The Art of the Cover, Part 2

Bringing it all together. You've got the artwork, now what?

Working with my designer, Charlotte Moore, we arrived at the cover for The Reluctant Dragon in stages, from sketch (far left), to the almost finished version. 

In all his glory, the complete The Reluctant Dragon audiobook cover by Charlotte Moore 

Topics in this blog:

• Sketching the cover
• Downloading and working with photos and art
• Specifications
• Rectangles to squares--a most important journey
• Using your own art or photographs

Just a reminder: this blog series is aimed at narrators who have taken on the responsibility of creating the completed cover for their public domain audiobooks, as is often the case with narrators working with Listen2aBook. The material covered in these blogs is not restricted to just one publisher, and there may be other publishers who welcome a complete audiobook package—from narration, to mastering, to completed covers for submission to Audible or another online audiobook distributors. I refer to Listen2aBook because I’ve been successfully narrating for L2aB for more than a year now, and I’ve enjoyed the total process of working with Steven Jay Cohen who has helped me move my last five books to Audible.

In the last blog, I talked about finding artwork, graphics, or photographs (or all three) suitable for the cover of your public domain audiobook. Now it’s time to begin assembling the several components of a memorable, sales-inspiring, cover.

Paper and Pencil

Sketch out your cover with pencil and paper before you open up your design program. You don’t need to be overly artsy or detailed at this stage; you’re just looking to organize your thoughts and visualize the general cover design. Draw a good-sized square—I’d recommend two squares per sheet of regular printer paper, so that’s two 5”x5” squares—and quickly sketch in the basic shapes of the artwork you’re considering for the cover. And I mean quickly. 

Don’t obsess over the sketch. You just want the key elements down on the paper so you can figure out the best placement for the title and your own credit line. Keep in mind that your cover needs to be distinguishable from a distance of three feet.

Tip #1: The Yardstick Standard

Just for giggles, find a yardstick and hold it up between your face and the screen on your laptop or desktop monitor. Now, look at images or texts on the screen and see which ones are easy to read or discern from a yard away, and which ones have elements too small to pick out. If you have to strain to figure out what is actually in an image, that tells you that your cover had better be easy to figure out from the same distance.

Cocktail Napkin Trick

If all else fails, and you get stuck on the drawing, pretend you’re at a restaurant or bar, and you’ve got a minute or two to sketch an idea out for someone sitting with you at the table. You grab a cocktail napkin or one of those square cork coasters, and sketch the basics of the cover. That’s the designer’s version of the 30-second elevator speech.

Squaring a Rectangle

You will find very quickly that some of the elements you want to place within the square cover’s borders are rectangles—like a sweeping landscape of mountains, or an image of a spiral galaxy, or wide cityscape, or the full width grill of a car—and you will have to make a decision: use the image as is, which will limit it in size on your square (and make it harder to recognize in the Audible version); or crop the image. 

When I was designing the cover for The Virginian, I used a photograph I’d taken of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains at sunset. As you can see below, it is definitely a rectangular image. But I really wanted to use it for the cover of the Western novel, so I made the decision to lop off about a third of the right side of the picture and a bit of the left to get to my square format.

One of the difficult parts of this cover was the font selection for the title. I worked closely with Brian Lee, a terrific designer in Raleigh, NC, to declutter my original font choice, and clean up the overall image. Brian's advice was to go with a classic font for the title, and drop the distracting graphics. In addition, he massaged the lower portion of the mountain picture to add an intensity to the darker areas that was lacking in the original. This is a classic example of how working with a designer can polish an otherwise amateur product. 

Three stages in the early layouts from a rectangular image, far left, to a square format. 

And here's the final cover as displayed on Audible

This version is about as simple as I could get. 

If you really need the entire rectangular element either because you are totally wedded to it, or because any cropping would take away from its visual message, just understand that when you place it, you will need to do something about the empty space that will remain in the square. The solution could be as simple as putting in a background color or pattern that works with the image, or using the open space for your title and credits or additional images or art elements. 

