So now that you know how to review an audio and you get an idea of how flexible an option audiobooks are for getting more reading into your busy life, how do you promote audiobooks to the non-listener? Here are a few tips and ideas for spreading the audio love.

For me, promoting audiobooks is easy: whenever I talk a book I listened to, I make sure to emphasize that I listened to the book. I highlight some of the things that worked really well in the audiobook and sell that. Sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover how many audiobook listeners there are, especially among teenagers (that’s the age group with whom I work a lot). If I can model that listening is perfectly acceptable reading, then others will see it the same way. Sometimes, I like to play an audio clip, too, and it was a clip from M. T. Anderson’s Feed that turned many of the teens onto a book that had languished for a long time on the shelf. My audio copy got a lot of play for a couple of months after that.

Likewise, I try to always have an audiobook going. It keeps me fresh and helps me quickly talk an interesting title to those who are new or are looking for something different. I had a family, for example, who exhausted many of the titles in the children’s area and needed a family-friendly, lengthy series of audiobooks. Redwall was my first instinct, and they’ve been making their way eagerly through that series.

Other ways I personally promote audiobooks involves including them in displays and putting them out within the book stacks. In Illinois, there are two sets of award books for teens: The Abe Lincoln Awards and the Read for a Lifetime list. I intershelve my audio copies with the print copies, and I see both moving quite a bit. I think too easily that readers can overlook audiobooks, and when they see them right there with the print titles, they remember that those can be just as enjoyable (and it helps the titles on these lists include family friendly reads, adult titles, classics, and teen classics). I’ve also made sure that teens know during summer and winter reading club, audiobooks are DEFINITELY considered books, and they should be counted toward meeting their reading goals.

Perhaps the biggest promotion tool is right here on the blog. We make an effort to review for a reason, and Abby (the) Librarian and I developed AudioSynced for this precise reason: to get the word out about audiobooks. It’s important to review them, to talk about issues such as readers and production, and to emphasize that listening to a book is an easy way to increase your reading. Many people ask how I read so much, and it’s easy to say audiobooks have helped me carve out more reading time in my daily life.

Do you have a preference for your audiobook narration? Today, Kim and I will talk a bit about our preferences and what differences these production choices make.

Up until recently, the only audiobooks I had ever listened to (that I can remember) were single-voiced.  One person narrated all characters, with varying success.  Some narrators chose to differentiate each character’s voice drastically, while others changed their voice only slightly, if at all.  I honestly didn’t even know that audiobooks existed where each character was voiced by a different person until a few months ago.  My first experience with a fully-voiced audiobook was Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which I’ll be reviewing later today.

Even more recently, I’ve ventured into listening to books narrated by multiple characters – and thus voiced by different narrators.  Make sense?  What I’m referring to is Edith Pattou’s East, which shifts perspective from character to character with each chapter.  It’s an interesting way of writing a book and a really interesting way of listening to it.  Each character speaks within the other characters’ sections, so the listener hears how each character interprets the other.  This is the kind of insight into characters that is really unique to audiobooks – it’s impossible to understand from a print book that a daughter hears her father’s voice as gentle while a son may hear it in harsher tones (unless of course it’s spelled out for you in the text).

I don’t think I really have a preference when it comes to one vs. multiple voices, provided the narration is expressive and paints a picture in my mind.  What I do prefer, however, is for the audiobook to be – by and large – free of sound effects.  Music to divide chapters is generally okay, but anything beyond that is just excessive (and so cheesy it makes me cringe).  Audiobooks should be a faithful presentation of the text, and added noise of thunderstorms or horse’s hooves is inauthentic to the story the author has written. (Of course, there’s an exception to every rule, and I have to say that Feed used sound effects in a really effective way.)

I haven’t listened to enough audiobooks to have a clear preference on what style I prefer, quite frankly. I had the opportunity to meet a producer and a couple of readers from the Full Cast company, and I loved getting an insider’s look at how these books are put together. The example they showed us was from Lisa Mantchev’s Eyes Like Stars, and while I haven’t been able to pick it up to listen to yet, I was impressed with how much like reader’s theater it was. For a book about life in the theater, I would think it essential to employ a full cast.

I got a real kick out of the use of multiple narrators for Stockett’s The Help. Three narrators take turns as the main characters, and a fourth narrator is introduced during a couple of pivotal, non-charactered scenes. I thought for this book, it was necessary to use the different voices, as the women were of different ages and races, something that would never have worked as a single reader. Despite loving the production, I still found some of the choices didn’t work for me.

