APAC, NYC: An Annual Migration Where Narrators Gather in a Volume of Voices

[This is a pretty long post for BWIIW?, but stick with it, please. There is a personal story of attending a conference that frightened me in the months and weeks leading up to it; and it is a little bit of education into the home-studio world of audiobook narrators. There is so much more to be said that I can't say here without writing a book, and I apologize up front to all my narrator, producer, and APA friends who I did not mention. As always, feel free to add your name to my blog's subscribers.]

I am an audiobook narrator. I am also a photographer, photojournalist, writer, pilot, former government employee, husband, dad, and granddad. But, when I’m asked, “What do you do?” I am quick to reply, “I narrate audiobooks.” My license plate is NARR80R, just to confirm the vanity of my work to passersby in the shopping centers here in Northern Virginia, and while driving down I-95 when I am visiting my family in North Carolina.

This past week, I took a great leap from the comfort of my home here in Alexandria, Virginia where I have a modest studio we lovingly call “The Dungeon,” and ventured to New York City to attend the Audio Publishers Association Conference (APAC), a migration of talent (I think more than 600 of us, for which there should be some sort of collective noun. If there can be an exaltation of larks, a pandemonium of parrots, a convocation of eagles or a charm of finches…perhaps a gathering of narrators could be a volume of voices?). Well, if you get my tortured drift (I am a bird photographer, too), then APAC is a microcosm of those great annual avian flyways that swirl over the Americas and alight on their summer feeding grounds, the APA conference was filled with experts in the field whose many goals were to excite us, encourage us, embrace us, teach us, hear us, and bond with us.

I’ve been narrating audiobooks for about six years, and I joined APA a little more than a year ago. I felt totally inadequate, and, frankly, intimidated by the thought of meeting so many amazing, well-known professionals whose audiobook output puts mine to shame. Little did I know how many other phobics were fighting the same internal battle. But I, and they, spread our wings, flapped out of our safe nests (or took Amtrak), joined the great migration, and showed up at the Javits Convention Center.

Going up to New York to stand in this arena of narration and production icons, gods and goddesses triggered all the hide-in-the corner and flight responses I harbor. I am a victim of imposter syndrome, social anxiety, phobias, and depression. In all my years in the public arena…as a news photographer, reporter, columnist, a press secretary, a president appointee and cabinet speechwriter…I feared every day or event that would cast me into some group (usually smallish—10-30 people) where I was expected to interact. I can give a speech to an audience of 1,000; I fail miserably when contemplating talking at a cocktail party, reception, or closed venue like those meeting rooms at APAC. But, in most cases, I go somewhere inside myself and find the courage to hold my own hand and proceed with my head up into the world I fear. I suspect I manage okay; I have yet to be ejected from a party or conference for being a creepy bore, nor have I been wheeled out on a gurney and taken to a hospital in a straitjacket. So, those are plusses.

With respect to APAC, I felt, after six years of audiobook narrating and only a handful of titles that barely get listened to or reviewed, I needed a glimpse into the world of the more successful narrators, to see how newcomers are treated, to hear panels of the publishers, to meet my coaches and those narrators/friends for whom I was but a virtual presence. My expectations were low, by choice; I set a list of about ten things I wanted to accomplish and people I thought I should meet. It was my great fortune to meet Jenny Hoops, my #1 proofer and a wonder narrator in her own right. Jenny was there to welcome me with genuine warmth and comity, and she and two or three other narrators I’ve known took me around to meet other people. But the anxiety and phobia were always lurking, especially at the pre-APAC reception at the Boat Basin where “mingling” was my worst bête noire, and after a drink and a bite of catered food, I was out of there in the teeth of a vivid and wild thunderstorm. The day of the main APAC events started with my taking a slow walk from my hotel to the Javits Center, snapping pictures along the way, finding in my photography, as I always do, the muse I would need to make it through the day’s events. As I entered the Javits Center, I made a determined effort to “whistle a happy tune,” as the song goes (though quietly, in my head), and meet the challenge head on.

