I’m embarking on this new creative endeavor for three reasons:
I love to read. And I particularly love reading aloud. I don’t care if it’s a news article, a passage from a novel, or a letter. It always improves when given a voice. It probably began with my own mother who, nearing age 89, still loves to read aloud anything interesting she comes across. She and my father met in theater and spent the early years of their marriage involved in community theater. They even put me and my brother in a play my dad directed with the Athens College Players in 1950’s Greece. So when she read to us, she read like an actor, and I try to do likewise. I give each character a slightly different voice or accent or pitch. It makes the story come alive.
Friends want me to record their books. I also write, and the others in my writing group keep raving over how I read their manuscripts. They’ve encouraged me to give this a go. Also, I have a lot of writer friends, many of them published. I’m hoping that if they don’t need or want me to record their books, then maybe my example may lead them to try recording their own books, as well. They may not want to go as far as narrating the books of others, but perhaps some will find the process as enjoyable as I have and choose to dive in, as well.
The audiobook industry is on the rise. The number of books added daily to the ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) website is testament of this fact. I heard one industry insider compare it to Hollywood’s silent picture days. That is to say, it’s still in its infancy, so it seems like the perfect time to get involved. As an author, it’s becoming more and more difficult to get your book to stand out in a market that put out 3,500 books each day only three years ago (and that didn’t even include the books that went straight to e-book, bypassing print altogether)! At least with audiobooks, there are still only some 35,000 titles total. There is phenomenal room for growth, and in an age when time is becoming more and more scarce, readers are turning into listeners simply because they have to multi-task.