Should authors write books anticipating audiobook narrations?
With the surge of audiobooks popularity and the dramatization of fiction and non-fiction recitations, do authors plan for their books to publish their work as audiobooks too?
Additionally, if an author knows his book will be made into an audiobook, how does this knowledge alter the writing process? Does it affect the dialogue, narration POV, character casting, and the general format of the book? For instance, Sleeping Giants, by Sylvain Neuvel is a well-written story in an interview format conducted by the MC. I think this enabled the audiobook to feel a lot more like a radio show than a book.
Furthermore, do audiobooks imply more constraints on proofreaders, editors, and publishers?
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1 answer
I don't think an author has to plan for an audio book, I would plan on getting published in print first. Trying to write a story that can be a book, a movie, an audio-book, a comic, and a Television series is adding enough handcuffs and shackles that Houdini couldn't finish a draft.
That said, if you think an audio-book is your best bet, I suggest you use the screenplay writer's trick: Read it aloud. Screenplay writers read all the dialogue aloud, and make sure it is "sayable". Some written sentences that glide by just fine, cause stumbles in speech just due to the physical movements (and necessity to breathe) involved.
It doesn't matter in reading, readers aren't reading aloud, even if they hear the words in their head, they don't encounter the physicality obstacles of actually saying it aloud.
But in an audio-book, you'd like the whole book to be "sayable," both dialogue and exposition. So read it aloud and edit until you find it all feels like natural speech.
Note that doesn't mean you should exclude words and phrases you would not SAY in normal speech. Use them. Most novels are using sentences and words we very seldom use in normal conversation. The point is NOT to make the whole book sound like a conversation you might really have, the point is just to avoid sentence lengths that leave you gasping for oxygen, and to avoid tongue twisters and words that are likely to be mispronounced, or unintentional homonyms (sound-alikes) that could be misinterpreted.
But I would also presume an audio-book will be voiced by a professional trained voice (actor or speaker) and they know the tricks to make things sound clear. (You can practice this if you want with voice recognition on your phone, and seeing which words it confuses for other words -- You are not saying those words clearly).
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