In the series of images below, I was trying to find one that would best portray key elements of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, This Side of Paradise, about a young man's journey from boyhood and Princeton, all the while navigating the tortuous world of love and loss. I had sketched out something that had one of Princeton's major buildings, but it was too tall and lacked a message by itself. Then I looked at drawings by C.D. Gibson, a noted artist of the time (famous for his Gibson Girls), and began narrowing my hunt until I found a horizontal panel that could be cropped to a tight square (final frame). By hand-coloring the image in Photoshop, and adding the title in a big, bold, shadowed font, my original idea became the Audible cover. 

These panels represent a long search for the right image to begin the cover design process. From the tall rectangle of Princeton, to the busy horizontal rectangle of two lovers, to the square format, the goal was to simplify and honor the theme of the book

This exercise has three benefits:

• It will simplify your thoughts about the cover;
• It forces you to work in a square;
• It will give you something to share with a designer should you go in that direction.

Although my own assembly workflow takes place using Photoshop CC, the drag-and-drop and sizing techniques are pretty much universal among graphic arts software—even basic ones. There are a couple of caveats, so let’s deal with those right off the bat:

1.  Image Size. Big is not only good, it is required. That tiny 147KB thumbnail image, with a resolution of 72 pixels per inch (ppi) you pulled up in a Google search might work on your laptop screen, or on your phone, but it will not stand up to Audible’s standards. Your completed cover is going to be 2400 pixels by 2400 pixels at a minimum resolution of 100 ppi. That’s a file that can range from 6-16MB, uncompressed, to anywhere from 1.5MB to 4MB compressed as a jpeg. When you are selecting your art, think big; you can always scale a photo or piece of artwork down from huge to modest, but you can’t expect something tiny to withstand significant enlargement.

2. Resolution. Be consistent in image resolution. When you begin sizing your photos or art, make sure all the elements you work with share the same ppi resolution. All my cover art elements are 100 ppi images. If I were making the images for sale as 20” x 40” posters, for example, the resolution would be much higher, 400 ppi at minimum, and probably much more. An audiobook cover is relatively tiny compared to that, but it still has to stand on-screen scrutiny and be readable from a distance of three feet. If you are working with a picture that is 100 ppi that you place with an art image that is, say, 150 ppi, the two elements will conflict with each other as you place them, scale them, or otherwise manipulate them. Whether you choose 100 ppi or 150 ppi or higher, stick to one resolution setting all the way through.

Tip #2: If you decide to work with a designer, be sure to impart these directives about size and resolution to him or her before they get started with their layouts. Few things will tick off a designer more than finding out that there were standards that had to be met right at the beginning.

Using your own art or photographs—with one caution

There are no rules against using your own art or photographs for your audiobook cover. The obvious advantage is that you own the work and are thus exempt, to a point, from the whole copyright issue. To a point. You still need to be very careful that your cover design, using your own photograph, does not include recognizable images of living persons from whom you have not gotten a model release. This means anyone who can be easily recognized in the photo—your Aunt Sarah, your office baseball team colleagues, a woman standing by the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, a photogenic Nebraska farmer, a colorful busker on a street corner in L.A.—will have to agree, via a model release, to your use of their image.

Let’s say you’ve just completed narrating a lovely book about babies, and you decide that the cover would pop with that great picture you took the other day of your neighbor’s six-month-old boy. Your neighbor loves the idea, and says, “Sure, that’s a wonderful shot, go ahead.” Get it in writing. I know Audible requires proof of a model release, and you should proceed on the assumption that all publishers will require similar proof.  

The other sticking point concerns recognizable properties with logos or other trademark signs on them. A New York cityscape featuring many buildings is pretty generic and probably okay to use on your cover; a picture of a hot little café down in Greenwich Village, with the restaurant’s name over the door, is subject to copyright and you need permission to use that picture on your audiobook cover. Just use common sense; put yourself in the shoes of the person whose picture you like, or the owner of the business you photographed, and ask yourself if you would want that image to be out on the Internet without written permission.

Coming Up Next

In the next installment of But What If I’m Write? I’ll address the subject of titles and the typefaces (fonts) that can really draw a potential buyer to your audiobook. You may not be able to change your audiobook’s title, but you most certainly can give it the star treatment when it comes to laying out your very own cover. 

The Art of the Cover, Public Domain Version

This week’s blog is the first of a three-part series about finding or creating the right art for the cover of your public-domain audiobook. While most of my comments are based on my own cover art for five public domain audiobooks produced by Listen2aBook, the ideas behind selecting art that will give your audiobook that first good impression are universal.

