I’m one of those people who likes variety. I’m usually reading three different books on my Kindle at the same time, editing my next book, playing around with an idea for another book, and reading up on how to change one of my books into a screenplay. Now, I’ve decided to learn how to record my books for audio.
My background in this is nil. I have no speech training, have never taken an acting lesson, and I’m not that great with new software systems. However, having any one of my books made into an audio recording by someone else is very expensive. “Dancing In the Sand” is in audio and I just hired someone to narrate “Sworn to Forget.” It’s time to see if I can do this myself for my other four (soon to be five) books.
Apparently, audio books are very popular. I don’t listen to them because I like to read, and my commute to work was five minutes. But for those driving long distances or taking mass transit, audio books are the way to go. So I took a free seminar online from Derek Doepker on how to get started. I feared that buying the equipment and setting up a home studio would be considerably expensive, but it isn’t. He told us exactly what equipment we would need (microphone, pop filter and head phones) which I picked up on amazon prime day for a little over one hundred dollars. The software is Audacity which is free. My studio is a room off our bedroom, which is really a closet.
My equipment came last week and I took everything out of their boxes yesterday. After Derek’s free seminar, he encouraged us to buy his step-by-step how to seminar, called Audiobooks Made Easy, which I did. I started listening to it yesterday (after looking at my equipment and not knowing what to do with it) and learned how to set it up. I downloaded Audacity and played around with the basics, but was not comfortable with it. So today, I listened to more of Derek’s seminar and did a few test pages of my book. I learned how to edit those pages by removing noises, breaths, and errors.
I still have more to learn before I jump into my closet- I mean recording studio-to start this project in earnest. But by the end of this week, I plan to add “narrating my book” to my various pursuits.
Let me know if you read audiobooks, and if so, please share any tips that this new narrator could use. mimbalzano@aol.com
