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Audio tape books job?

RainbowGurl

RainbowGurl

Active Member
Hello all,
I am unsure of where to put this so if it is in the wrong area I apolergise. I am at a young age where I am unsure of what I would like to do as a job but as I am listening to a Harry Potter audio book CD at the moment, it sounds like an intresting job, if it is a job... If it is a job how am I able to apply for this kind of career, it intrests me and I would like to maybe see what its about and possibly apply to read childrens books. I am quite a good reader and I talk into the micraphone my own stories which I have written. How much does this job pay? What subjects at school will I need to study to further this career? Is it a job to work from home? I tried googling about this but am not getting the answers I was looking for. Can anyone here tell me some information about this? Thanks very much for reading and for those who respond :)
 
I think you'll find that this isn't really a job. Typically the books are read by well-known people by way of a contract. I think it's Stephen Fry that reads the British tapes of Harry Potter and... - that's certainly not his day job. Just a few extra bucks on a Sunday afternoon.
 
Yes, if you read the bios on the back of the cases you'll see that most of them are celebs of some sort. Often it is someone the author requests or an actor in the movie version.
 
Sometimes the actual author reads the book (Bill Bryson being the first to come to mind). So you could write a novel and hope it is successful enough to warrant being turned into an audio book!
 
Actually RainbowGurl, while some of the audiobook readers are celebs of some sort, it isn't exclusively the case. In fact, I think this is almost an exception rather than the norm, so nothing should stop you from looking further down this line, if you're interested.

Almost all the audiobooks I own are not read by celebrities. The one book I have that is read by a 'celebrity' is Salman Rushdie's Fury, which is read by the author himself, and let's just say that I would have thanked him if he paid someone who was trained properly in voice acting to read his work.

So, what can you do? I'm not an expert, but I would try and check out local acting/drama/theatre clubs or communities, and they may have contacts for jobs of this kind. Remember the skills involved in reading a narrative is very similar to acting. Look along those lines.

I have tried googling myself, so you may want to look at some of the things that google throws up with this search. Also, some info you may be interested in here.



Good luck.

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You could also try contacting some charities for the blind and partially sighed. These require individuals to record newspapers, magazine articles, information pamphlets and advice forms.
 
Audiobook readers

I worked for an unabridged audio book company for 20 years, so have seen a wide variety of readers.

A high percentage of UK readers in this field are radio actors, who generally have a more flexible voice range than successful stage actors. They are also used to working from a script to a microphone. Some stage and film actors are great readers, some are dire, and some cannot do it at all. Authors can be good readers, but by no means all, and one always hoped that they knew their limits.

This is not to say that you can't learn to be a brilliant reader, but the voice box (larynx) does need to be trained and exercised. Most people generally cannot speak for very long without the voice changing in pitch and quality. Why don't you look into training via an acting school? Incidentally, rates of pay are not brilliant, even for top readers, so I wouldn't see this as a permanent career. It's a filler for many between more substantially lucrative jobs.
 
It seems to be helpful to speak several languages too. (I'm thinking of Davina Porter at the moment.) And people like George Guidall and Simon Prebble are just so amazing. You mean to tell us that they aren't paid a fortune for what they do? They should be! A good narrator can make a bad writer sound good, and a bad one can do exactly the opposite. (I'm thinking of Patricia Cornwell here. I actually thought she was an okay writer until she up and changed narrators on us.)
 
It's not too bad for celebrities. I think it has more to do with how you sound necessarily than what educational experience you could bring with you. I'd wager that James Earl Jones was chosen to be an audio reader for the Bible, and not say....Michael Jackson. For vocal reasons.....
 
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