 Here’s my theory on the whole create-your-cover thing: The 30-second elevator pitch

Because you have studied the book, taken notes (see the September 10 blog), and nurtured the story with your voice, proofing, editing, and mastering, you know every character, every scene, and, most important, the very idea of the book. You know in your sleep what the cover possibilities are. If there are strong characters who have carried the plot along from start to finish, you can see their faces—there’s a cover. If the story is sweeping and epic, you can picture the landscapes or locales that provide the story’s background—there’s a cover. If the book delves into the intellect and the world of ideas, religion, government, there are images that call to mind those very concepts—those are cover ideas. Reduce all the elements of the story to a 30-second elevator pitch and describe your audiobook to your passenger. There’s the core of your cover.

Why should you be in control of your own art? 

• First impressions count. Great cover art may not, by itself, sell your audiobook; but mediocre or murky cover art will do nothing to encourage customers to buy.

• Just as the beauty of narrating public domain books is not worrying about publication rights, gathering public domain artwork to match your audiobook is equally hassle-free. 

• It’s creative. It gives you a ton of control over how your book will be seen in a very competitive market, and because you form such a close relationship with the book’s subject matter, you’ll probably already have some idea of what the cover should look like by the time you complete the narration. 

• It’s a matter of dollars and cents. If you can pull the art together, you can minimize or eliminate the expenses of hiring a designer, and in a royalty market, every cent you can save upfront improves your cash flow down the road.

• It’s gratifying. When my first public domain book, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, made it to Audible, I felt an extra pump just looking at a cover I’d designed. It felt like there was more ownership of the audiobook, and it was a great feeling.

My First Public Domain Audiobook

You don’t have to be an artsy designer type to create your own cover art.

What you need is a sense of what you would want to see on the cover of your audiobook. I won’t minimize the value of bringing design and artistic abilities to the process, but if you are competent at downloading photos or graphics, sizing images with your favorite program, and if you like playing with typefaces, you can produce your own audiobook cover art. Really.

You really don’t need Photoshop to create your cover art.

I promise you, you don’t. I use Photoshop CC because I’ve been a Photoshop user as a professional and in retirement for 25 years, and I am invested in it as a photographer and designer. But, as these alternatives suggested by creativeblog.com and gizmodo.com and beebom.com indicate, there are perfectly suitable graphics programs that offer all the tools you’ll need to do your own cover art.

If you do want to work with a designer, you can help reduce your costs.

By knowing what you want your cover to look like, and by having already selected some images and typefaces (fonts), you can compress the design stage and the time you spend working with a designer. Of the five covers covered in this blog, The Reluctant Dragon was completely produced by my daughter, Charlotte, an artist/designer; The Virginian was a blending of a photograph of mine and the fine-tuning of a designer who came up with the most appropriate typeface; and three of the covers--The Lincoln Trio, This Side of Paradise, and The Beautiful and Damned--incorporated public-domain images or artwork I either photographed or downloaded to which I added typefaces appropriate to the books’ titles and credits.

Cover Art by Charlotte Moore

To choose new or retrieve from the distant past?

Let’s define public domain in two categories: Contemporary photos and images that have been released to the public by their still-living creators; and photographs and images dating back more than 70+ years (before 1923), for which the copyrights have expired and the creators are no more. For a more detailed (but easy to read) explanation of what constitutes a public domain work, take a look at Public Domain Sherpa.

Free-but-really-not-for-free public domain images (New)

There are recently-created public domain images all across the Web, and whether you choose to go diving deep into your favorite search engine for public domain images, or visit or subscribe to public domain image suppliers like Pixabay or Public Domain Pictures, there are literally millions of pictures available to you. I haven’t explored all the public domain image sites, but I have found that while quite a few offer a “free” download option for their images, they often promote a subscription-with-fee upgrade for higher resolutions versions of the free images.

However…and this is a biggie…you are responsible for making sure there are no copyright or other rights issues attached to the image. Reputable web-based companies that provide catalogues of public domain pictures or graphics will say they are covered by a Creative Commons or a Public Copyright license which is, in theory, an okay by the creator of the image to download the work. It behooves (good word) you to be cautious and confirm the free-use of any image you download for commercial purposes (like an audiobook cover).

Tip #1: It is possible that the creator of a Creative Commons image requires a credit line on the image, so check carefully before you proceed.

