The beauty of face-to-face

“I think it's important to remember in our business how an author's heart remains on his sleeve. Words are gifts of the heart as well as the imagination, and we are the ones tasked with handling them with care -- bringing them to life and potentially making an author's dreams come true.”

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We are a unique bunch. We hide behind our mics in our sweats. We isolate ourselves in tiny sound booths trying to filter out barking dogs and rustling trash cans. We use our voices to tell other people’s stories. Then? We get paid for it.

In a way, voice acting is both a haven and a curse. Why? While we can cubbyhole ourselves away, we often forget how great IRL social interaction with our author-employers can be.

Who are the people who hire us for audiobook narrations, after all? It’s those souls who invested their blood, sweat, and tears over their words for months — perhaps even years — before laying it before a pool of potential voice actors, crossing their fingers in the hopes that we understand what they want out of it. Then they proceed — after hearing only a snippet of our talents — to leave their precious cargo in our hands to make virtual movies with them for all the world to hear.

Pexels: Kindel Media

As a professional writer and copywriter since the late 1990s, concise has been my middle name. Whether it was marketing speak, a word-count-limited newspaper story, or a ghost-written blog, I worried that my employer got what they paid for so they would send me more business. But I also worried that my words were taken in just the right way so that readers wouldn’t stop reading after the first few paragraphs.

Fast forward a few decades and here I am — a voice actor in her larval years. Upon the advice of my coach, I joined various Facebook groups for people like me, where veterans hung out and offered advice. I seriously wanted to go to a live event to meet and mingle IRL with my audiobook brethren, but nothing big or geographically feasible was yet on the horizon for me to attend.

“See if you can attend some local writers’ guild meetings to meet a few indie authors,” one said. Really? What a great idea. It never occurred to me to go directly to the source of my business, even though my ultimate goal is to someday be added to the narrator lists of the Big Five. So I looked up a few local groups online, contacted them, got invited, and attended one.

The breakfast meeting was held in an offset restaurant room. Introductions around the table began and I realized male sci-fi and fantasy writers were in abundance. I was deep in the throes of narrating a post-apocalyptic fantasy at the time and introduced myself. Many there indicated they had never met a voice actor in the flesh before, so it was fun explaining what I do and how I got here. I received lots of curious questions.

The meeting continued with a discussion about free AI discoveries, making me a tad uncomfortable. But I understood how many of these authors operated on tiny if no budgets at all. Still, a few had already published books that thrived, so I hoped I was in the right place for networking. After the meeting, I offered my business card along with a sample reading of their work if they were interested. A few were receptive, including a gentleman sitting across from me who had narrated a few of his own books.

A month later, after going back and forth by email as to my rates, explaining the process, and giving that gentleman a little audition, we agreed to work together. I thought it might be fun to do a "table read" with him for his book of very inventive short stories. A table read consists of sitting across a table from one another and going over characters, accents, plot, and the intent of the author (his sci-fi stories are fun and other-worldly) — things you rarely get to do when taking on a book on ACX/Audible.

It was great to be able to take notes on his vision for the narration, marking up a copy of his manuscript as we went along. I suggested accents from Brooklyn to Kentucky swamp to upper and lower-class London to him and threw a few at him while reading his dialogue. His eyes lit up as his characters came alive. Many authors don’t think about how accents can differentiate their characters because their lines are never read out loud.

Buffered with personal stories, it took us 3 hours to go through only 2 tales. When we looked at our watches and decided to call it quits for the afternoon, he said he didn't want it to end. He was having so much fun imagining what I would do with his words, he wanted to do more. So we Zoom-called the rest of his stories a few days later.

The point here? I think it's important to remember in our business how an author's heart remains on his sleeve. Words are gifts of the heart as well as the imagination, and we are the ones tasked with handling them with care -- bringing them to life and potentially making an author's dreams come true.

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Below are a few of the comments I received on social media when posting about this experience the following day:

“I love this so much! I am an author (posting with admin permission) who just published my 12th audiobook with the same narrator. I would be beyond thrilled to be able to meet up with him in person or even TALK to him. We rarely ever communicate and have never talked in person. And, for me, that's just sad. (Sad face emoji)

“THIS! I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting one of my authors before narrating their book once. Great conversation!”

“I have personally met five of my authors, soon to be a sixth. The chance to do so is immeasurable. I have given workshops as a guest speaker at writers’ conferences and had those folks in the audience verify everything I spoke to. Indie authors are the real deal and as performers doing their work is a gift to me.”

“Very special moment when you get to meet the author in person and get more insight of how and why they wrote the book.”

And lastly: “That’s great. I never really thought of it from their perspective.”