I made myself meet Robin Whitten, founder and editor of AudioFile magazine; I reached out to PJ Ochlan, one of my coaches who helped my dialect in “The 480.” I finally got to meet, face to face, Andi Arndt, my co-narrator for my very first duet book five years ago. Andi and I have been FB friends for a while, but meeting her was important. I sat at a roundtable discussion with my coach Sean Pratt and met several new narrators there who actually asked me questions about the narrating world. Alice Anne English, a connection of mine (through family and narration) dragged me over to meet Scott Brick, and he and I got along fine once he found out that my grandfather produced several of Scott’s favorite 1940s movies. I participated in the Networking with Publishers discussion by asking all four of the panelists a question about us older narrators—those in our 70s and above—and recounted to them and the audience my anxiety of aging, my imposter fear, and my story of being blinded for a year when I was a young boy, and how so many people read to me over the phone. To hold a microphone in a packed conference room and ask a question was a challenge—and my shaky voice probably betrayed my fear—but I knew I had invested in going to APAC, and I was going to make the most of it. One of the producers asked for my card—a nice gesture, but I won’t obsess over it. What was important, is that after that panel broke up, several of my age-related peers came up to me and thanked me for asking a question they were too anxious to ask.

I met Pam Almand, a well-known narrator (I didn’t know that) who was once, of all things, a 747 captain who was happy to meet a fellow pilot. She is now one of the big players at APA, though I was blissfully unaware of the link until after I met her.

All in all, I collected about 20 business cards—gave out about as many of my own—and achieved most of my modest goals.

At the final reception, I touched base with about everyone I’d met during the conference to thank them for their kindnesses and audiobooks, and while I’m sure I was just one common face in a crowd of 600 (despite my portliness), everyone I met, without exception, responded with warmth and congeniality. As I left Javits, another massive thunderstorm rolled across the city…a copy of the one just the night before that had spawned a tornado in New Jersey and almost trapped me at the Boat Basin. I took both storms as nature’s way of telling me there are powers greater than my simple human fears.

Will I do APAC again? I don’t know for sure. Like many new-to-mid-range narrators, I don’t have a major publisher behind me, though I am still a BeeAudio narrator, and my latest book is being represented by Blackstone. What APAC did set in motion for me was a rededication to getting more, and higher-quality, audiobooks under my belt, and to keep pushing every button I can find to promote my work and keep making a go of this thing. All the newbies at APAC, and all of us in the middle ground of our narration journeys, did find an organization that welcomed us, informed us, and treated us with respect.

About My Small Niche of the Audiobook Narration Business: The Home Studio Narrator

There are thousands of narrators across the U.S., down in Mexico, up in Canada, across the United Kingdom, across the Channel on the European Continent, and around the world in Asia, along the Pacific Rim, and down under in Australia and New Zealand. I’ve sure I’ve missed some regions. If you look hard enough (or listen often enough) you’ll find us everywhere. And we’re not all narrators…many of us are proofers, editors, and engineers whose efforts pull it all together. And there is the APA staff and organizing committee challenged with pulling it all together. It rather does take a community (mostly virtual) of many talents to make it work.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more eclectic bunch—a broad and deep demographic slice of us would reveal at least six-decades worth of ages (20-80), single and married working mothers and fathers and grandparents, soccer moms, teachers, cabbies, care-givers to aging parents or special needs children, artists, writers, carpenters, a former 747-400 pilot (one of the few women to assume the left seat of that airliner), community volunteers, stage actors, doctors, nurses, boat-builders (in Alberta, Canada, no less), engineers, scientists, historians, grad-school students, stay at home dads (one of whom I met recently wrangles seven children while still managing to squeeze in narrating time thanks to his working wife who takes on the kid-duty while dad is on the microphone), grandmothers who narrate erotica (yes, really) and grandfathers who give voice to Civil War histories. A high school classmate of mine is now a senior judge in a local county court, and he just narrated his first audiobook! Many of us are the dreams of analysts and mental health professionals: we can be painfully shy in our black tee shirts and sweats; some of us think we are socially awkward; while others are happily boisterous and fabulously feathered with nary a care. We are blind to color and religion, we are ethnically blended, sexually “who cares?”, politically all over the board, city dwellers, rural (and I mean rural) outliers, and from every other form of community in between.

