Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: So we're here with Kate Karyus Quinn and Carrie Coello, which was actually more difficult to say than I anticipated, the both of you together. So we're here to talk about exactly that kind of thing, how difficult something may or may not be to say, because Carrie is an audiobook narrator. And Kate, many of you who have been listening to me for a while may remember Kate was actually my very first guest on the show for the very first episode of Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire and she also co hosted with me last summer until everyone told me that she shouldn't be allowed to do that anymore.
Carrie: Kate, what did you do?
Kate: I think it was all the ChapStick talk.
Mindy: I think that really killed it, Kate.
Mindy: Kate had a big idea that I needed to be more chatty and talk about myself and my life more. And so we tried it for a couple of months last summer with her as a co host to like, prompt me to say regular ass shit. And I got like five emails. They were like, what have you done?
Carrie: Oh, I need to go back and listen to those episodes.
Kate: I love the chatty part of a podcast. Almost every podcast I listened to has a chatty part at the beginning and I feel like it's what makes you bond with the listeners. But I guess not Mindy's listeners. Mindy's listeners are like - put the information in our brains, we are here for the content.
Mindy: Kate had an idea. It didn't work out.
Kate: We tried it. But we also talked about indie publishing and we had some really good guests. Hopefully that part of it was helpful.
Mindy: I would think we had some really high rollers in the indie community.
Kate: Actually, that's how I connected with Carrie, through the indie books that I've been doing with my co authors, Demitria Lunetta and Marley Lynn. We started a new series last fall - Down and Dirty Supernatural Cleaning Services. And it is a funny, cozy mystery, A little bit of romance. Hopefully lots of laughs. It's meant to be very, very funny and kind of silly. We sort of started talking about maybe doing an audio book.For our first series, we sold some audio rights, but we wanted to try and produce the audio books ourselves, which is something a lot of indie authors do. It was Kismet because I received an email from Carrie. I Think around that time, two or three different people emailed us enquiring if we were going to make audiobooks, sending samples, you know, I would listen to them. But when Carrie's came I looked at it and I was kind of like, uh and I listened to the sample and I was like, oh my gosh, this is so perfect, she's so good. I was amazed. I went to my co authors and I said she's really good. What do you guys think? And they were like, yeah, sure, sounds great, let's do it. And so we jumped into audiobooks and Carrie was super patient and kind of held our hands. So that's my side of it.
Mindy: Carrie, why don't you tell us a little bit about what that's like from your end as a vocal performer, kind of like a freelancer. Really like trying to pick up those gigs because I know that like Kate said you kind of like Cold called her and you had read a section of the book ahead of time to present to her, to show her, you know, this is what I can do. So what's it like on your end?
Carrie: Well, I love working with indie authors. You see a lot of creativity and innovation. I feel like on the indie side of things. And as a freelancer, I do like working with the author directly. Often when you work with a production company, you're working with their producers and sometimes they limit your contact with the author. They don't necessarily want you to have any contact with the author at all. But I prefer a more collaborative approach where I can bounce ideas off the author, get into the book's interpretation, make sure that I'm understanding the characters and themes. There are a couple of different places that narrators can go to to try to connect with authors and the biggest one is ACX. That's the Amazon Creation Exchange. And so for any e book that's available on amazon, an author can put out an audition and narrators can search for auditions and try to match with projects. The problem with ACX… ACX is beautiful and has done wonders for the audiobook community, Indies in particular and small publishers. But the issue with ACX is that once a book is available for audition there could be hundreds or even over 1000 narrators looking at that audition and competing. So one thing that I like to do in addition to auditioning on ACX, Is to go prospecting.
Prospecting is when I open amazon and I start scrolling through recently published e books and basically trying to find a match on my own. So I know who I am and I know my voice and I know what kind of characters really get me excited and right now what I really like is characters that are just a little bit naughtier or edgier than I would ever be in real life. I like to swear a little more. I like to lean in maybe to that edge more than I feel like I actually get to experience as a... I don't necessarily want to just call myself a 41 year old mom.
Mindy: So you want to live vicariously?