Really for free public domain images (Distant Past)

On my desk here in the Dungeon rests a rather weighty 113-year-old art portfolio, titled EIGHTY DRAWINGS INCLUDING THE WEAKER SEX: THE STORY OF A SUSCEPTIBLE BACHELOR BY C.D. GIBSON. Yep, the same Charles Dana Gibson who gave the world The Gibson Girl. The book is a first printing, and more than qualifies as a public domain source. The book has been in the family since Charles Gibson gave it to my great grandfather shortly after the portfolio was published.

When I was narrating F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, which takes place in the 1900-1910s, I read a description in an early chapter of the protagonist’s first day at Princeton when he stops by a college store and sees through the front window, “…prints of Gibson Girls that lined the walls.” And because the book’s hero, Amory Blaine, is constantly falling in and out of relationships with beautiful women of that era, the Gibson Girl ideal is sustained throughout the story. I am fortunate to have a 113-year-old reference source right at hand, but if I’d not had the book, and still wanted the Gibson Girl image, it was no further away than a quick Google search of “Gibson Girl images’ (see screenshot below).

Original Art from a 113-Year-Old Portfolio
Colorization and Title by Me

Public Domain from the Public Records

In my search for images to illustrate the cover of The Lincoln Trio: Abraham Lincoln’s Three Greatest Speeches, I turned to Google and found a photograph of Lincoln delivering his Second Inaugural address (one of the three speeches narrated in the audiobook). I specifically chose the image from the Library of Congress (LOC) because it comes from a trusted public source—not that I needed to worry about a public domain rights question for a 150-year-old photograph, but caution is a good thing when it comes to the use of images.

Image from the Library of Congress

Tip #2: Whenever you can source an image through a respected public records site like the Library of Congress, you can be pretty sure you’re getting the real deal.

Tip #3: Download the largest image possible. Audiobook covers need to be sized to 2400 x 2400 pixels, at a screen resolution no less than 72 dots or pixels per inch (dpi).

Public Domain from the past (and free) 

Sometimes, the artwork you want for your cover is actual artwork—a drawing, an oil painting, a watercolor, a sculpture, maybe even cave art. Common sense, and U.S. copyright law, suggests that if the art was published prior to 1923, it’s probably available for free. Such was the case for my cover of The Beautiful and Damned, which features the art of Neysa McMein, an early 20^th century artist known for her covers of major magazines of the day. This particular image, painted and published in 1916, matched perfectly the mid-date of the novel, and portrays a young woman who, to my way of thinking, represents the heroine of the story.  Even though McMein died in 1949, the artwork, published in 1916, is fair game for downloading and repurposing as cover art for an audiobook.

Public Domain Art From 1916

Some caveats about public domain works.

It is incumbent on you, the end-user of the work, to be certain it is in the public domain. A 2016 photograph of an 1890 painting of Big Ben in London, no matter how generic in appearance, is a protected work even though the painting itself is not protected. Unless that photograph is part of a government collection made available to the public, or the creator of the photograph has released it under Creative Commons, or the photograph was made prior to 1923, you should consider skipping it (or, fly to London and take your own picture). Also, if the work of art or photograph, even if published prior to 1923, features a still-living and recognizable person, you should tread carefully when considering using the image for an audiobook cover.

Coming Up in But What If I’m Write?

• Downloading and working with artwork for your audiobook cover
• Specifications
• Using your own art or photographs
• Selecting typefaces
• Positioning the Title
• Adding credit lines

Selecting the Sales Sample for Your Audiobook

The Beautiful and Damned Sample’s Waveform

One of the trickier tasks to accomplish once you’ve mastered your audiobook, is selecting a sample clip to append to the image of your book on Audible or any other audiobook publication website. It sounds so simple, but once you get into your book and own certain characters, when you’ve described grand and glorious landscapes, or when you help your listener sneak around dark corridors of a suspenseful plot, picking out one snapshot-like snippet of the story becomes a real challenge.

Let’s be frank here: The reason the clip exists is to hook a buyer for your audiobook. There are other narrator-fisherpersons on the publishing dock, casting their samples out in the hopes of snagging a passing fish…er… sale. Here is the Audible search results page for my just-released audiobook, The Beautiful and Damned. I'm down at the bottom, and it's a long way up to the top if sales don't happen. 

