Teri Schnaubelt at TeriSchnaubelt.com, narrator extraordinaire, believes these are the best ways to give your book a voice. Here are Teri’s Top Ten Tips* for finding the perfect voice for you:

1. Listen to samples on Amazon’s ACX, then investigate some of the narrators whom you like.
2. Check out narrator reviews on Audible. Do they consistently get good/great reviews? How many books have they done?
3. Are the narrators also actors?  Being an actor helps with creating characters as well as understanding the art of storytelling.
4. Are they working as narrators part-time or full time?
5. Feel free to ask for references from other authors who have used the narrator you are considering.
6. Ask the narrators if they use a professional editor or if they do the work themselves.
7. Ask them what kind of turnaround time you could expect if you hired them for your project.
8. You don’t always need an audition. If they have done books in a similar genre, you can often tell how great they would be without having them audition for your specific book.
9. If you’re new to the audiobook production world, do your due diligence by doing some research on ACX, and then ASK QUESTIONS if you don’t understand the process or what’s involved.
10. Audiobook narrators read your book as it is written. You may need to make some changes in the text to make it friendlier to the ear, which keeps the listener in the moment. For instance, if your printed book says “you’re reading this book”, you might change the verb to be “you’re listening to this book.”

I have had the privilege of being a co-narrator with Teri of several audiobooks, including The Third Realm, a free audiobook by Adam Train.

*This blog is an excerpt from The Author’s Guide to AudioBook Creation by Richard Rieman