Carrie: I do. I want to live vicariously through some of these characters, the swashbuckling, the badass fantasy, the complicated heroines. And I'm also looking for books where it's clear that the authors know how to do a little bit of that marketing and self promotion. If it's part of a series that's definitely a plus. If they have produced other audio titles or had them produced, like I saw that you had sold the rights to a previous series. That's a plus for me too, because you'll already have a little bit of a following that we can work on together.
Mindy: I'm curious, as an author who operates in the traditional sphere, I'm interested in the philosophy and I know it's true that typically audiobook narrators operating in the traditional publishing industry don't interact with or connect with their authors. I have a little bit of an exception to that. Brittney Presley has done I think, six of my books at this point, maybe more. My editor just emails me and says, I assume you want Britney if we can get her? And I'm like, yes, and she will uh send me like, DMs on Twitter and have questions.
The first time that she contacted me was because of I wrote a book called This Darkness Mine, the main character believes she's communicating with the twin that she never had, and it's coming through her texts and emails and things like that, and they're really, like, broken up and even weird punctuation and very, very difficult for her to deliver in an audio form, because they're even like, kind of little puzzles sometimes. She basically reached out directly, and she was like, I just need you to break this down for me. How do you want to do this? So what do you think is, why do you suppose that contact is limited?
Carrie: I'm not a producer myself, so I'm edging into the realm of speculation here, but I've certainly seen a lot of comments from producers about how audiobook narrators might reach out directly to the author and confuse the author or distress them. I think the producers just sort of see it as more work for them. They're already managing a relationship with an author and maybe soothing the author’s ego a little bit, or laying everything out very smoothly, gently. And then to have a narrator pop in there and be like, you know, there's 14 typos on page four, and how exactly did you want me to pronounce this? So they prefer to be the go between so that they're managing the delicacies of the relationships on both sides.
Mindy: That makes sense. I tend to be pretty…
Kate: Does it make sense though?
Mindy: I think it does if you consider some of the personalities. So it's like, I just don't care about many things, like I'm not going to get my ruff up about the audiobook world, I don't know audio books, I don't know how they work. I'm not a producer, I don't understand anything about that particular art, so if they just want to handle that cool, like, I get that, but I can see where some ego might get involved.
Kate: I feel like most authors are so excited just to be part of the process, just to be making an audiobook, just to have this thing just to hear somebody speaking their words. I really think that's most authors. Yes, of course, there's always some people who stink.
Carrie: I think that you're right, 75% of the time. But I also think probably a producer only has to deal with one or two horror stories before they sort of set it as a policy uh that they just don't want to work that way. Like you said, you have established a relationship with a narrator. And I actually think that that's pretty common for someone who's doing a whole series or working with the same author over and over. But I think that initial contact is often carefully managed.
Mindy: Back to the indie world. What's the word that you used?
Carrie: Prospecting.
Mindy: Prospecting. Personally, as a writer, If someone were to reach out to me and be like, I took the time to do this. For me, I would already be interested.
Carrie: Like Kate said at the time that I reached out to her, a couple of other narrators reached out to her as well. So I think there are a lot of us out there who may be looking for the same things. The last thing we want to do is inundate authors with dozens of requests to listen to our samples and hire us, particularly if we're not a perfect fit. So I try to be really, really judicious and confident that I believe my voice could be a great voice for this particular project and I'll usually put maybe half an hour or an hour's worth of research, looking through the book, learning as much as I can about the characters, reading the sample chapter, reading the reviews, researching the author, going on the author's website, taking a look at everything else that they've written, putting together the whole picture. And then I'll even kind of go through and read a page or two out loud often to myself to make sure that this particular style of writing and my mouth fit together, that my brain works to interpret it. And then I'll take a chance and send the email.
Kate: I think that all really showed in your email because I remember like you referenced the book and you knew it was a series because we had several books out by that point and you know, you said complimentary things about the book, enjoying it and really the big thing was the sample. It blew me away. Reviews that we have since gotten have been so impressed with your performance.
