Five tips for recording an emotion-packed audiobook

This week an interesting article about audiobooks is published in Italy’s weekly magazine “Starbene” and it was a real pleasure for me to help Lorenza G. to realize it by sharing my experience as a Vocal Coach. If you are interested in reading the article, entitled “This is the time for audiobooks”. If you want to read the full Interview, click on the magazine cover you’ll find below!

I have helped so many authors make their audiobooks that by now I think I know all the difficulties one can encounter and all the different excuses they create to justify an unsatisfactory result.

Today, hearing one’s own recorded voice is not uncommon. “Audio” messages fill our smartphones and yet, when you are about to record an audiobook, everyone is surprised that they don’t recognize themselves in the recorded voice.

There are those who blame the poor results on the technical side and start buying very expensive equipment and microphones, there are those who begin to hate their own voice and there are even those who, in order not to hear their own recorded voice, try to make an audiobook through synthesized voices.

Here are the top five tips that can help you save time and most importantly money to produce your best audiobook ever.

1) Audiobooks are a useful tool to give rest to our eyes, but for them to be enjoyable it is necessary that the narrator’s voice fills the listener’s imagination with emotions. Conveying emotions through the voice is not an easy task, especially when it comes to a book. One thing is to send a romantic message to one’s partner or an angry message to a friend, but it is quite different to color with emotions a sentence that in our mind appears perfect, but once recorded appears cold and colorless. The Inborn Voice method is still the only one able to help people reconnect with their emotions and hundreds of authors have publicly thanked me in their audiobooks!

2) The best book in the world, read with an unsuitable voice will appear a flop. A book with little content read with an intriguing voice will sound like a masterpiece. A voice that is not expressive and disconnected from the emotions can bore and disperse the listener’s interest. The narrative voice is much more important than the “cover” of a printed book: it is its soul.
Very often, authors who understand this point turn to professional voice actors because they believe that to get a good result they need someone else’s voice. In reality, they are wrong. No one in the world will ever feel more transport, passion and love than the author of the book himself who has tried with all his strength to bring characters or events to life. The best thing, therefore, is simply to learn to use one’s own voice in another way: the right way!

3) An actor’s voice is almost always connected to the same emotions. Setscript voices are a “human” version of speech synthesis. They limit vocal expressiveness and even bore the person who is recording the audiobook. A neutral voice would suffer from the same problem. The success of my work is that through the Inborn Voice method, I help people connect their voice to their deepest identity and authenticity. Anyone who has written a romance, mystery or noir scene knows exactly how to read it. The problem is not “knowing” how to read it, but getting the mouth and voice to respond to the commands. In other words, the intention is there, it’s the execution that’s missing. That’s why it’s necessary to train one’s own voice: an investment that will go beyond the audiobook, because it will also be used in public presentations, during interviews and, for many small authors, even to negotiate with large retailers.

4) Record only when you are in tune with the emotions to be conveyed. When your voice is connected to your emotions in an authentic way, it naturally resonates with what I call the listener’s Inborn Voice. If the current mood is one of anger, recording a love scene is not the greatest thing to do. If you wrote the book, you have the advantage of knowing where the emotion of anger might be most useful, thus recording the book “out of” sequence. It will then be easy to “reassemble” it in sequence!

5) Practice makes perfect. It’s not important that the voice be seemingly flawless, but that it be able to carry the right vibrations of emotions. Those who learn to use their voice with me achieve unimagined improvements, one step at a time. Those who start with “I hate my voice” have to go a long way to say “I have recorded a masterpiece”, but this does not mean waiting. It means commitment, study and practice. Only practice can lead to results. As a vocal coach, I can help you shorten the time, overcome the biggest barriers, but the work, the real work, is always done by the student!

For those who wish to learn more can find a lot of information on my website, in my book “the way of the voice“, in my Youtube channel or in my Patreon (where there are whole video lessons on the subject!).