Undercover: How audiobooks bring a story to life. An illustration shows a hot cup of coffee next to a smartphone. The phone is playing Nerdette’s Undercover series on earbuds.
Laura Vergara / WBEZ
Undercover: How audiobooks bring a story to life. An illustration shows a hot cup of coffee next to a smartphone. The phone is playing Nerdette’s Undercover series on earbuds.
Laura Vergara / WBEZ

Last week in our special series “Undercover,” we heard about the thorny business of book blurbs. Today, we are talking all about the audiobook.

It can be such a pleasure when a great narrator just reads you a story. It’s the perfect way to interact with a book when you can’t actually sit down and read, like when you’re walking the dog or doing dishes or sitting in terrible traffic. They’re perfect for multitasking, which is great. They’re also just really fun to listen to.

The idea of an audiobook is super simple. You download it from the library or another app, you press play and, magically, a voice in your headphones or on your car speakers reads out loud to you. No stumbles, no pauses to sip a glass of water, no shuffle of pages turning.

There’s something really magical about that, something that appeals to our most elemental selves.

“When we’re born, we are already wired to respond to the sound of our mother’s voice,” says seasoned audiobook narrator Robin Miles.

“It’s like the family or the tribe has gathered around a fire at night, and a storyteller is telling the story,” author Mohsin Hamid says. “In a sense, audiobooks take us back to that world before the novel.”

Do you know those “How it’s made” videos that show you how hard candy or soda cans or crayons are made in the bowels of a factory? Today, we’re going to do something similar. Except we’ll be following the life cycle of an audiobook from author to producer to narrator … to the sounds coming out of your earbuds.

The history of the audiobook is deeply rooted in the history of disability justice in the United States. In 1932, the American Federation for the Blind began making what was then known as “talking books.”

I didn’t know this history, but it didn’t totally surprise me. I first learned about books on tape from my legally blind Opa, my dad’s dad, who’d get them mailed to him from the Library of Congress.

Fast forward to today, and the audiobook business is thriving. According to the audiobook company Libro, 2022 was the tenth straight year of double-digit growth in audiobook sales. In 2021, revenue increased by 25% over the year before — that’s more than $1.5 billion. Plus, publishers are making more audiobooks than ever.

A person with a big role in your favorite audiobooks, but whose voice you’ll never actually hear is the producer. Sarah Jaffe, an executive producer at Penguin Random House audio, says she’s been explaining what she does to her parents for the last 12 years.

“Mostly, I think my 10 year old self would be thrilled. I get paid to read books all day and talk to really brilliant authors, and then do the dream casting that I think we all do in our heads. And then I get to find and hire that voice.”

One of my favorite voices is Kevin R. Free, who describes himself as a multi-hyphenate artist who has been wearing the audiobook narrator hat since 2000.

Among many other things, he narrates Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, which is a much more delightful series than the title may suggest.

For Kevin, audiobook narration wasn’t originally a career path he had considered. “I grew up wanting to be an actor, and that meant theater, and then eventually TV, and then movies, and then you know, death,” Kevin says.

It took him a while to fully embrace narration as the actual goal, but he says it’s the only time he gets to use all of his talents as an actor. “When I’m doing an audiobook, I get to play a leading man. It’s exciting,” Kevin says.

Another one of my favorite readers is Robin Miles. I first heard her when she brought N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy to life. She’s also narrated nonfiction like Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, or fiction like Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Which is just to say that she has immense range.

Both Robin and Kevin said they don’t read the entire book before agreeing to voice it. Which may seem risky, but does make sense in terms of how long it can take to read a book before even deciding to take a job.

“A lot of times, I don’t know what the book is going to be about, except for the description that is sent to me by a publisher,” Kevin says.

If they accept the gig, then they start reading. Sometimes Robin’s husband helps her out with that part. He’s Robin’s production manager and a speed reader. If Robin is tight on time, she has some tricks too. “What I’ve discovered is that most mainstream books, right around page 80, you’re going to find like the first significant incident,” Robin says.

As the narrators are reading, they’re taking a lot of notes. Some are probably pretty obvious — names they don’t know how to pronounce, or pivotal scenes with a big emotional moment.

But what really blew my mind to think about was how narrators bring characters to life with different voices. Sometimes it’s obvious – sometimes the book mentions an accent specifically. In Robin’s case, she has voiced Cockney-accented pirates, grumpy Norwegians, and even the raspy voice of blues singer Howlin’ Wolf.

