An Audiobook In the Making

My first thought upon entering CDM Studios on 9th Avenue was that there’d have to be an Orson Welles moment. You know, one where the producer cuts in on the voice-over talent one time too many and gets reamed out for daring to correct the enunciation of peas. Fortunately, nothing of the sort took place, and when I made reference to Welles’ infamous meltdown to the Random House Audio crew, which included Director of Marketing & Publicity Amanda D’Acierno, Director of Master Recording Daniel Zitt and Marketing Manager Doug Hirn – only on day four of his new job — some of them immediately got the joke and others were nice enough to go along with it.

We were all gathered to watch Jonathan Lethem record a chunk of the audiobook version of his new novel, YOU DON’T LOVE ME YET, which Doubleday releases in March. For a brief excerpt of the audiobook, check out this exclusive MP3 made available here by RH Audio.

Lethem already spent all day Wednesday going through the first half of the book, and was well on track to finish things up by 5 PM yesterday (not just he had to get to his semi-regular poker game afterwards.) Though he had recorded portions of the audiobook versions of his last two books (respectively, the essay collection THE DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST and the short story collection MEN AND CARTOONS) this was the first time Lethem recorded one of his full-length works in its entirety. It was strange, he commented during a brief break from recording, because normally he read several excerpts of a particular book “to death” while on tour, but never the whole thing. But if anything (and confirmed by Zitt as well as Lethem’s longtime audiobook executive producer, Jacob Bronstein) Lethem seemed wholly comfortable with the material, investing key turns of phrase with the appropriate offbeat humor, sharp observation or key inflection, as necessary. At one point, he laughed during one of the sentences, then stopped, figuring out would be cut. Bronstein interjected that the laugh actually sounded appropriate, to which Lethem made reference to a similar instance when Bob Dylan laughed on a recording at it was kept in. (In the end, Lethem was asked to repeat the line.)

For those who, like me, had never seen an audiobook in action, it went pretty much like you’d expect a recording session to go: Lethem sat in an enclosed booth, visible to us via a one-way mirror but able to concentrate on reading necessary passages. Bronstein sat at a desk with a large-type format of the manuscript, interrupting Lethem as necessary if a flub took place or if extra noise cut in on the recording. Meanwhile, one of CDM’s own sound engineers monitored the level of sound, but the feed remained raw: any mastering or editing would take place after the fact. A general rule is that three hours of recording time equals one hour of an audiobook, which made most of us drop our jaws when Zitt bring up the unabridged version of Bill Clinton’s MY LIFE – all 67 hours of it (a project that RH Audio didn’t work on, but they did have the abridged version.)

After about 90 minutes, D’Acierno, Zitt, Hirn and I took our leave, and on the walk back I peppered them with questions about working in the audiobook world. One thing that surprised me was the quick production turnaround time. Galleys of YOU DON’T LOVE ME YET are already circulating (and prepub reviews are available) but the audiobook is only being recorded now. How could that be? Turns out that audio can be processed very quickly to produce professional quality product, at lesser cost than a book manuscript. Most of the time, anyway; Zitt described the making of WORLD WAR Z’s audiobook, which made use of so much voice-over talent (many of them working for scale) that recording took two months. As for print runs, Zitt said that the variation is so great from audiobook to audiobook he couldn’t pin down a ballpark number.

Eavesdropping on Lethem’s audio session brought several realizations: first (as I suspected) it’s damn hard work to record an audiobook, but it’s also worth it for writers to invest some of their time in learning more about the process, even if reading isn’t (or shouldn’t be) their strongest suit. Second, that most people working on the audio side of publishing were book people first, audio geeks second. Will the future bring a reversal, where passionate audiophiles decide to corner the publishing market en masse because they happen to have a real love for books? Maybe – but only if the career option is made available to them. With that sector growing where others stagnate, I don’t see why not…

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