The Beautiful and Damned

Take Good Notes

Remember when your parents, teachers, or professors told you to take good notes? If you did, you know they paid off when it came down to finals. The same holds true in audiobook narration and in the selection of a sample for sales. 

Because I like to record medium-length audiobooks—anywhere from 9-15 hours long—finding a three- to five-minute clip requires extensive note-taking throughout the narration process. Although my reading source during narration is usually a PDF of the book displayed on a monitor adjacent to my DAW (digital audio workplace) monitor, I keep a hard copy of the book next to my keyboard, placing sticky tabs on pages with unusual pronunciations, special effects possibilities, character characteristics, and passages with potential for clips. And I must admit to the heresy of writing directly on the pages of the book!

(Tip #1: Buy a used copy, or at least a cheap copy, online. Be sure it matches the version you're narrating. Hardbacks are easier to markup, but paperbacks cost less.)

Don't be afraid to mark up a hard copy of your book

Plot-Driven Sample

In selecting the clip from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, I chose a point in the lives of the book’s two key characters, Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert, in the run-up to their full-blown relationship.

Think of yourself as the director of a play, with notes for characters and scenes 

Having read the book twice before beginning the narration, I had a pretty good idea of what characters I wanted a sample to include and what stage in the story the clip should describe. I chose a point near the end of the concluding half of chapter two, a point at which the two lead players were just beginning to show their characters to each other and to the reader. The setting is the Marathon, a New York City jazz-café on Broadway, described by Fitzgerald as, ‘[A]n unsung palace of pleasure,” where the inhabitants are, “…very rich and the very poor, the very dashing and the very criminal….” 

Harvard graduate Anthony, 25, the novel’s tragic male protagonist is seated at a table with the beautiful 22-year-old Gloria. She is fascinated by the circus of customers surrounding their table, and as Anthony watches her take it all in he finds himself completely enraptured by her loveliness and her excitement at the music, the dancers, and the swirl of life around them. He is astonished by her reaction to the scene before them: “I belong here,” she murmured. “I’m like these people.” Although the sample is only five minutes out of 15 hours of audio, it should be enough to intrigue someone who is considering purchasing the audiobook.

(Tip #2: A sample without dialogue, or with very little dialogue, can work if the scene itself has enough plot-foreshadowing elements to lead the listener to want more.)

The Reluctant Dragon

Voice acting Sample

If your goal is to use the sample to highlight your range of vocal characterization, then grabbing a few minutes of back-and-forth among the story’s key players, as with this light-hearted sample of a three-way conversation between the Boy, the Dragon, and St. George, from Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon, will showcase your voice acting skills in just a few minutes. This particular book is only 56 minutes long, so a clip like this one represents nearly all of the major characters in just a single sample. I selected this clip because the characters themselves describe the whole point of the story in one scene: St. George has been called to a small English village to confront a troublesome dragon. The dragon, a poetry-spouting, fire-breathing beast, has been befriended by a young boy, who is trying to keep the dragon out of harm’s way, while, at the same time, appeasing St. George and the villagers.

When I first volunteered to narrate the public domain book for Listen2aBook, I’d forgotten how many versions of the book were out there, and how many different voices had brought the story to life over the past 70+ years. The Boy was not too difficult: a light, confident, upper register voice would be fine. St. George’s voice fell well within my own natural range between baritone and bass; I just had to give him a bit of gravitas (I imagined I was giving a fatherly “the talk” to my own children). The Dragon, the star of the book, was ultimately given over to a W.C. Fields treatment, but not in a ridiculous way; he’s a sensitive guy, well-read, and thoughtful.

Owen Wister's Epic Western, The Virginian

The Sweeping Story Sample

If your book is sweeping or epic in nature, covering years of territory and a broad cast of characters, then you really have to work at isolating a sample that will encourage a listener to buy the book because they are so intrigued by the chosen character or characters, or the scene-setting descriptions that they feel compelled to hear more. With the Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, a public domain novel by Owen Wister, the 19th-century story spans half-a continent, disparate cultures, and years of plot in a tale of a cowboy and a schoolmarm, a wise old western judge, a Bennington, Vermont great aunt, and a black-hatted villain named Trampas. The Virginian’s sample is pulled from the opening chapter as the unnamed storyteller describes a tense poker game in a bar in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. It is the first meeting of the Virginian and Trampas, and it sets the stage for the bitterness, violence, and final showdown that drives the story along.