Sometimes, though, a character’s characteristics are a lot more subtle. For example, what might a really tall woman named Fran sound like? Robin has a whole process of figuring it out.

She imagines that Fran would literally have to talk down to people most of the time. So she tips her chin down and reads while looking downward. “All of a sudden, when I did that, it compressed my voice box just a little bit, and that’s Fran,” Robin says.

As Robin and Kevin mentioned, they’re both professional actors. But sometimes there’s another sort of person who narrates an audiobook, too — the author themself.

With non-fiction, especially memoir, it’s pretty common for the writer to be the narrator, whether or not they have a performance background.

“I never thought about somebody else narrating my – well, I mean, I would like to hear what Michael Fassbender would do with the text,” says Maeve Higgins. She’s a comedian, frequent guest on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and the author of two books, Maeve in America, and Tell Everyone On This Train I Love Them.

Maeve says she never considered having someone else narrate her work. “Not to be crass, you also get paid. It’s a job. So, if you do it, then you get the money.”

What’s less common, but still happens now and then, is for a fiction writer to narrate their own book. Mohsin Hamid is the author of five novels and a collection of essays, all of which he has narrated.

He says narrating his own words made the most sense to him, too, because he writes for the ear in the first place. “I probably spend more time in my study pacing around, reading my manuscripts out loud, than actually typing into my computer.”

Whether you’re a professional actor or someone who talks to yourself in your study, the recording process itself is pretty similar.

Based on how many pages the book is, you can figure out how long it will take to record the text. Generally, it takes about twice as long as the final product, which means if you’re listening to a 10-hour audiobook, that probably took about 20 hours in the studio. Though of course, some narrators are faster than others.

Once the voices are hired and the studio time is booked, the narrators show up ready for a full eight hour day of reading.

Kevin R Free. Kevin sits behind a mic and wears headphones in a recording studio. A cup of coffee is buy his side.
“When I’m doing an audiobook, I get to play a leading man. It’s exciting,” Kevin says. Kevin R. Free
To prepare, Robin Miles and Kevin R. Free both have a regimen of vocal warmups that includes blowing their lips and doing deep breathing exercises.

After all that is done, next comes the reading. While the narrator reads in a studio, a director listens in. Their role is to help the narrator understand and interpret the text to bring it to life.

Mohsin Hamid imagines the director as a conductor in an orchestra who’s “telling you when to bring up the woodwinds and when to reduce the strings.”

Simone Barros is an audiobook director. She says her role is to be the eyes and ears for the producer. She also thinks of narrating as a sort of instrumentation.

“I consider the audiobook an actor’s medium, because sometimes you’re voicing several characters. And keeping those characters in a certain sound and tone and genre is their instrument alone,” Simone says.

“For directing, it’s great to be a support to them. And to catch all of the fine details that you’re gonna miss when you’re in the moment when bringing a character to life.”

Once the narrator has gotten through the whole text and the director has helped them do it, the audio goes off to editors.

Editors are the ones who take those twenty hours of audio, and take out all of the weird mouth sounds and stutters.

One of the last steps of the process is called a “QC listen,” which stands for quality control. A producer listens to the final draft to make sure all of the audio is clean before it gets sent out to audiobook websites.

A QC listen is something we do with podcasts, too, to make sure nothing is out of place and it all sounds how it’s supposed to. It’s one thing to do that for a thirty-minute podcast episode, but it’s a way different job for a ten-hour audiobook. “It can be painful,” Simone says.

And that, more or less, is it! It takes a village to get the audio version of a book out into the world.

Everyone we talked to about making audiobooks had a certain reverence for the process, from the micro-level with double checking pronunciation, to a more 20,000 foot view, reflecting on the importance of the medium.

“So much of why we read is to be transported into someone else’s life,” Sarah says. “I think audio enhances that, and I think it brings the text to life in a way that’s very visceral.”

And as both a narrator and a fan of audiobooks in general, Maeve Higgins totally agrees. “I still know lots of people who are like, ‘Oh, audiobooks are not the same as reading a book.’” Maeve says. “But my poor brain is so frazzled from the last, I don’t know, just being alive, I’m happy for someone to take on a little bit of the labor.”

Because in the end, what’s better than having someone tell you a story?

