Audiobook Stories

A Writer Learns to Let Go

AUDIOBOOK STORIES

A Writer Learns to Let Go

My memoir, Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies  has just been released as an audiobook. The original platform is Scribd/Everand, a subscription program not unlike a library. You sign up, pay $11.99 a month, and can listen to books and magazines as well as podcasts.  You can also find the audiobook on Amazon and another audiobook platform. I’m hoping soon that it will be carried by Libro.fm which is my favorite audiobook outlet as readers can designate an independent bookstore to receive money from their purchase.

But I’ve subtitled this newsletter, A Writer Learns to Let Go, which is what we writers have to do when our book is published and moves out of our hands. I very much wanted to read this book myself as I’ve narrated three of my audiobooks, about which more later.  However, Bee Audio, the production company, informed my publisher that they only use professional actors. I was able to request an English female and Morag Sims, an accomplished young narrator, was selected to do the reading. I’ve listened to the first chapter and probably won’t listen to anymore. Here’s why.

The Castle in the Attic, the first audiobook I narrated, was produced by a full cast audio company, Words Take Wing, under the steady direction of the author and audio producer, Bruce Coville, I narrated the book and the characters were all played by actors. Here I am with the cast of another book we did together, The Red Hot Rattoons.

I quickly learned about the sensitivity of the microphones when on that first morning we taped, I had to keep reading the same passage over and over again. Occasionally, the drone of planes taking off from a nearby airport was the problem, but more often it was the growling stomach of one of my young actors. We decreed that every single person scheduled to be in the studio the next day had to eat oatmeal for breakfast which solved that problem. 

More than once, I put up my hand to stop the taping and begged Bruce through my headphones to let me edit a line. “I have a word repeat in that paragraph. Couldn’t I just change that last sentence?”  From outside the booth, he would shake his head with an understanding grin.

 After all, he’s a wildly successful author himself. He knows how painful it can be for a writer to accept that the editing process is over. The book is published, out there in the world and the audiobook must match the words on the written page. From that time on, I have always read my books out loud before I submit them to the publisher. Unless I’m researching a sequel or giving a public reading, I never re-read my own books once they’re published and that’s one reason why I won’t listen to the audio version of Daughter of Spies.  

But there’s another reason and this is where I come to the “letting go” part. Actors act and often they bring that energy to the reading of an audiobook. I cringe at the slight mispronunciation of my last name or the sharpness of the tone when the narrator speaks in my mother’s voice because that’s not the way I heard my mother when she said those words to me. A writer wishes to control every aspect of the delivery of her words to the reader be they on the page or in the air but of course, that’s simply not possible and the sooner the author realizes that, the better for her sanity.  

So, off this audiobook goes, floating to you listeners over the air waves. May you become absorbed in the story delivered in that lilting British accent that echoes my mother’s when she was young. May you hear all the emotions I was trying to convey as I worked to untangle and understand the complicated mother/daughter relationship.

 As an avid audiobook listener myself, I’m grateful that Daughter of Spies is now available to all those who like me still love to hear a voice whispering a story directly into their ear.