Issue #13

April 28, 2024

Holy cow, happy birthday to us! Bad Directions is one year old. Thank you for being a subscriber and for all the stories you’ve shared over the last year. You are the best. And if you’ve just subscribed recently, welcome! Keep the questions and suggestions coming.

MAKING AN AUDIOBOOK

I am beyond enthused: An audiobook of THE OUTLIER, my first novel, is in the works.

The audio producer at Penguin Random House Canada, Jaclyn Gruenberger, reached out late last year and asked how involved I wanted to be in the process. Pretty involved, I said.  What that mainly meant is that I’d get to help choose the voice actors and provide them with a bit of guidance.

Have you ever listened to an audiobook in which mispronunciations or off-kilter accents took you out of the story? I wanted to avoid that. Jaclyn and I talked over accents, tones, and pronunciations.

For example, the novel is set largely in Baja, Mexico, so it includes a lot of Spanish proper nouns. And the characters have a mix of linguistic backgrounds. One is a native English speaker, one a native Spanish speaker, and another is fully bilingual. Plus, one section of the book takes the form of a doctor’s clinical notes. The story is told in alternating points of view.

Jaclyn’s team had already decided to take a multicast rather than solo approach, meaning that a different actor would narrate each character’s chapters. In January, she sent me audition recordings: Three voices each for main characters Cate, Gabriel, and Luciana. Each actor had read a couple of paragraphs. After working for so long in my silent world of putting words on the page, it was strange to hear them read out loud. It was like glimpsing a new dimension of my fictional creation, in which my characters had come alive.

It wasn’t hard to choose favorites. Some voices immediately struck me as too high, too youthful, or too formal for the role. Others sounded exactly like the person I’d made up. But some I had to listen to several times before I could make a call.

I sent Jaclyn my favorites – and as far as I know, those actors were hired.

When she was getting ready to record, she sent me a list of words from the novel that are either particularly important or could be hard to pronounce. They include people and locations as well as a company, a drug, and a ship. Jaclyn asked for a voice memo of me saying each one, as a guideline for the actors. You can see the list here, and listen to my recording here.

Some audiobook FAQs:

Do authors ever voice their own audiobooks?

It happens, but it’s not the norm. There’s been a trend towards memoirists narrating their own books, since the genre is about a direct connection between author and reader. Sometimes novelists who are professional performers, or are icons of their time like Toni Morrison, or who just have really great voices like Mohsin Hamid, can convince their publishers to let them do it.

If you’re thinking about doing this, consider: As a general rule, for a professional actor, it takes twice as long to record as the length of the finished product. So 20 hours of recording yields a 10-hour audiobook. Vocal cords get tired. Throats get dry. Producers want multiple takes. I don’t think I’d want to do this.

Is there always an audiobook?

Not necessarily. Usually, in traditional publishing, authors sell audio rights to the same company that’s doing their paper and ebooks. But acquiring audio rights doesn’t obligate the publisher to produce an audiobook. It could decide not to, or it could sell the rights onward to another company.

What about AI narration?

It exists. It has a long way to go to catch up with human actors.

PS: 

My second book, the travel memoir WANDERLUST, is available as an audiobook, narrated by the very talented Erin Bennett. You can buy it on Audible and Apple Books.

WEEKEND IN NEW YORK

In April, I spent a long weekend in New York City to see friends and attend my 25th grad-school reunion. No, I can’t believe it’s been a quarter century since 1999. But I’m sure happy about the friend’s I’ve kept since then. Here’s me this month in front of the building on West 113th Street where I lived from 1997 to 1999; the Church of Saint John the Divine, which was just around the corner from me on Amsterdam Avenue, and me with old friends Claudine and Chelsea on the Columbia campus. (We went to the university’s School of International and Public Affairs.)

FIVE FAVES: DOPAMINE, CIVIL WAR, AND MORE

CIVIL WAR. In this feature film directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), journalists trek across a war-torn nation as rebel forces advance on the capital city. They witness all the horrors of modern warfare — riots, refugee camps, rogue soldiers, mass graves. The twist is that the landscape is America, which creates a provocative thought experiment for anyone who tracks conflict elsewhere in the world. This film has polarized reviewers, some of whom think it should have covered the causes of the titular civil war. But that would be another movie altogether. This one is terrific for what it is, a tale of a ragtag foursome who bond and rage in their quest to get the story.

NO ONE BUYS BOOKS by Elle Griffin. This is the business-of-publishing story writers are talking about this month. It goes over lessons learned from that giant 2022 antitrust case against Penguin Random House, in which publishing executives had to bare their business practices for all to see.

DOPAMINE NATION by Anna Lembke. This is a fascinating book about brain science, and in particular the role of the pleasure-inducing neurotransmitter dopamine. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand pleasure, pain, addiction, and managing the constant onslaught of stimuli in modern life — and also, maybe why you made certain less-than-rational decisions. The author is a psychiatry professor at Stanford. (And narrated her own book!)

SO YOU THINK YOU’VE BEEN GASLIT by Leslie Jamison. Gaslighting isn’t just lying: It means trying to convince someone that their perception of reality is wrong. In the worst cases, perpetrators do it deliberately for their own advantage. But after reading this article, I’m convinced that everyone gaslights and is gaslit some of the time. We all want our own versions of reality to be true.

A TERRIBLE COUNTRY by Keith Gessen. If a Russian-speaking David Sedaris had crash-landed in Moscow around 2008, he might have produced something like this novel. The narrator, who immigrated to the United States as a boy — like the author — goes back to Russia as a professionally frustrated adult, where he’s tasked with caring for his ailing grandmother. The book offers a funny, detailed, insider-outsider portrait of life in Moscow, something I’ve been craving as a contrast to the headlines. In a love/hate review in the New York Times, Boris Fishman conceded that “you won’t read a more observant book about the country that has now been America’s bedeviling foil for almost a century.”

LET’S TALK

Write to me at eavesdrop AT elisabetheaves.com. I read every email, and I’ll try to answer every question.

Happy trails,
Elisabeth