Undercover: How audiobooks bring a story to life. An illustration shows a hot cup of coffee next to a smartphone. The phone is playing Nerdette’s Undercover series on earbuds.
Laura Vergara / WBEZ
Undercover: How audiobooks bring a story to life. An illustration shows a hot cup of coffee next to a smartphone. The phone is playing Nerdette’s Undercover series on earbuds.
Laura Vergara / WBEZ

Last week in our special series “Undercover,” we heard about the thorny business of book blurbs. Today, we are talking all about the audiobook.

It can be such a pleasure when a great narrator just reads you a story. It’s the perfect way to interact with a book when you can’t actually sit down and read, like when you’re walking the dog or doing dishes or sitting in terrible traffic. They’re perfect for multitasking, which is great. They’re also just really fun to listen to.

The idea of an audiobook is super simple. You download it from the library or another app, you press play and, magically, a voice in your headphones or on your car speakers reads out loud to you. No stumbles, no pauses to sip a glass of water, no shuffle of pages turning.

There’s something really magical about that, something that appeals to our most elemental selves.

“When we’re born, we are already wired to respond to the sound of our mother’s voice,” says seasoned audiobook narrator Robin Miles.

“It’s like the family or the tribe has gathered around a fire at night, and a storyteller is telling the story,” author Mohsin Hamid says. “In a sense, audiobooks take us back to that world before the novel.”

Do you know those “How it’s made” videos that show you how hard candy or soda cans or crayons are made in the bowels of a factory? Today, we’re going to do something similar. Except we’ll be following the life cycle of an audiobook from author to producer to narrator … to the sounds coming out of your earbuds.

The history of the audiobook is deeply rooted in the history of disability justice in the United States. In 1932, the American Federation for the Blind began making what was then known as “talking books.”

I didn’t know this history, but it didn’t totally surprise me. I first learned about books on tape from my legally blind Opa, my dad’s dad, who’d get them mailed to him from the Library of Congress.

Fast forward to today, and the audiobook business is thriving. According to the audiobook company Libro, 2022 was the tenth straight year of double-digit growth in audiobook sales. In 2021, revenue increased by 25% over the year before — that’s more than $1.5 billion. Plus, publishers are making more audiobooks than ever.

A person with a big role in your favorite audiobooks, but whose voice you’ll never actually hear is the producer. Sarah Jaffe, an executive producer at Penguin Random House audio, says she’s been explaining what she does to her parents for the last 12 years.

“Mostly, I think my 10 year old self would be thrilled. I get paid to read books all day and talk to really brilliant authors, and then do the dream casting that I think we all do in our heads. And then I get to find and hire that voice.”

One of my favorite voices is Kevin R. Free, who describes himself as a multi-hyphenate artist who has been wearing the audiobook narrator hat since 2000.

Among many other things, he narrates Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, which is a much more delightful series than the title may suggest.

For Kevin, audiobook narration wasn’t originally a career path he had considered. “I grew up wanting to be an actor, and that meant theater, and then eventually TV, and then movies, and then you know, death,” Kevin says.

It took him a while to fully embrace narration as the actual goal, but he says it’s the only time he gets to use all of his talents as an actor. “When I’m doing an audiobook, I get to play a leading man. It’s exciting,” Kevin says.

Another one of my favorite readers is Robin Miles. I first heard her when she brought N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy to life. She’s also narrated nonfiction like Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, or fiction like Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Which is just to say that she has immense range.

Both Robin and Kevin said they don’t read the entire book before agreeing to voice it. Which may seem risky, but does make sense in terms of how long it can take to read a book before even deciding to take a job.

“A lot of times, I don’t know what the book is going to be about, except for the description that is sent to me by a publisher,” Kevin says.

If they accept the gig, then they start reading. Sometimes Robin’s husband helps her out with that part. He’s Robin’s production manager and a speed reader. If Robin is tight on time, she has some tricks too. “What I’ve discovered is that most mainstream books, right around page 80, you’re going to find like the first significant incident,” Robin says.

As the narrators are reading, they’re taking a lot of notes. Some are probably pretty obvious — names they don’t know how to pronounce, or pivotal scenes with a big emotional moment.

But what really blew my mind to think about was how narrators bring characters to life with different voices. Sometimes it’s obvious – sometimes the book mentions an accent specifically. In Robin’s case, she has voiced Cockney-accented pirates, grumpy Norwegians, and even the raspy voice of blues singer Howlin’ Wolf.