Carrie: As soon as I would finish each recording session in my studio, I would usually pop out jazzed almost like high off of this book because there's so much energy in it and it moves really quickly and the language has a flow and there's all the different characters and personalities. Can I talk about the plot or we don't want to use spoilers? You know, there's vampires and there's pixies and there're werewolves and it's all over the place and you just never know where it's going next. And so I would come out and I would Rush over to my husband and high five him and be like, yeah, I'm so excited about this project.
Kate: It was really fun listening to the different samples you would send and the different voices you did for everyone. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because like you said, there are a ton of characters in our books and there are some crazy characters. I'd imagine that at some point it becomes challenging to separate all those voices, remember who's supposed to be who.
Carrie: I think the fact that the characters are Such different types is actually really beneficial in creating voices that are really distinctive. You know when you've got a book that is about seven 18 year old girls that are all best friends, that's actually much more challenging in giving each one a unique voice. So the fact that the characters are so different from each other really helps. But I have a hard time really focusing on reading print books these days. I think I'm so used to audio books, but reading print is an important part of my job. So what I usually do is I draw a really hot bath and I light a bunch of candles and I just sit my butt in the bath with the book and there's nowhere else to go and there's no other distractions and I'll just stay in there for a couple of hours. I usually put the main character's voice as close to my natural speaking voice as possible. And that's really critical with this series in particular since it's told in the first person, so that I don't strain my voice so that I don't injure myself. And I'll give them an attitude that might be different than my personality, but in terms of pitch and mouth position - so Paige had my pitch in my mouth position.
Kate: You sound like her. Like when I first came on this call, I was like oh this is so weird, it sounds like Paige Harper.
Carrie: And that goes back to prospecting, right? As I'm looking at different projects, I have to make sure that that main character is going to work with my natural voice. So it's got to be a caucasian woman between 18 and 60, right? And then we go from there with an American accent. So then as I'm sitting in the bathtub, I'll be just like reading, reading, reading, reading, skimming, and then whenever I get to a character I'll just test out their voice. So someone sitting outside the bathroom would just hear all these little random snippets of dialogue, you know and here's the vampire and here's the pixie and that's my prep. And by the time I get to the end of the book, those voices are really set and then I can go right into the studio and do them confidently.
Mindy: You know, it's so alien to me. I guess as a writer people probably wonder how a person switches when you're writing different POVs, how you switch your styles up when you hit that bump and you change. I'm sure people wonder how a writer does that and I just do it naturally. Whereas I can't imagine changing my voice for a new character and there's dialogue like back and forth. And it’s eally snappy in these books. So I mean when you're doing that, do you read it linearly? Do you do it in one go? Do you hop between the voices in a conversation?
Carrie: Yes, I do. That's the most efficient way to do it and it just gets better with practice. If I have a really challenging accent sometimes I can't, if it's an accent I'm really not familiar with then it's better if I can kind of tune myself to that accent and then I'll do all of that character's dialogue or a big chunk of it in a row and then I'll go back and cut it in. But that's so much more time consuming. It's better if I can just flow.
Kate: I think the hardest thing must be your voice getting tired because I love reading aloud with my kids. My youngest. You know we still do picture books so that's pretty doable. But my middle daughter, she and I have been reading aloud, we've actually been reading Kate diCamillo Louisiana's Way and after like a couple chapters, I have to stop. It's hard on your voice.
Carrie: I’ve been narrating professionally for two years and when I first started out I could really only do half an hour at a time and you kind of build it up like a muscle and relying also on previous acting and vocal training of working with your diaphragm and making sure that your posture is good. And you choose character voices. I choose voices that I can maintain. I'm thinking of the books that we did together. Nico's voice is low and gravelly and that is a bit of a strain. So I have to use that judiciously. If I do a chapter that has a long section of dialogue with Nico, then I'll need to take a little break. There really are physical limits to how much you can do. You maximize everything you can by being warmed up and limber and having a good posture and minimizing vocal strain through your acting choices. Start hydrating two hours before I go into the booth, drink water constantly while I'm working. And then even with that really the most That I think is healthy for me is a 2-3 hour studio session maybe four times a week.
