An audiobook listener on Goodreads wrote recently:
“I’m hoping the powers-that-be realize this (and care) and we’ll see more audiobooks being narrated by dual-gender narrators.
And I don’t mean simply dividing up the chapters between a male and female narrator to read…I like the dialogue narrated by the relevant gender.”
I can tell you why most books have a solo narrator: COST.
I produced and co-narrated the 4-book Blue Suede Memphis mystery series (fun, cozy mysteries with romantic elements) where I voiced the narrative and all of the female parts, and a male actor (my husband Drew!) voiced all of the male parts — a narration style known as DUET.
A DUAL narration occurs where 2 actors narrate all the characters’ lines in the chapters associated with their main characters’ points of view.
While I love the sound of the finished product and agree that having both genders makes the production so much more interesting, it’s a very time-consuming and tedious process to create an audiobook this way.
First, you have to have production rights to even be able to do a multi-voice production. One mid-size publisher told me that we couldn’t use 2 voices on a particular book because they didn’t have the production rights for it. I guess the production rights allow you to make a play or movie from the book’s text and are somehow different than audio rights.
Next, you cast the 2 actors and must coordinate their recording schedules. If I weren’t married to my co-star, the scheduling step alone could have derailed the production. The schedule is less of a consideration when the narrators are reading whole chapters instead of performing dialogue.
Once the schedule is worked out, you turn to the cost of studio time, both for the recording and the editing/mastering. The Big 5 publishers can afford real-time studio hours in big cities for their high-profile, bestselling titles. Everyone else — small and mid-size publishers and indie authors — usually looks to control costs by casting narrators with home studios. Depending on the project, the editing might be done by the publisher, the narrator, or an editor sub-contracted by the narrator.
Normally, my rule of thumb is that it takes 2 hours in real time to record 1 finished hour and 3 hours in real time to proof/edit/master for 1 finished hour. With the books in this series, we spent at least an additional hour on both phases. A book that runs 10 hours with 1 narrator (or 2 or more narrators who read different chapters) therefore might require 50 hours in real time to record and edit. The same book with 2 narrators and interspersed dialogue might require 70 hours of production time.
Studio time isn’t the only cost consideration. I also have the opportunity cost of other projects or promotion that I can’t do when an audiobook requires more time than usual to complete.
In this series, I did all of the narrative portions and the female voices. I left airtime in the dialogue where male characters spoke. As Drew directed me, he mouthed his lines and cued me in for my next sentence.
Then, we switched places; I directed him as we recorded his parts:
- I cued him by playing my audio in his headphones.
- I pressed Record in the software.
- He delivered his lines. Everything true of solo narration is true here, too, as far as re-recording to fix inflection, accent, flubs, etc. In fact, it may be harder to be the 2nd person because you’re kind of coming into the dialogue cold. I think that person has to work harder to connect to the text because they weren’t immersed in the story to that point.
- I stopped recording before he spoke over my next line.
- Sometimes we originally left too much time for his parts, sometimes not enough. Sometimes his delivery caused me go back to my part and re-do it to change some nuance.
As a result, editing the dialogue is EXTREMELY time-consuming. When I am narrating all voices, as is customary, I naturally leave the appropriate amount of time between characters. The editor is not constantly adjusting the timing to make the conversations flow smoothly and naturally. In these productions with true M/F dialogue, the editor’s job was even tougher given the timing issues.
Due to the considerable amount of time needed for this kind of production, I’m not too eager to produce another one. Instead, I’m looking for dual narration projects with 2-3 1st person POVs (romance or mystery) where each narrator is responsible for entire chapters.
Do you like hearing books with 2 narrators? Do you know of a book for which you’d like to hear a dual narration in the audiobook? Please leave a note in the comments!
Great article on the pros and cons of dual narration, Karen. Thanks, as always, for sharing your experience. 🙂
Hi, Lee Ann! Thanks so much for the comment and for tweeting my article! I truly appreciate your support!
Karen
Interesting article Karen, answers a lot OT the questions I didn’t know how to ask!
Timely too, considering my review of Hound Dog Blues.
Its good for us listeners and reviewers to learn about the whole process,
Thanks
Hi, Bec! Thanks for the comment! In fact, your wonderful review of Hound Dog Blues triggered this article! I had written most of it a while back but had not finalized it. So, I thank YOU for jogging my memory on it!
Thanks again for your interest!
Karen
I would love to hear Sherrilyn Kenyon’s books with dual narration. I buy just about everything she writes. right now, I listen to MK Eidem because she does a superb job with dual narration. her characters are each read by the correct gender, and since is a romance/Scifi book it even has very subtle special effects in the background which takes it to a whole new level. This is a indie author, so I cant imagine how she affords it, but it must be worth the cost because she’s done five books like this now.
I also believe this type of dual narration sells more books. I go out of my way to find them. If it’s with a chapter swap instead of interactive between characters, I return it.
Hi, Syn! I agree a dual narration is more interesting. If a producer hires a studio that can accommodate both performers at once with microphones in 2 booths, the recording time is reduced. The recording and editing time doesn’t go up significantly.
However, the studio rental fees would go up, as would the complexity of coordinating schedules.
As more listeners come to the medium, the number of full cast recordings with effects is likely to increase.
Thanks for the interesting comment!