Our daily voices run the gamut of ranges—from bass/baritone (yours truly), to contraltos to sopranos. Some of us have big, booming voices useful for little-league coaching, while some of us are known around the office for our soft tenor lilts that calm heated discussions. But despite our at-home-or-around-the-office voices, we are all vocal chameleons when seated (or standing) before a microphone and the “record” light comes on. An Ohioan becomes a Liverpudlian; a Londoner becomes an American southern sheriff; a burly Virginian becomes a frail 90-year-old aunt from Vermont; a soft-spoken woman from Georgia becomes a cheeky teenager from Limerick; a ginger-haired Oklahoman strides the studio boards as the Bard of non-fiction (that Sean Pratt would become my non-fiction coach has nothing to do with his entry in this blog); and a New Yorker/Los Angelino named PJ Ochlan becomes almost any character anywhere in the world (I single out PJ because he transformed my gentle Virginia drawl into the musical dialects of several Indians and one or two Pakistanis); and light-hearted, soft-spoken Jenny Hoops—a mom, a caring neighbor, a scientist surrounded by all her husband’s tools of serious wooden boat-building in Alberta, Canada—becomes a master narrator of the planetary world of Johannes Kepler. (It is safe to say that were it not for Jenny Hoops and her masterful proofing, and the masterful engineer of Bob Evoniuk, my newest audiobook, “The 480,” would not have the wings I hoped it would have).

We all work at something that promises no great profit (yes, the great narrators—and I don’t mean the major screen, stage, and television actors who also narrate, just the core cadre of experienced professionals who have established themselves in the trade—do quite well, but even for them, the work of working never ends). But it is something which also holds out the promise of steady work and a fair income commensurate with, and demanding of, our talent, commitment, life-long learning, ability to accept failure and/or frustration, the desire to strive for improvement, and the willingness to put ourselves out there (to bang our own drums, as my voice coach Sean Pratt puts it) without being obnoxious or “creepy” as publisher Suzanne Elise Freeman, on a professional panel put it recently.

How popular is this audiobook market? According to a 2018 report in IBISWorld data,

“Over the five years to 2018, the Audiobook Publishing industry has exhibited strong growth as consumer demand for audiobooks has increased. In particular, the simultaneous rise of the digital audiobook format and increased smartphone usage have made audiobooks more accessible to a wider audience than ever before. During the five-year period, digital audiobooks have continued to eclipse other audiobook formats, as they facilitate greater economies of scale and higher margins. Furthermore, shifting media consumption habits among consumers have largely been in favor of audiobooks. Stoked by the increasing popularity of podcasts and online radio shows, consumers have turned to audiobooks as a convenient form of entertainment and education.”

From Vulture, reporting on the September, 2018 statistics:

“The rise of audiobooks, a small but rapidly growing piece of book publishing, is by now well documented, but rarely is it framed as a tech story. It’s maybe a little counterintuitive to think of what we once called Books on Tape (so cumbersome they had to be abridged to remain affordable) as a format on the disruptive cutting edge. But this decade’s double-digit annual growth — with total sales doubling to $2.5 billion over the past five years…” In that same story, Michelle Cobb, Executive Director, APA, said, “We have a lot of room to grow, and a lot of members are getting into the market. We don’t see any signs of it slowing down.”

And from Statista, three years ago:

"The printed book market has struggled in recent years as a result of consumers increasingly turning to technology to provide entertainment. One medium that bridges the gap between the traditional book market and new forms of technology is the audiobook. Sales revenues have soared in this area, more than doubling between 2010 and 2016. This growing demand for audiobooks can be seen in the fact that the number of audiobook titles published in the United States has grown from approximately 6,200 to over 50,00 in the same time frame."