(Tip #3: Be sure to treat an anonymous narrator—particularly one who is a first-person character—with the same enthusiasm you give to your main players. Anonymous though they may be, they are still very much a part of the story)

Wrapping It Up

Selecting a sample for your audiobook’s sales pitch can be challenging, but it’s not a Sophie’s Choice. Yes, you will wonder after you sent the whole audio package off to your publisher or producer if maybe you should have chosen a different clip. It’s quite likely that you’ll open up the book, or the audio files and think you’ve found something much better. “Drat!” will be your first reaction (okay, maybe not Drat, but those are the four letters I chose). You may wonder if the clip is too long, too short, too this or too that. If you did your groundwork, took notes as you went along, considered the plot elements and flow of the book, and then went with what you felt best portrayed your narration skills and would capture the attention of a potential buyer, you did your job. Put the second-guessing aside and get started on your next book.

The Fear and Loathing of Audiobook Narration

I’ve just completed my fourth fiction audiobook, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Beautiful and Damned,” for Listen2aBook. It is my eleventh audiobook overall; with one exception, my previous books, all non-fiction, were produced by BeeAudio. The exception was an ACX-produced audiobook for a self-publishing novelist. Eleven audiobooks is a very modest count for sure, but not bad for an older (67) retiree who spent the first 45 years in the labor force as a photojournalist, writer, editor, press secretary, and speechwriter. Somewhere in there was time spent voicing local radio commercials and narrating government public relations videos (think a 12-part series titled “Abraham Lincoln, a 150-Year Anniversary”).  And, for the past eight years, I’ve been a volunteer audio news narrator for the Metropolitan Washington Ear, and an audio-textbook reader for Learning Ally. Between those two organizations, I add about 200 on-mic-hours per year to my home recording studio schedule.

When I retired three years ago, a colleague of mine suggested I consider audiobook narration as a productive way to ease into my golden years, and he connected me with someone in the industry who took a chance on the recommendation and opened the door to an audition. Three months later, on Christmas Eve, 2013, I got a text message offering me my first audiobook job, “The Faiths of the Founding Fathers,” by David Holmes. 

Over the next two years, I recorded six more non-fiction titles. In 2014, I received my home studio certification from BeeAudio to record, edit, and master audiobooks. That certification opened a very different door for me, one that led to a great deal of fear and loathing as I ventured into the world of total control over what comes out of my studio. It also led me to Mike Vendetti of Listen2aBook, in 2015, and to Steven Jay Cohen, my producer at L2aB, who helped me discover the myriad audio possibilities of public domain books.

To review, public domain books are novels, short stories, children’s books, etc., whose copyrights have expired; their authors are long-gone, and their publishing houses and/or estates no longer have a legal hold on the material. As a very rough rule of thumb, books published prior to 1923, under U.S. copyright law, are in the public domain. Exceptions abound, and it’s always wise to use a sources like Project Gutenberg or goodreads to verify a book’s status in the public domain. In June of 2016, Steven Jay Cohen hosted a YouTube discussion about selecting public domain books, and it’s worth the watch to get a good idea about what titles work for audiobook narrators. 

 Two paragraphs ago, I used the words fear and loathing in relation to audiobook production. The truth of the matter is, for me at least, the freedom to select and record complex books like Owen Wister’s “The Virginian, A Horseman of the Plains,” or the first two F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, “This Side of Paradise” and “The Beautiful and Damned,” puts tremendous pressure on me to “get it right” as I interpret “right.” There is great performance latitude inherent in narrating any significant work of fiction. Multiple characters enter and exit only to reenter years later. Protagonists age and change in voice and morph in attitudes about themselves and toward other characters. Antagonists rise out of the muck and their voices alternate between cool and terrifying. Women are bold, men cower, children are wise, rubes are actually clever.

Discomfiting stereotypes abound in many public domain books—in the books of the late 1800s and early 1900s, society’s views of foreigners, southerners, blacks, the poor, and the lower strata of humanity were often unkind by today’s standards, and their depictions in the books of 1916, for example, lead to awkward moments in the enlightened 2016 recording studio.