Kate: That makes sense about the different voices. Because I have chosen in reading picture books to do something like a funny monster voice and after doing it like I am a monster, I'm like, oh what, why did I do that? That was a bad choice. Like even just doing that little bit, I can feel it like nails on my throat.
Carrie: Yeah, and you can give yourself an actual injury like it's no joke, you can cause polyps on your vocal cords. I took a job a year ago where I overcommitted myself to do a 37 hour fantasy trilogy all in one month. And that was So much. And that was my July 2020 and there were a lot of demons and really deep voiced men and I did, I did start to injure myself and so then I had to take most of the next month off because I was like I can't actually endanger my career.
Mindy: Kate has traveled with me multiple times when I have lost my voice. It doesn't take much. I get laryngitis really, really easily. Something interesting, I started substituting once COVID became a thing because our substitute pool at the local school where I used to work was mostly made up of retired teachers and they didn't want to be going back into the schools. So I took a long term sub position as a 5th grade teacher for like the last nine weeks of school. I hadn't been working in like a classroom setting for gosh, four or five years and I knew I was going to lose my voice because on your feet talking to the kids all day for eight hours and I knew I would lose it in the first week and I did and I just babied myself and I got it back and it is amazing how you can build that.
Interestingly enough, uh, to take a personal detour my past two long term romantic relationships were with people that didn't talk a lot. So I was always like, not having conversations if I was home, like it just wasn't happening. So the person I've been seeing now for the past like almost two years talks a lot. So we're having conversations like all the time, very long, 6-8 hours and I'm like this is good. I'm building up my vocal cords.
Carrie: Yeah, I know what you mean about teaching. I taught 7th and 8th grade for three years and then I also taught preschool for five years. You have to be careful with your voice, man.
Mindy: So tell me, I know what I do and I know what I found works for me, but I'm really curious about what your steps are to protect your voice.
Carrie: So in addition to what I've already mentioned Like that month that I did 37 finished hours in addition to just good posture and hydration. I learned this technique called lax Vox or bubble cup. I was so amused when I found it because who would have thought? But you take one of those sippy cups with a firm plastic straw, like the kind you get at a hospital, fill it up part way with water so that the straw is partially submerged by just a few inches. Blow into it while humming and relaxing your throat. And it's the most soothing feeling.That little bit of water that's in the straw balances out the pressure when you're blowing and humming.
Mindy: A Friend of mine, well Kate’s too Joelle Charbonneau. She's also a writer but she's also a trained opera performer. I tweeted about like I've lost my voice, I'm on tour, I can't talk. And she emailed me and she's like start humming. Start now. Bubble cup sounds like weird sex move.
Carrie: Yeah it definitely does.
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Mindy: Kate, do you want to talk more about your interaction through the ACX platform? Like as an indie author, did you ever put any of your books up for audition or were you just lucky enough that Carrie like cold called you And it went well?
Kate: My co authors and I were discussing putting them up when we started getting these emails. You know, I kind of thought, what are the chances that someone's going to contact us and they're going to be the one since we were looking? I would listen and I would read the emails so I was prepared to do the audition process. But honestly hearing about getting thousands of responses, even getting like hundreds. I can't imagine. That would be so overwhelming to listen to those. I'm so grateful that Carrie came knocking at our door and was like, um guess what? I'm perfect for this. I've done the work for you. But otherwise Carrie was also super helpful walking me through ACX. The first time I clicked the wrong button. I'm trying to do the first book and I did the wrong thing. So I had to go back and undo it. And she was just so so nice willing to hold my hand and walk me through it and put up with my terrible emailing habits of letting things fall to the bottom of my email inbox.
Carrie: Forget it. So it's not that bad. It was not that bad. It's me being like, Hi, I still really want this job! Well, ACX It can be done. There's thousands and thousands of books produced through ACX all the time. But their interface is not necessarily intuitive, it kind of surprises me seeing that they're an Amazon product. How much it feels like 2008 when you're trying to go through their website.
Kate: It’s interesting. The back end of it, it's very clunky and slow. I have to reload it and it's also really confusing just on the payout and of trying to figure out, why did you give me this much money? But with the royalties and stuff. So they are the biggest game in town right now.
