What's it like to record an audiobook?

The insider scoop

I just finished recording the audiobook version of my upcoming book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals about Human Stupidity (out on August 9th). It was a far weirder experience than I had anticipated, and I thought y’all might be curious as to how it went down.

I expected that recording an audiobook would be easy. Especially since it was a book I had written, so I was reading it “in my own voice” as it were. And also because I had worked for years as a voice actor for radio, television, and even animation. But “easy” is not the right word. Exhausting is a better word.

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The recording happened over the course of three days, with each session lasting at least 5 hours. I made myself a little isolation booth in my office by piling cushions around my desk and hanging bed sheets from the ceiling. Inelegant, but effective. I had a brilliant director listening on the line from his studio in Brooklyn. It’s the director’s job to make sure that I find the right voice for the book, and to stop me from speaking too fast. And, perhaps most importantly, to stop me when I make a mistake.

And let me tell you I made more mistakes than I thought possible. Sometimes I would stumble over the same sentence 4 or 5 times for no reason at all. Not a sentence with big vocab words - just a regular ole sentence that I couldn’t seem to get out of my mouth.

But the biggest surprise was the sheer number of words that I had written in the book that I simply had no idea how to pronounce properly. Practically every page contained a word that I had been using/writing for years, but apparently had never said out loud and thus had no idea how to pronounce. Or had been pronouncing wrong for years.

The director was primed and ready for these weirdo words, and had already taken the time to look up the proper pronunciation in case I got it wrong. Which I did more often than not. Some examples of words I was sure I knew how to pronounce, but apparently do not are: Sulawesi (pronounced with an “s” sound at the end, not a “z”), Tahlequah (a famous killer whale from British Columbia whose name I had mispronounced for years), macaque (a species of monkey that I talk about all the time but apparently do not know how to pronounce). This was humiliating for me, but the director explained that every single author who records an audiobook goes through this.

And then there were the names. So many foreign names! Why did I have to name-drop so many people? The thing about names is that sometimes the right thing to do is to pronounce the name incorrectly. For example: I was an exchange student in Sweden, so I have a decent grasp on how to pronounce Swedish names, like Greta Thunberg. But the problem with Greta’s name is that if you say it correctly in Swedish, nobody outside of Sweden will have any idea who you are talking about. Here is how Greta pronounces her own name:

But she is an international public figure and the world is used to hearing her name butchered as a semi-Anglicized pronunciation. So it would be confusing to the listener if I aggressively pronounced her name in the correct, Swedish manner - nobody would know who I was taking about! So for each foreign name in the book, the director and I needed to figure out what was the best way to say it in such a way that the listener could parse what I was saying. This often meant a version of the name that was halfway between the correct/native way and an over-the-top Americanized version. Of course, not every name was something I was even capable of pronouncing, so some of them are just plain butchered because of my terrible French (for example). I mean, I had to pronounce this guy’s name, which I am sure I did not do even remotely correctly: Abel Nicolas Georges Henri Bergasse du Petit-Thouars.

As each recording day came to a close, I would start making more and more mistakes. I wasn’t physically tired, but mentally drained. Concentrating on reading out loud for hours on end is cognitively taxing. It hadn’t experienced anything like it before.

I have met numerous people who have professed interest in becoming an audiobook actor/reader. More power to you, I say. I too once thought this would be a fun career path. But after three days inside my pillow fort mispronouncing words I thought I knew, I have been shown the error of my ways. I absolutely loved recording my own audiobook - especially with the awesome director that I had. But I cannot imagine trying to record someone else’s book. Yes, I’ll do it again for my next book - in fact, I am looking forward to it! But even through the director and publisher were very happy with the final product for If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal (and I am sure we will win dozens upon dozens of Audie Awards), I don’t think this is a career for me!