The recording session
Recording is not reading aloud into a microphone until the book runs out. It is a production job with a craft of its own, and most of that craft exists to solve one problem: making days of separate sittings sound like one continuous performance by one person in one room.
Whether you are narrating your own book or sitting in on the sessions of someone you cast in Finding and auditioning a narrator, this is what those days contain.
Prepare the chapter before you record it
Mark the script. Mark the chapter like sheet music: where you breathe, which word carries the weight, where a new speaker starts and who it is. Marks in the margin are faster to follow than memory, and they stop you discovering the emphasis halfway through a sentence you have already committed to.
Read the chapter aloud once before you record it. This is the single biggest saving in the whole process. Cold reading is where most retakes come from — the sentence that will not fit in one breath, the clause that only parses on the page, the character name you have been pronouncing two ways without noticing. Find those with the microphone off.
Keep a pronunciation list as you go. Place names, invented words, anything you had to decide about. You will need the same answer in chapter nineteen, and again in the next book — and whoever checks the finished audio in Proof-listening before you publish checks it against that list rather than against anybody's memory.
In the Interior Formatter. If you are reading from your own pages, set a Large Print edition of the book to read from — 6 × 9, 16 pt, ragged right, in Luciole, a face drawn for low-vision readers. Large type at arm's length in dim light saves you the stumbles that come from squinting, and page turns are quieter than scrolling. Start your book → · about the Interior Formatter
Punch and roll
When you fumble a line, you do not sigh, mark it and carry on. You stop, back the recording up to the start of the previous sentence, and record over the mistake from there, picking up the pitch and pace you were already using.
That is punch and roll, and every recording program worth using supports it in some form. It is the difference between an edit measured in hours and one measured in days, because the alternative is a take full of false starts that somebody — probably you — has to find and cut later, matching tone across each join long after the energy of the day is gone. Do it as you go: the correction is easier while the voice you are matching is still in your mouth.
Consistency is the hidden problem
Your voice is not the same instrument in the morning as it is late in the afternoon, and it changes again when you are tired, dehydrated, or have not spoken to anyone yet that day. A listener will not name any of this, but they hear the seam when chapter four was recorded fresh and chapter five at the end of a long evening.
The fixes are dull and they work:
- Record at the same time of day, every day, for the whole book.
- Keep sessions to a length you can sustain rather than the length you wish you could. A shorter session you can repeat tomorrow beats a heroic one that costs you the next two days.
- Note where you stopped — chapter, page, the exact line — before you leave the room.
- Listen to the last minute of yesterday before you record a word today. It resets pace and pitch faster than any warm-up.
- Change nothing in the room. Microphone position, chair, distance, what you are wearing over your shoulders. The room is part of the recording, which is why Where to record, and what you need has you mark the floor with tape on day one.
Character voices: fewer and smaller than you think
The instinct is accents, and the instinct is wrong. Accents are hard to hold for hours, easy to drift, and unforgiving when they slip mid-scene.
Separate characters by pace, pitch and energy instead — one speaks a little faster, one a little lower, one leaves a beat before answering. Those differences survive a long day, and they are enough; in a scene with two speakers, the tags and the rhythm do most of the work anyway.
Write every voice down as you invent it: the character, what you did, and a line of their dialogue you can read back as a reference. That list is what makes book two match book one.
Your body is the equipment
Water, at room temperature, within reach. Cold water tightens the throat.
No dairy immediately before a session. It thickens everything and you will hear it.
Take breaks before you need them. Stand up, stop talking, drink something.
Stop when your voice tires. A tired voice does not sound like a rested voice, so pushing through does not buy you a chapter — it buys you a chapter you will re-record.
The two noises that ruin takes
Stomach rumble. A microphone that close picks up a hungry stomach clearly. Eat something small beforehand rather than recording on an empty one.
Mouth clicks. Dry mouth, mostly. Sip water often, keep the room from getting too warm, and avoid sugary drinks, which make it worse. Some readers swear by a bite of apple. Clicks are removable in the edit, one at a time, forever, which is a good reason to prevent them.
Make your mistakes findable
When something goes wrong and you are not punching it in immediately — a siren outside, a door, a line you want to retry later — clap once, loudly, before you restart.
A clap is a tall vertical spike in the waveform. Whoever edits the file can see it from a zoomed-out view without listening to anything, which turns a hunt into a glance. Say what happened out loud too, so the note is in the recording.
The rule
All of this is one idea applied to different problems: fix it in the room, not in the edit. The room is where you have the voice, the pace and the context. The edit is where you have none of them.
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: Editing, mastering and hitting the spec · More: Where to record, and what you need · Should you make an audiobook? · Writing by dictation · The series bible, and what it saves you