LIVE – Narrators Forum: Charting a Path to Success

Note: A link to the full chat is below at the end of this introduction. 

Untrained narrators. It was the subject of one of my recent Speaking of Audiobooks columns, Untrained Narrators? I’m Not Interested, which garnered a good deal of attention. In that piece, I basically stated my complaint – as listeners, we are being inundated with what I have referred to as untrained narrators. Narrators who drive people away from listening rather than make it an experience they want to repeat. Narrators whose lack of experience we can sense after only a few minutes of listening and who leave us frustrated with a mediocre performance, especially when we’ve anticipated the audiobook release of a much-loved book.

With our Narrators Forum today, we’ll take the discussion in a more positive direction by talking with professional narrators who were once first time narrators. Through our discussion, we hope to create a path of success for those new to narrating.

 

The Narrators

Six narrators join us today who are at the top of their profession. Each were invited based on their popularity among our listeners as well as our ability to trust they will deliver a quality narration each time we listen to one of their titles.

 

Holter Graham

Holter Graham, multiple Earphone winner and multiple Audie nominee, has been narrating audiobooks since 2004. He is the co-president of SAG-AFTRA New York, the performer’s union that covers audiobook narration. He strives to bring quality work across all genres, and considers himself lucky to have read great craft across the spectrum of books. He has been actively working to increase opportunities and protections for professional narrators in the audiobook field for years, notably working with union members and staff to create the Audible.com contract, and more recently through contracts with Blackstone and Tantor, among many others. He is based in New York City with his wife, author Neela Vaswani (earphones winner for narration of her YA title Same Sun Here).

Graham has been acting on film, television, and stage since age 13, has a BA and MFA in writing from Skidmore and Vermont Colleges, respectively, and is originally from Baltimore, whose Ravens just won the Super Bowl.

 

Susan Ericksen

Susan Ericksen is an Audie Award winning narrator who  has recorded over 300 books including the highly acclaimed In Death series by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts), the V.I. Warshawski novels by Sara Paretsky , and Meg Gardiner’s  Jo Beckett series. The winner of multiple Earphone Awards for both fiction and non-fiction, Susan is also an actress and a singer. She has performed in New York and in regional theaters across the country. Upcoming audiobooks include Kristin Hannah’s Fly Away, and the third book in Lisa Jackson’s Wicked series.

 

 

Barbara Rosenblat

Barbara Rosenblat is one of the most respected and sought after audiobook recording artists in the industry. She has won countless honors and accolades over a long career voicing well over 400 titles. They include The Odyssey Medal, over 45 Golden Earphones from Audiofile Magazine (who named her a Voice of the Century) and eight Audie Awards from the Audio Publishers Association. The richly detailed recordings and the scope of her work led one critic to say ‘Barbara Rosenblat is to audiobooks what Meryl Streep is to film’..

 

 

 

Kate Reading

Kate Reading has been a freelance narrator for over twenty years. She received an Audie Award for Bellwether by Connie Willis; an Audie nomination for The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, recorded with her husband, Michael Kramer; and an Audie nomination for Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell. She has also received numerous Earphones Awards fromAudioFile magazine, which has named her Narrator of the Year and, for two years running, Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy for her narration of Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series. As Jennifer Mendenhall, she has worked as a stage actor in the Washington, D.C., area and has been a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company since 1987. Her work onstage has been recognized by the Helen Hayes Awards Society, the Washington Theatre Lobby Awards, and the Carbonell Awards in Florida. She and her husband live in Hyattsville, Maryland, with their two children.

 

Tavia Gilbert

Multiple Audie nominee and Earphones and Parent’s Choice Award-winning producer, narrator, and writer Tavia Gilbert has appeared on stage and in film. School Library Journal has called the performances of this highly-acclaimed actress “as close as you can get to a full cast narration with a solo voice.” She has narrated over 150 multi-cast and solo voice audiobooks.

 

 

 

Karen White
Karen White is a classically trained actress who has been recording audio books for more than a dozen years and has 100+ books to her credit.  Honored to be included in Audiofile’s Best Voices 2010 and 2011, she’s also an Audie Finalist and Best Audiobook of the Year winner for 2009, 2010 and 2011) and she has earned multiple Audiofile Earphones Awards.  Publishers Weekly says of  Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, “Karen White delivers a stunning reading, her character interpretations are confident and well-rounded, and she forges a strong bond with the audience.”

 

 

 

 

Lea Hensley, Moderator

Lea has written the Speaking of Audiobooks column at All About Romance for the past four years and is one of the three gals at AudioGals. She is an advocate for quality audiobooks and dedicated to converting print readers to audio listeners.

 

The Dilemma

Just a few years ago, our discussion of audiobooks usually centered on the narrator’s performance and if that performance worked for us. That is, it was usually a question of taste – some of us liked one narrator’s way of doing things, others did not. For the most part, we heard clearly differentiated characters, appropriate pacing, and didn’t hear big intakes of breath or other distracting vocal noises. As I look back on those days, I now realize we were experiencing, for the most part, narrators with at least some training in the art of narration, with a certain level of skill that we’d come to expect. The selection of audiobooks was much smaller, yes, but I had a great deal of trust in the audiobook industry’s ability (and desire) to deliver a high quality performance with each book.

That trust has eroded over the past two years with 2012 giving consumers hundreds of audio titles read by those who we perceive to have little or no training in the basics of narration or simply a lack of talent altogether. We find ourselves penalized for buying an audiobook with an unknown narrator – even if we’re confident of the author. That’s not to say there aren’t decent first time narrators – there are. It’s just much more difficult to find them these days in a large sea of untrained narrators.

Although the use of new-to-audio narrators has increased our selection of audiobooks, we bemoan the lack of clearly defined characters and dependable delivery this greater selection gives to us. We notice a lack of pacing, awkward pausing, and performance of characters inconsistent with the author’s words. Noticeable gasping for breath has the ability to drive us to distraction and make us stop our listening altogether. We miss those narrations which are, in essence, performances in the truest sense of the word.

 

Now it’s time…

for our six narrators to weigh in and talk about this dilemma and charting a path of success.

The live chat starts at 11:00 a.m. EST and continues until 1:00 p.m. Once the discussion is complete, we’ll open it up to all who wish to participate. The narrators will be available to answer your questions.

The full chat is now complete. Follow LIVE Narrators Chat to see it in its entirety.

The edited – with a real time flow – version of the chat is now available here...

Thanks for joining us!

 

Lea Hensley