Carrie: They are the biggest game in town. You know, you're not the only one who's had a little bit of frustration though with the interface and with the payout clarity and there are other folks moving into this space. There are a lot of production companies, audiobook production companies that kind of act as middlemen between the author and different narrators and that will assist you with casting and with production. And a lot of those are actually started by narrators who became frustrated with the process and you know, they had their own clients and were able to kind of expand and facilitate other author narrator relationships.
And then there are other aggregators who will assist author narrator teams in distribution, not only to Amazon, but to all of the other apps that are starting up. Some of them have been in the space for a while. You know, whether it's Kobo or Scripd or Libro FM or getting into Overdrive and Libby and Hoopla for the library market, it's a balancing act for authors. And maybe you can speak to this Kate because, you know, if you go exclusive with Audible, you do get a higher royalty percentage, but then you're dealing with some of the frustrations that come from working exclusively with Amazon. So it's - do you cast your net wide and accept the lower royalty Payout in the hopes of a return from a broader variety of sources? Or do you just work with the 800 lb. gorilla?
Kate: Amazon is like the big guy that every indie author has to figure out how much you want to jump in bed with them and how much you just want to make them one of your regulars? Because they're not just seeing you. They are definitely not true to you. We did the first three books of this series and we're waiting to see how much we make back on them. But I would definitely say in the future I'd be interested in trying to go somewhere else and trying not to go exclusive with Audible and Amazon. Just because that's kind of my approach to being an indie author at this point is that you have these options and you can try different things and so it's like, well let's see how this works. If the results aren't amazing or you aren't totally happy, then the next time you can say, well let's try this thing and see how that works. And if it's better and you know then you have the data and you can look at it and you can make choices. It is difficult with ACX, so far to look at the data and make choices. Because the reporting is very need to know and Amazon doesn't think we need to know that much.
Mindy: The series that you had out first, Kate, those first three blocks are on audio, but there with Blackstone audio. So those are wide. Right?
Kate: Yes. Those books we recently experimented with because we originally had them available for reading through Amazon's Kindle unlimited platform, which is for people who sign up for Kindle unlimited. It's all you can read as many books as you want, as long as they're enrolled in that program. And for some readers, that is an amazing thing because there are people who are very big readers. They read a ton, mostly genre readers. They will read our whole seven book series in a day or two because that's what they do. They just go from one book to the next. My co authors felt like maybe we were missing some of the market and that we might be able to do better wide. So we're experimenting by putting those books wide. We may do the same with this other newer series, the Down and Dirty Supernatural Cleaning Services, which we’re closing in on book six. I think it's also going to close out with seven books and then we'll start another new series.
It's constantly trying things and seeing what works. I definitely feel like moving into doing our own audiobooks has been really great. You know, we are selling audiobooks every single day because I check it every single day and the number keeps going up. Our read through or I guess are listened through rate is really great. Most people who are listening to the first book probably about 80% are going to the second book. And then the numbers for the 2nd and 3rd book are almost exactly the same. So people who are listening to the second book are jumping into the third.
Mindy: You have that data. Whereas with the first three books of your first series with Blackstone Audio, you really don't know how those are performing because it's through a distributor, right?
Kate: Yeah. I get the statements every six months. So the data is a lot older at that point and it's dated by the time I get it. It's not as helpful. Especially, you know, I can run sales on my books. Usually if you buy the e book on Amazon then you can add on the audio book for a very small price. I can look at data and say, oh I sold a lot of these books on sale in my audio book sales went up. So people are obviously doing the add on. Or if I'm running ads, I can see my audio sales are going up. So obviously some people are clicking on the book and choosing to buy the audiobook. Audio is becoming so huge and so many people love to listen. I've had one person, she loves the book. She's a reviewer. I found her on an audio book review site and she's read all the books and she's left really great reviews. She wanted the fourth book and I said, I don't know yet if we're going to do it in audio, but I'd be happy to send you a copy of the book just so you can read it. And she said, no, I don't read books. I only listen because of health reasons. And I said, well now audio counts as reading you're still reading the books, you're just reading it with your ears. I don't know what my point was.