In Fitzgerald’s “The Beautiful and Damned” there is a Japanese houseboy named Tanalahaka, Tana, for short. In one scene, Tana is speaking to the book’s hero, Anthony Patch, about his idea to invent a new kind of typewriter:

“I been think—typewutta—has, oh, many many many many thing. Oh many many many many.”

“Many keys. I see.”

“No-o? Yes—key. Many many many many lettah. Like so a-b-c.”

 “Yes, you’re right.”

“Wait. I tell.” He screwed his face up in a tremendous effort to express himself: “I been think—many words—end same. Like i-n-g.”

“You bet. A whole raft of them.”

“So—I make—typewutta—quick. Not so many lettah…”

There is no other way to narrate Tana but to totally immerse oneself in Fitzgerald’s 1922 jingoistic, “splintered English” characterization of a sing-song Asian who is scripted unequivocally to say, “In my countree…all time—peoples—eat rice—because haven’t got. Cannot eat what no have got.”

And Tana is but one of more than 20 main characters and an additional dozen or so supporting cast who come and go throughout the audiobook’s 15 hours of action taking place over ten years of storyline. So, how does a narrator choose which voices to work with…if any voices are chosen at all?

My first long public domain audiobook for Listen2aBook, Owen Wister’s “The Virginian, A Horseman of the Plains,” presented me with my first narration style options: straight read; minor inflections to differentiate key characters; or full out multi-character voices. I read the book twice, noting carefully (writing them down) each character and his or her speech patterns as defined by the author. I practiced each voice, seeing if I was up to the task of giving life to the words of a gentle cowboy from the Southeast, a young girl from Vermont, a beloved western judge, a mean-spirited, gruff talking bad guy, various side-kicks, young children, and a lovely and wise great-aunt from New England. I recorded each character half a dozen times or more, making individual audio tracks using PreSonus’ Studio One digital audio workstation (DAW), and listening back to see if I was even close to making them believable characters. 

Keep in mind, I’m a 67-year-old white guy with a baritone voice edged by a soft Virginia accent that can deepen to reflect many years of growing up in the South. Tuning that voice to respectfully mimic a 20-year-old schoolmarm from New England, while, in the same paragraph offering her the hero’s drawling sweet nothings from the back of his horse does take a bit of courage and probably a lot of chutzpa. It wouldn’t hurt, I thought, that I’d had some stage experience, most recently as the wise-cracking New York gangster Nicely Nicely Johnson in the community theater production of “Guys and Dolls.”
I applied that same pre-performance rigor to the next three books for Listen2aBook, one of which, Kenneth Grahame’s fun, “The Reluctant Dragon,” had me giving the eponymous dragon the voice of W.C. Fields!

But what about the fear and loathing I mentioned earlier? Well, as I immersed myself in each audiobook narration—particularly the long and character-complex “The Beautiful and Damned”-- I would suddenly find myself doubting everything about my efforts: Was I silly or reckless to try to give life to so many characters; was my approach to interpreting Fitzgerald legitimate; would my engineering be up to the task; would it pass muster with my producer? And, finally, was this going to be a book anyone would listen to?

In the end, when it comes to the universe of public domain books, the narrator must give himself or herself full latitude to play however many roles he or she wants to try. But, once you start down that road, don’t look back. Stay true to every character you create, stick with them, grow into them, adapt with them. Many of my characters started out with voices they didn’t end up with. Age, circumstances, emotions all modified their speech patterns, tones, and deliveries. Men’s voices thicken with age, women’s voices mellow and sometimes downshift half-an-octave or so over the time period of a long novel. The spirited tenor-toned boy who goes off to the trenches of World War I, may come back a dusty-throated, coughing baritone.  With respect to fearing misinterpretation of the author’s intent, you have to do a little sleuthing, and exercise some common sense coupled with historical sense. For the Fitzgerald books, I researched Fitzgerald and developed useful information about his writing methods, his reasons for naming certain characters, his worldview about the times in which he wrote, and, of course, his own personal demons. When you know about the author, and you explore the period of his or her book, you begin to think like the author, and your narration takes on a more credible tone.

