation · Proofreading your own work, and when to stop