What I get a kick out of, though, are partially-voiced audiobooks. I love when one reader provides the voices for a few of the main characters in a story — but only if the book is told from the first person perspective. If a story is told through the eyes of one character, using just one reader seems to fit better, and by partially voicing it, we are able to get a true insight into the main character. We know, for example, that the main character thinks he has a whiny-sounding sister or that the mom always sounds regal. The Art of Racing in the Rain, told partially voiced from the dog’s perspective, worked well for me, too.

I guess for me the preference falls to the story itself. Does it lend itself to a full cast better than a single narrator? Does it require drastically different sounding readers for the different parts? These are the things I think about when listening and that ultimately helps decide whether the book’s been successful to me as a listener.

Do you have a preference? We’d like to hear! Share your thoughts below.

Today, we’re talking audiobook reviews. Ever curious how we write a review or what we listen for to comment on when planning to review a title? Here’s your insight into our minds, as well as what we hope are helpful pointers for the new listener, new reviewer, or seasoned pro looking for a little more vocabulary for what they’re doing!

For me, it’s all about the narrator and the production/editing of the book. When I listen, I know immediately whether the book is going to work for me or not. I have ended books well before I should have on audio — whereas most print books I’ll give 50 pages, the audiobook has just about 10 minutes. I need to be hooked into a believable narrator immediately. Books that haven’t worked for me tend to have either a lot of weird editing issues — where you hear the reader swallowing, the sound quality changes from track to track so you need to keep adjusting your volume, or there are background noises distracting from the reader — or it has reader issues — the age of the reader doesn’t match the character or the accent is all wrong.

In writing audio reviews, I follow my gut a little more than I do with a printed text. I am willing to talk more about my shortfalls as a listener, too, as you probably remember from my review of Zen and the Art of Faking It. I do use a little bit of a cheat sheet to make sure I hit on as many important points as I can, and that little cheat sheet is from my post right here. I like to look at that to hit on the things that matter, but that I don’t necessarily consciously look for, when listening to a book (since I’m listening to the story).

Since I brought up narrator, I thought I’d share with you my best experiences and my worst. My favorite narrators are Joel Johnstone (from The Wednesday Wars and Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie) and Natalie Moore (from The Dairy Queen). Both fit their characters in the books perfectly and they did so in a way that was authentic to the age, gender, race, and accent to the listener. Moore delivers a pitch-perfect Wisconsin accent that made me sad that I had to READ the last book before I could listen to it. She will always be the voice of D. J. to me.

On the worst end, I had a rough time with Susan Beth Pfeffer’s The Dead and the Gone on audio, as well as Andrew Smith’s In the Path of Falling Objects. I couldn’t find the voices as matching the story . . . and interestingly, the reader of Smith’s work was the reader for Zen and the Art of Faking It, which fit much better for me as a listener. Proof that it’s not necessarily the reader who makes the book hard to go to; it’s the need to match the reader with the right character.

 Much of what Kelly wrote above applies to my audio review style as well.  For me, a lot depends on the narration.  While good narration doesn’t always save a bad book, bad narration will almost certainly ruin a good one.  I’m currently listening to Going Bovine, Libba Bray’s huge doorstopper of a book that most recently won the Printz, and the narration is almost killing me.  The book is in first-person, and the voice is just so wrong.  Apart from sounding much too old, the narrator infuses sarcasm, sardonicism, and irony into every single sentence.  This is not so bad some of the time, because Cameron, our protagonist, is frequently sarcastic.  The problem manifests itself when he tells the listener something like “I went to the store.”  Imagine hearing all lines that are meant to be matter of fact, emotionally moving, or exciting as sarcastic.  It’s grating.

That rant over…other annoyances include mispronunciation of words, long gaps between pieces of dialogue in a conversation (sounds fake), and, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, poorly done female voices (usually by a male narrator).

Poor production values can also get to me, but it’s not something I make a habit of listening for consciously.  If something sticks out (usually a bad something), I’ll remark upon it, but otherwise, I don’t pay a lot of attention.

All the importance of the narration aside, when I review an audio for the blog or other medium, I try to devote half the space to the actual story and writing.  I like to give our blog readers an impression of whether or not they’d enjoy the book in either format – audio or print – and I can’t do that by concentrating only on the narration.  If the narration is bad, it’s good to note that the story itself is good, so interested readers will check out the print version (and vice versa).