To the uninitiated, audiobook narration may sound like a profession that requires a major recording studio, or, at least, a major investment in equipment and space. After all, don’t those beautifully-produced Audible.com television ads make it seem as if all us narrators are ensconced in elegant Hollywood or Manhattan studios? Believe me, if I had my druthers, I’d be out in LA in Debra Deyan’s studio, or seated before a mic at Edge Studios, or in any number of great audio production houses from Tantor to Penguin to Audible.

Well, while being able to record in a major studio is certainly a goal of many narrators, the truth underpinning our product is quite a bit more down to earth. The audiobook you last enjoyed, or are now enjoying, may well have been recorded in a clothes closet in some high-rise apartment building in Atlanta, or in a tiny booth created beneath a staircase in a single-family row house in the suburbs of Detroit, or in a spare bedroom draped in moving blankets to keep out the sound of the tractor plowing the field of the farm across the dirt road in Iowa, or in a hand-made basement Dungeon studio of a 47-year-old four-bedroom house in Alexandria, Virginia. Countless narrators live and record under the flight paths of military jets, police and mercy flight helicopters; we work at filtering out road crews repaving our street or dynamiting subway tunnels. We try to seal our recording space from the adorable but noisy, children playing next door, the lawn mowing crews, the roofers repairing out roofs or the flooring crews laying down new hardwood floors just a few feet over our heads.

We pray for “just one hour, please audio-god-of-silence” so we can get at least one good chapter narrated. And don’t get me started on the insidious hums, thrums, and through-the-floor echoes of air conditioners, furnaces, and refrigerator compressors—or that moment when your spouse decides to take a shower and the rush and whoosh of the water races through the pipes next to your recording space. All these distractions are well-documented throughout the narration community. And yet…and yet…narrators find a way to transform the written word into something rich and immersive and transporting. Because that is our passion, and we will not be deterred from the goal.

Most of us are also small businessmen and women; we know we must invest in our profession, and that is rarely easy for the beginners and modestly successful narrators. It is true, thankfully, that the equipment—computers, microphones, and recording and editing programs—is within reach of most start-up narrators; gone are the days when $10,000 was not an unusual amount to spend to get the gear necessary to equip a modest home studio. 

One of the best equipment resources going is Sweetwater Electronics, where almost everything a new and experienced narrator needs can be purchased along with outstanding technical help from the Sweetwater staff. But the costs are still there, and for a home-based narrator who really wants to rise in the business, good/great microphones ain’t cheap; the investment in industry-acceptable recording programs and the attendant hardware (pre-amps, monitors, cables, speakers) can take the place of family vacation funds—those costs alone can easily exceed $2,000-$3,000 (though I’ve marveled at the results of some narrators who’ve managed to create their studios for under a grand). On top of all that, there are often technical questions about using recording software such as Audacity, Audition, Twisted Wave, PreSonus’s Studio One, or the incredible repair tool, Izotope’s RX7, as well as learning to get the most of out of the various pieces of hardware, cables, etc., that make up a home studio’s toolbox. Experts like Don Baarns, who post regularly in narrator and related-audio groups, are also available for one-on-one sessions via Skype (as an example), and a serious narrator must factor in the fees for that high-level help.

Add to those entry-level fees the costs of hiring someone to proof your narration (yes, it’s vital to have an ear that is not yours listen to your work. A proficient proofer will help with proper pronunciation of myriad words and foreign phrase, catch the misplaced word, remind us of a character’s voice we’d used in chapter one and messed up in chapter 20; we all make mistakes we miss, and a great proofer is like an insurance policy against embarrassment and poor sales). We need to hire an editor and/or audio engineer to clean up the assortment of lip noises, stomach rumbles, dog snoring (yes, that’s happened to me and other narrators whose beloved hounds nap at our feet), chair squeaks, plosives (the popping sound after “p” and “b”) and sibilants (the hissing of an “s”) and many other extraneous noises that inevitably creep into to our recording sessions.

