Anthony Camber

I’m going to create an audiobook for Unstable Orbits.

First of all let me empty a can of highly flammable caveats on that: I’m going to attempt to make an audiobook for Unstable Orbits. I’ve never done this kind of thing before and there’s a fair chance I’ll make a five-star hash of the whole kaboodle.

No AI. No hired-in narrator. My own voice.

I’m buying a decent microphone. I’ll use free software to record, enhance, edit and export the audio, and this will all take some time to blunder through so don’t hold your breath.

How long will it take, exactly?

I’m not sure. Let’s try to find out.

Noted audiobook flogger Audible apparently expects narration at ~155 words per minute, on average.

ENGAGE THE MATHULATOR!

93,400 words divided by 155 words/minute ≅ 603 minutes, or about 10 hours at 1x playback speed.

One narrator suggests that the production/blundering phase — recording, enhancing, editing — takes about six times the finished number of hours. According to that narrator it breaks down like this:

• Recording: 2 hours per finished hour
• Editing: 3 hours per finished hour
• Proofing: 1.2 hours per finished hour

Those numbers seem in the right ballpark to me. Recording involves setup and teardown faff, and reviews and retakes. Editing can be incredibly fiddly, with EQ and normalisation and gates and compression and other buzzwords we can both agree I’m pretending to understand right now. Proofing will force me to endure the torture of ten hours of my own voice at 1x, and might trigger retakes. It all adds up.

Which means I’m looking at about 60 hours of (unpaid) effort, with no guarantee of any sales.

Why am I even considering this?

It’s an additional potential revenue stream. Using Audible and other audiobook vendors I can hopefully attract people who wouldn’t otherwise buy the paperback or ebook. Some people might want both ocular and aural versions, and buy both. (I’m not attempting any other senses. Unstable Orbits will not be available nasally.)

Also, one of the small joys of the revision process for me is reading the book out loud. This crucial step helps to find repeated words, clunky phrasing, endless sentences and plain old typos. And for me it’s a chance to act out the book. To make sure each piece of dialogue fits the character. To see if the emotional beats hit. To see if the jokes land. I know how each line should be read — I’ve read them often enough — and I’d love to see if I can sustain a performance for the whole book.

The first step will be to try it out. Record the first couple of scenes and figure out a workflow. Hit random buttons in audio editors to see if they make my awful voice sound better or worse. Worry about pops and mouth noises and echoes and background noise. Do some light panicking about how much time it’s all taking.

Look out for updates here! You may be the very first to laugh at how bad I am.