Carrie: Whatever it is, I like it. I've seen a number of articles recently where they do functional magnetic resonance imaging the FMRI tests and see which parts of your brain light up when you're actually reading print versus when you're listening to audio. And it's basically the same parts of your brain.
Mindy: I've seen similar studies before, the audiobook boom when e books came out and it was talking about how with an e book it actually lights up less of your brain because you don't have some of the inputs. So, for example, you're not moving your body, you're not turning a page. You don't have the tactile feedback to your fingertips. It's very different when you're on an e reader. It actually uses less of your brain, whether that's a good thing or bad thing is up to you. The audio book, I can see that it would actually be very, very similar because you're engaging another sense completely.
Carrie: And I think it's really about immersing yourself in the world of the story and the characters.
Kate: Do you have any thoughts about people who listen to the book at like two times or three times speed?
Carrie: It's fine if they do that, but I don't want to hear about it. I do my performance the way I do my performance at the rate that I think is right for me. But then once I've done it it is released and then people can listen to it however they want. There is a general school of thought that as a narrator if you're going to err on one side or the other, err on the side of being just a little too slow because most listeners know how to turn it up.
Mindy: Carrie, you mentioned other alternatives for both vocal performers and indie authors when it comes to connecting and getting audiobooks made. So other than ACX, like what names can you throw out there that people can be looking for?
Carrie: Yes. I mean the other major audition space for narrators I would say right now is Ahab, which is not actually an indie space, so maybe I'm not answering your question, but it's a project put out there by Penguin, Random House audio to help connect publishers and audiobook producers with narrators that they might not already be working with and they're really expanding that to include formats other than audio books as well. So other types of vocal work. You know, there's other things out there that you hear about like voices dot com up work, but I honestly haven't heard of people having really good experiences with those. There's still an opening in the market for another good matchmaking service. When it comes to aggregators, if you'd like to distribute wide, I've worked with Audiobooks Unleashed on a number of titles and I found them very easy to work with. So they don't pair up authors and narrators at this time, although I think they might be moving into that space, if you know that you want to distribute your book wide, they can help you with that.
Kate: Do you have any advice for anyone who says, oh, I always wanted to be an audiobook narrator? How did you decide to get into this? You said you've been doing it for two years and you have a theater background?
Carrie: I had quite a bit of theater and acting training actually as a child and teenager. And then in my 20's I worked in film on the production side as a editor and script supervisor primarily, which was great because that gave me a lot of technical skills and also a chance to spend a lot of time evaluating performance, which I think serves me well now where I both perform and evaluate my own performance because narrators frequently are their own directors, almost always in the Indy space. And even for major publishers often as well, then I got into education and I spent a lot of time reading to Children and I had my own Children and I spent a lot of time reading to them and practicing all my farm animal voices and my fairytale skills. And I had always loved audiobooks. I've loved audio books since I was 10 and playing around with cassette tapes for the blind. It just kind of occurred to me one day that this dream that I thought I could never actually attain actually is possible now in the world of Home Studios and DIY. And so many people working in this indie space. And I know we've given ACX a little bit of flak in this conversation so far, but really ACX made this possible, bringing narrators and authors together.
Kate: We're sorry Jeff, don't don't be too sad, we still love you.
Mindy: Yeah, he’s fine.
Carrie: So yeah, I just kind of realized that I actually had a lot of the technical skills and performance background to start to pull this together into a legitimate career. For people starting out, acting training helps. And the first thing that I would do though is lock yourself into a closet and read out loud to no one for several hours and see how you feel because that's the job. And you have to actually love doing that sitting still and listening to the sound of your own voice.
There is a website out there called the narrator's roadmap that was put together by Karen Commons with input from a number of professional narrators and that's the best place to start as a newbie, if you want to see what it's like to look for work and some of the minimum technical requirements and how to get up to speed. People don't go out and get a degree in being an audiobook narrator, aside from the acting and technical skills and literary analysis, being a great reader that definitely helps. Aside from that, most people learn through workshops, webinars and coaches. It's almost like an apprenticeship system where well established narrators will take students under their wing and answer all their questions and give them personalized feedback and help them get started. So I've had some great coaches, Carol Monda and Emily Laurence, I would definitely recommend Crystal Lewis. And then there's a number of technical coaches as well, Don Barnes and James Romick, folks that will help you get set up on the technical side.