Karen
Karen, just want to thank you very much for this post. I am an indie author (my literary historical novel, The Tremble of Love: A Novel of the Baal Shem Tov, published last December), and I am currently preparing for production of the audiobook (working with an audiobook production studio). It is a long book, with an unusually large cast of characters spanning childhood to 60s, and the novel has very strong male and female primary characters. My sense is that having at least two narrators would serve the audiobook, but I have found little written about this to help me explore this option. Your very pragmatic post helps me to consider this option more deeply and I am thankful.
I do have a question: point of view changes quite often in the novel (within chapters and among numerous characters of different ages). Would you maintain a single narrative voice but have dialogue read by the gender speaking? Or would you have the narrative voice change, too and correspond with the gender of the point of view of the passage? Either way, for the very reasons you enumerate, given that narrators will not be together in real time (as was the case with you and your husband), this could be quite challenging to orchestrate, yes?
Would love to hear your suggestions.
Thank you!
Ani
Hi, Ani! I’ve been meaning to write an update on this post to indicate the differences between Dual and Duet narrations.
Dual narrations occur when 2 narrators read entire chapters or sections, including the dialogue for the other gender. Narrators are often in different studios for these narrations.
In a Duet narration, the female narrator reads all of the female dialogue, and the male narrator reads all of the male dialogue. The books my husband and I performed were duet narrations. As I indicated in the article, Duet narrations are much more difficult and expensive to produce because of the timing of the dialogue. The whole point of a Duet narration is the immediacy of one actor’s reaction to the other.
I make this distinction because 2 or more narrators are a necessity only for sections of the text written in 1st person. When the book was written in 3rd person, a single narrator usually performs the entire book. It’s not unusual for one narrator to tackle large casts of characters; in fact, Jim Dale performed over 140 characters in one of the Harry Potter books!
Since I haven’t read your book and am not producing your audiobook, I can only give you general comments based on a cursory look inside and at a few reviews on Amazon. It looks like a man is the central character for the whole book and that you wrote the book in 3rd person with the POV indicated in the subtext by free indirect discourse. If that’s the case, I would cast a single male narrator to perform the entire book.
Your biggest challenge will be in casting someone with strong language skills needed for correct pronunciation of the Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish words in your extensive Glossary. Ideally, you will want to hire a male narrator who is Jewish as he will authentically and intuitively understand concepts that would require explanation to someone of another faith.
I hope these thoughts are helpful. Once your audiobook is completed, check out my Audiobook Marketing Cheat Sheet for lots of great ideas to promote it. Best wishes for your success!
Karen
Karen, thank you so much for your helpful reply and for the clarification between duet and dual narrators. I have one further question; please forgive me if the answer is contained/implied in what you wrote and I’ve missed it. In the case of duet narration, who reads the narration of the story, what is not the male or female characters’ dialogue? Thanks!
Hi, Ani! Since a duet narration is generally only done for 1st person reads, the narrator for that character would also speak the narrative parts.
My books were actually written in 3rd person. The main character was female, so I read all of the narrative portions in addition to all of the female dialogue.
Thanks for the good question!
Karen
Karen, thanks for this great post. Can you explain why you didn’t record the duet dialogue scenes together vs separately? That’s what I’m planning to do as the female narrator of my 1st person novel with the male who’ll be doing all of the male characters. I’m hoping that will help conversations flow and save some editing time. Thank you.
Hi, Ruth! While my booth is large enough for 2 people in it at once, we recorded the way we did for 2 reasons:
1) We only had the 1 microphone, and I didn’t want each person to speak off-mic.
2) One person did the directing and engineering for the other.
The editing was definitely a nightmare even though we left time to punch in the male lines. The timing had to be adjusted after every punch-in so the dialogue sounded natural. An ideal setup has both actors recording at the same time on 2 mics.
I hope these thoughts help.
Karen
Thanks! We’re going to record at the same time on 2 mics…testing the setup next week. Maybe when the book is done, I’ll write a post about it since there doesn’t seem to be much out there.
Hi, Karen! Thank you so much for this very informative article! I stumbled upon a romance series by Amy Daws that are narrated in duet, and I fell in love with this narration style. Unfortunately Audible doesn’t have a search filter for this type of narration, but I so wish it did. I’ve been searching through Google now, but the results are not what I need. If you know of any other romances read as duets, pls share.
Hi, Rachel! Thanks for the nice note.
A group of romance narrators announce their new releases, including an abundance of duet narrations, on this Facebook page.
Happy listening! ❤️
Karen
Hi Karen,
I’ve been hitting a big snag in putting together an audiobook for the novel I’m completing right now, VY: A Beginning And An End. I’ve self-narrated 14 of the 25 chapters and I’m at just shy of 5 hours of audio right now, but I have significant dialogue between the male main character and roughly 8-10 female characters with various accents and preferred vocal ranges. Having been in choir for 7 years, I have above average vocal control, but with my Bass2 natural voice tone, narrating female characters is next to impossible. What do you suggest for that?
Hi, Steven! Thanks for the note.
If you had asked my advice before you started narrating, I would have referred you to my article Should An Author Narrate Her Audiobook?. Even now, I still suggest you read it. You may change your mind about narrating your book and instead hire a professional narrator or 2 narrators if your text calls for it.
The situation you describe is one that requires acting skills, which aren’t easily or quickly obtained. If you decide to continue with the narration, this article on my site NarratorsRoadmap.com has some guidance and resources to help you. I also advise you to work with an audiobook coach listed on this page.
I hope this info is helpful. Best wishes for your success!
Karen