And we need to keep on learning, availing ourselves of experienced coaches—experts in voice, dialect, genre, gender tones and textures, etc. (see note at bottom for a list of the experts we call on every day, and who were there at APAC to lead discussions and give advice).—and conferences like APAC in order to stay abreast of industry, business, and social media trends. [Thank goodness for our industry magazine, AudioFile, founded and edited by Robin Whitten who opens the doors to audiobook reviews, narrator interviews, and industry news crucial to our work.] 

And all those necessaries come with costs—a voice coach can cost $200 or more per hour, a dialect coach the same. Proofers’ and editors’ fees range from $40-$100 per finished hour of recording, and if you do the math, that means a 10-hour book (a book that takes 10 hours to listen to) may rack up anywhere from $800 to $2,000 in proofing and editing alone. Going to 2-3 days of APAC in New York for someone who lives in Los Angeles can be a thousand-dollar commitment (or more) when airfare, hotel, and conference fees are all totted up.

Taken all together, the average in-home-studio narrator who is serious about his or her work, has to know right from the start that recouping the costs of business through royalties from their first audiobooks will not happen overnight or even over the first year or two of their efforts. 

Many audiobook narrators begin their voice acting journeys by recording books that are in the public domain (PD)…that is, books published before 1923. Public domain books are free of copyright constraints and can be narrated without having to pay for the rights, which is a definite upside. The downside, and it’s not all that down, really, is that PD books don’t market themselves, and they do require the same tender loving care—and expense--in the studio as any other audiobook. 

When I recorded Owen Wister’s sweeping 19th century western, The Virginian, a fun 15-hour book filled with great characters and fast-paced scenes, I associated myself with Steven Jay Cohen’s Spoken Realms (then Listen-2-a-Book), which placed The Virginian on Audible in a royalty arrangement. It takes quite a few sales to achieve a cost-matching return on a long book like The Virginian, but over the years, I’ve been able to recoup those costs. The same was true for many other books I’ve narrated in collaboration with Spoken Realms.

Even when we find ourselves with books that pay by the per-finished-hour (PFH) (that same 10-hour book mentioned above can bring in somewhere around $2,000 and more when it’s assigned and produced by a big-name publishing house, the publisher foots the production costs), the average narrator will spend roughly six hours narrating for every finished hour of completed audiobook—and that 6:1 ratio can soar to 10:1 with complex books that need research, dialect training, etc.

My point—and I sometimes have one—is that the audiobook listener (and there are more and more of them every year, see stats above) who purchase one of our 10-hour (or more) productions for $15, $20, $30, $40 or more is getting a listening experience created over hours and hours of isolated labor, cooperative artistry, and a complex distribution network that makes possible the simple act of downloading an audiobook, or slipping a CD into an player.

My experience at APAC was uplifting, educational, exciting, happy, and rewarding. I did not know what to expect, and all my years of experience as a media and government professional public relations exec, attending hundreds of professional conferences over the past 50 or so years, did not prepare me for the collegiality, warmth, and genuine sense of belonging in the right place at the right time.

With thanks to Tanya Eby, here are some of the very supportive and accessible coaches, narrators, producers, and APA leaders who made the APAC experience so worthwhile. Thank you all.

Siiri Scott, Piper Goodeve-Vaughan, RC Bray, Ramon de Ocampo, Andrew Eiden, Joel Leslie Froomkin, Jeffrey Kafer, Katherine Littrell, Matthew Lloyd Davies, Amy McFadden, Natalie Naudus Bradner, Sean Allen Pratt, Ann Richardson, Paul Alan Ruben, Teri Schnaubelt, Adam Verner, Neil Hellegers, Melissa Moran, Andi Arndt, Laura Jennings, Troy Otte, Karen Commins, Suzanne Elise Freeman, Cary Hite, Nick Martorelli, Anne McCarty, Andrea Emmes Cenna, PJ Ochlan, Pamela Mitchell Almand, Michele Cobb