Mindy: You know, I've often heard that publishing itself is the last apprentice based functioning model and I think that that can be fairly true. I mean Kate and Demitria give me a hard time all the time because they're always like, well Mindy knows somebody there. You know, I'm always networking and just the other day we had exchanged an email and there was a question about this new, like a new start up and I was like, wait, I think I know somebody there, like let me let me email them and see. And they knew me and they remembered me. We're interested in looking at something that Kate and Demetria had written. There is of course any time there's an apprenticeship model, the tough part is getting your foot in the door and making those connections. But networking just matters so much, I think, especially in this industry.
Carrie: Yeah, I think so too. And then also recognizing if you want to get into narration, it's going to take a couple of years and you're going to put in some unpaid hours and in fact you're going to pay a coach, you need to invest in the education and in the time to develop. Fair or not, that's just kind of the barrier to entry. And there's a lot of competition, especially at the early levels, there's a lot of work to go around because there are so many, like you said, the audiobook industry is exploding, but still at the entry level, there is a lot of competition.
Kate: So, Mindy famously always records her podcast in her closet. Are you in your closet right now?
Mindy: I’m actually laying on my bed. Because with the advent of Gus, my Dalmatian in my life, there is no sacred space. He watches me take a bath. He usually is halfway involved in the bath. Going to the bathroom is a partnership, so I can no longer do that.
Kate: He’s very needy.
Mindy: Basically either I'm a Dalmatian or he's a human. He doesn't care either way we're married. He's the man in my life. So I can't sit in my closet any longer to do my podcasting because the dog will not allow it. So I am in fact just sitting in bed, but I'm guessing the question that you're getting to Katem is about appropriate recording space.
Kate: I’m also sitting on my bed.
Carrie: I'm in a closet. I am in the closet under the stairs. This is like my little Harry Potter hideaway.
Mindy: And closets, interestingly enough, the whole thing where I even - because I wanted to start a podcast and I was excited about it and of course everybody was starting a podcast. I knew that I wanted to start a podcast, but I also was like, you know, I don't know if I want to put money into this and software and hardware and all this stuff. And I was listening to Serial and at one point in the later episodes, one of the reporters was on location at Adnan Syed's trial and she was giving an update and she was like, I hope this sounds okay, I'm not in the recording studio, I'm on the road and I'm just sitting in the closet at the hotel. She said I hung up all my clothes in here and I'm just sitting in the closet - and it sounded exactly the same as a recording studio and I was just like, well shit, I guess I can just sit in my closet and that's what I did. I would get emails and people would ask me, I had people that were doing like podcast seminars and they would email me and I'll be like, can you give us a little bit of insight in your process and your hardware, your mic, what mic do you tell use? Tell us about your studio? I’ Always just like, dude, and I take a picture of my closet and my laptop with Garageband open and they're just like, are you serious? I'm like, yes.
Carrie: That's really all you need.
Mindy: It's low rent. And for someone like me who isn't like making money off of the podcast, it's perfectly acceptable. But if you were an audiobook narrator wanting to start out, how do you do that? Like how do you walk that line between being professional and not like burning yourself in the process?
Kate: Can I also add that we haven't even talked about the post editing and the time that that takes. Mindy. I know you often are saying, “and I have to edit my podcast.” Like some people I know just record the podcast and throw it up. But you like to edit out the pauses. You really hate all my ums. You edit out the 5000 times I say like unless I attached them to another word, God bless you.
Mindy: At this point in time, I have identified in the waveform Kate's ums and likes. I don't even have to listen to it. I can just take them out because I know what it looks like.
Carrie: Yeah, you can develop an ability to read it like a cuneiform.
Kate: Editing audio I think is horrible. When I went to film school. It was the thing I hated the most, I really hated looking at those sound wave forms and honestly the idea of editing a podcast or a book would make me just want to like run down the street screaming.