Sometimes, though, a character’s characteristics are a lot more subtle. For example, what might a really tall woman named Fran sound like? Robin has a whole process of figuring it out.

She imagines that Fran would literally have to talk down to people most of the time. So she tips her chin down and reads while looking downward. “All of a sudden, when I did that, it compressed my voice box just a little bit, and that’s Fran,” Robin says.

As Robin and Kevin mentioned, they’re both professional actors. But sometimes there’s another sort of person who narrates an audiobook, too — the author themself.

With non-fiction, especially memoir, it’s pretty common for the writer to be the narrator, whether or not they have a performance background.

“I never thought about somebody else narrating my – well, I mean, I would like to hear what Michael Fassbender would do with the text,” says Maeve Higgins. She’s a comedian, frequent guest on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and the author of two books, Maeve in America, and Tell Everyone On This Train I Love Them.

Maeve says she never considered having someone else narrate her work. “Not to be crass, you also get paid. It’s a job. So, if you do it, then you get the money.”

What’s less common, but still happens now and then, is for a fiction writer to narrate their own book. Mohsin Hamid is the author of five novels and a collection of essays, all of which he has narrated.

He says narrating his own words made the most sense to him, too, because he writes for the ear in the first place. “I probably spend more time in my study pacing around, reading my manuscripts out loud, than actually typing into my computer.”

Whether you’re a professional actor or someone who talks to yourself in your study, the recording process itself is pretty similar.

Based on how many pages the book is, you can figure out how long it will take to record the text. Generally, it takes about twice as long as the final product, which means if you’re listening to a 10-hour audiobook, that probably took about 20 hours in the studio. Though of course, some narrators are faster than others.

Once the voices are hired and the studio time is booked, the narrators show up ready for a full eight hour day of reading.

Kevin R Free. Kevin sits behind a mic and wears headphones in a recording studio. A cup of coffee is buy his side.
“When I’m doing an audiobook, I get to play a leading man. It’s exciting,” Kevin says. Kevin R. Free
To prepare, Robin Miles and Kevin R. Free both have a regimen of vocal warmups that includes blowing their lips and doing deep breathing exercises.

After all that is done, next comes the reading. While the narrator reads in a studio, a director listens in. Their role is to help the narrator understand and interpret the text to bring it to life.

Mohsin Hamid imagines the director as a conductor in an orchestra who’s “telling you when to bring up the woodwinds and when to reduce the strings.”

Simone Barros is an audiobook director. She says her role is to be the eyes and ears for the producer. She also thinks of narrating as a sort of instrumentation.

“I consider the audiobook an actor’s medium, because sometimes you’re voicing several characters. And keeping those characters in a certain sound and tone and genre is their instrument alone,” Simone says.

“For directing, it’s great to be a support to them. And to catch all of the fine details that you’re gonna miss when you’re in the moment when bringing a character to life.”

Once the narrator has gotten through the whole text and the director has helped them do it, the audio goes off to editors.

Editors are the ones who take those twenty hours of audio, and take out all of the weird mouth sounds and stutters.

One of the last steps of the process is called a “QC listen,” which stands for quality control. A producer listens to the final draft to make sure all of the audio is clean before it gets sent out to audiobook websites.

A QC listen is something we do with podcasts, too, to make sure nothing is out of place and it all sounds how it’s supposed to. It’s one thing to do that for a thirty-minute podcast episode, but it’s a way different job for a ten-hour audiobook. “It can be painful,” Simone says.

And that, more or less, is it! It takes a village to get the audio version of a book out into the world.

Everyone we talked to about making audiobooks had a certain reverence for the process, from the micro-level with double checking pronunciation, to a more 20,000 foot view, reflecting on the importance of the medium.

“So much of why we read is to be transported into someone else’s life,” Sarah says. “I think audio enhances that, and I think it brings the text to life in a way that’s very visceral.”

And as both a narrator and a fan of audiobooks in general, Maeve Higgins totally agrees. “I still know lots of people who are like, ‘Oh, audiobooks are not the same as reading a book.’” Maeve says. “But my poor brain is so frazzled from the last, I don’t know, just being alive, I’m happy for someone to take on a little bit of the labor.”

Because in the end, what’s better than having someone tell you a story?