I see why audiobooks cost so much to produce. I listen to audiobooks all of the time, and I don’t think I ever fully appreciated how much work goes into them. I mean, of course, I appreciated the fact that they exist. They’ve made many a commute more tolerable for me. My love for them is actually one reason I wanted to start making them.
But holy cow. Recording is grueling. Editing is even more grueling. The first night I worked on editing, it took me 2 hours to edit 6 minutes of audio. I’m not kidding. There was a bit of a learning curve with the software. I had to look a few things up, but most of that time was editing.
I’m still new at all of this, including reading my stuff out loud, so there was a lot of stopping and starting again. If I stumbled over words, I read them again. Apparently, sometimes I write in tongue-twister form. Who knew?
I edited out some breathing and some throat clearing noises, etc, maybe a drink or two of water. It was a lot. By the end of it, I will say that my reading was better and required less editing.
I need to work on opening my mouth a little wider when I speak, and I need to work on making the different characters’ voices more distinct. I learned that when I rerecord a certain part, not to start in the middle of a sentence. Duh.
I also feel that I sound a little more country than I’d like. The husband says I don’t, but I hear it in certain words.
The length of audio before editing was an hour and 48 minutes. It is now an hour and 4 minutes, which is a little less than ACX’s length estimate calculator. If I remember correctly, it said the estimate was 75 minutes.
I still have some sentences that I need to rerecord and splice in. That shouldn’t take too long, I hope. Then I’ll have to clean the whole thing up in Audacity and make sure the file meets ACX requirements. Then, if all goes well, we’ll be off to the races, kids.
Professional Stringer of Words 