Mindy: Carrie, what kind of time involvement do you have there? And what kind of program do you use?
Carrie: I definitely edit all my auditions and I also have a podcast and I edit that myself and master that myself. But with a book like the Down and Dirty series, I outsourced editing and mastering. So I work with Centennial Sound Ben Zito in Michigan and send him my files and he makes them pretty. It's this push pull between, do I need the time or the money more on each particular file? And, and so that's kind of on a job by job basis, you know, just as you're speaking sometimes your mouth till mumble or I will literally belch sometimes I'll hear the way I said it and I'm like, oh I could do better, I definitely choose my takes and put it all together myself and then send it out. There's a technique called punch and roll where you, as you're working along, you get to a place where you know that you just made a mistake. And here's the other thing as I'm speaking, my mouth builds up saliva and I literally need to just stop and swallow all that shit before I can keep speaking at least once every two minutes. Or it starts to sound frothy, but usually I have some other fudge in less than two minutes and that gives me an opportunity to swallow. So by the time I send it off though, it's nice and clean.
Kate: What is the mastering involved?
Carrie: They're doing a little bit more than removing pauses though because actually even my pauses are mostly timed. Not that there isn't some room for improvement, but that's actually part of the flow of the performance. There is little like mouth clicks or a little thing in the background or maybe I accidentally bumped the keyboard or there's a car driving by. My closet shares no exterior walls with my house, so it's actually pretty well insulated but it's not perfect. An editor can go through and look at the waveform and do spectral editing to pull out particular frequencies to make a plane disappear. Or to minimize a little mouth click. So to discuss editing and mastering, editing is the process of going through and removing things by hand that need to be removed and adjusting the timing is necessary. And then mastering is running a set of plug-ins or filters balancing the EQ, making sure that everything is of equal loudness, that all the specs are met. There might be a file conversion process. So mastering is that process at the end.
Kate: Are you really in a closet under the stairs? Do you make sure no one else is home or is it like no one allowed to go up or down stairs when you're in the closet?
Carrie: Yeah, no one's allowed to go up and down stairs when I'm in the closet. And of course with Covid, everyone's home. So my husband is home, my two Children are home, my dog is always home and when they know that I'm recording, it's like the house is on lockdown and the Children are on mattresses because even just like bouncing and kicking their little heels against the edges of things. So they are on mattresses and my husband is working in the back and he has to take work calls quietly. But you know if someone needs to get up and pay, I can pause, right?
Mindy: Yeah. It's amazing the things that you have to consider, the things that get picked up. So when I'm getting ready to record, I have to make sure the ceiling fan is off. I have a very, very old house. So like basically I have to turn the furnace or the air conditioning off because when it kicks in it's so loud.
Carrie: I've been able to line my closet with mass loaded vinyl which is these sheets of think they're like metal particulates infused into vinyl, it's like a quarter of an inch thick and you lay it across the wall, you get a little air space and then you get the mass loaded vinyl and then there's a little more air space and then there's layers of moving blankets. So I've got both the deadening effect of the vinyl and then reducing the reflections from all of the blankets. And then I've closed pinned pretty little curtains up to cover some of the moving blankets so that the space feels a little bit more mine. It's a closet.
Mindy: I'm really curious what's your podcast?
Carrie: My podcast is Elderberry Tales. It's folktales and fairy tales for kids aged 4-8. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's sort of a continuation of the work I was doing as a preschool teacher as I let go of that career and moved fully into this. It's a way to stay connected with my students and my kids.
Mindy: Last thing Carrie, why don't you let our listeners know where they can find you like, either as a narrator or just to reach out and say hi?
Carrie: Yeah, definitely. I have a website Carrie Coello dot com where I post demos. That website is primarily to connect with authors. So if you're curious about my work and you want to know what kinds of books I've done and listen to some of my samples, then Carrie Coello dot com is the place to go for that. And then if you enjoy listening to my work and want updates on upcoming releases, I have a Facebook page Carrie Coello Voice where I keep folks updated on what's coming down the pike.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.