It’s very important to understand the time period of a given book before you begin narration. There will be terms and pronunciations familiar to the people of that era that are either subtly, or quite different 100 years later. A young college man of 1915 who is described by an author as gay and light hearted, is probably not gay in the 2016 sense, and a narrator should not make the mistake of misinterpreting that characteristic without the author’s specific permission as written. (Nor should a narrator presume any nuances of voice for a gay character written in the 21st century. Listen to the author.) The same is true of people of color. If the author specifically writes a 1915 black man saying, “Yassuh, I’ze gwin do it,” then the narrator has permission to try to achieve that slow drawling effect. But, if the author has a 1915 black man saying, “Yes sir, I’m going to do it,” the narrator must not presume anything other than the tone or quality of the voice of a man saying those words. 

In instances like these, think of the author as the director of the story, giving you, the narrator, specific cues about each character’s speech. Read carefully; every adjective and adverb in the sentences surrounding a quoted text constitute your direction for each character you play. Fitzgerald left me no choice at all when it came to narrating the Japanese Tana’s voice.

The loathing I’ve hinted at begins with the mastering process. Adobe Audition CC is my DAW of choice when it comes to assembling, proofing, editing, and mastering the audiobook tracks I created in Studio One. It is in Audition that I hear my voice across the broad expanse of a one-hour or longer file, and I usually loathe what I hear during the first pass. It’s not the breaths, or plosives, or throat clicks, or dry mouth pops, or lip snaps that bother me; those are the most easily remedied artifacts of the recording process. It is, frankly, me that I don’t like. And it is that “me” that I have to corral and temper and come to terms with before I can do any useful work on an audiobook. Many of my voice artist friends and colleagues express the same loathing, the same, “I hate how I sound” grumbling that accompanies their recording sessions.

You’re there with your headphones on, your voice coming through oh-so-clearly, and you say to yourself, “Is this what everyone hears?” No, it’s not. What you’re hearing is the self-critical you, the worrier you, the doubtful you who wonders in the dark of the night, alone in your studio, “How is it that everyone tells me I have a great voice when I sound like this?” You listen to a few minutes of you and wonder if your producer is going to can the whole thing, if it was a mistake to sign up for this book, if you’ve screwed up. You imagine that your producer, Steven Jay Cohen at Listen2aBook, will gently counsel you to find another hobby, and you believe to a certainty that Audible will never put another audiobook of yours into their catalogue.

Let me assure you that none of the above fears reflects reality. You’re fine. You are just playing a headgame on yourself, and it’s completely normal. Chalk it up to how creative people think. I’m a relatively well-published photographer, yet I often think my work is mediocre. I’ve been a successful writer for years, and still I imagine that the next piece I write will fail. And, I’m an audiobook narrator with a small list of books on Audible, and I still can’t help but go through the yips and doubts that stalk me when I begin the final leg of creating my audiobooks. 

Here’s my unsolicited advice: Separate the voice in your head from the voice on the audio track. They are not the same. Get into the story you’ve just recorded; put yourself into the book and picture the characters you just played, the plot you just twisted, the journey you just accomplished. As you make your edits, think about the pacing, the pauses, the hurried moments. Did you get them right? Tighten the track here, open it up there. Is the heroine really sobbing, or just sniffling? Is that a tense moment, or does it fall a bit flat? Where once the author was your director, you are now the story’s conductor, the mouse your baton, moving things along and interweaving dialogue and exposition to keep your listeners eager for more. Forget how you think you sound…cast the doubts aside…go for the whole darn story! Of course your producer will love it, of course Audible will post it. Whew.

Now to the last question: Is this a book anyone will listen to? I think we all ask this one, but we also know the answer is that we cannot know the answer. I’ve gotten to the stage in life where I think I’ve learned to put some questions out of my hands. All those of us who are narrators—particularly those of us still relatively new to the marketplace of audiobook production—have to focus on what we can control, and do our level best with the skillset we’ve got. My skillset does not include audiobook market prognostication, so I don’t waste mental energy worrying about it. What I do know is that I record certain books because I like the subject matter and I enjoy the challenge of translating the written word into a credible spoken word product. Once one of my books goes out, I’ll do my best to flog it around social media, but I refuse to obsess over the book’s likeability. Of course, I would like one of those Sally Fields’ moments when I can say, “They like me, they really like me!” but that’s not why I took up audiobook narration. I do it because I love it. And when I remind myself of that simple fact, the fear and loathing subsides, and the fun takes over.