Recording This Son of York

 

As many of you who prefer listening to a reading have probably noticed, the narrator can make or break a book. The narrator for my first books was the award-winning former actor Rosalyn Landor. She made my characters come alive so well that I was pleased and proud of her work. 

The same cannot be said for Royal Mistress! Despite my agent's insistence that the contract with Audible included hiring Roz Landor again, they ignored her and me and the result was not as pleasing IMHO.

When it came to This Son of York's publishing process, as many of you know, I was on my own; like so many of my fellow writers subject to the vagaries of traditional publishers, I was left out to dry. The result was contracting with Bellastoria Press, a small independent publisher, who did a beautiful job on creating and distributing the print and ebook versions, albeit leaving me alone to do marketing.

But when it came to an audiobook, my husband and I thought long and hard as to whether to invest any more of our hard-earned cash in this book. It was during an unrelated chat with fellow author and friend, Chris (C.C.) Humphreys, that he mentioned he was narrating a friend's book at that time. I almost jumped through the phone! Here was the perfect voice for my Richard book, and judging from the reviews so far, listeners agree. "Mellifluous" was one reaction, and another said: "I appreciated Mr Humphreys’ clear enunciation. He’s wonderfully easy to listen to!"

"Would you read mine?" I asked timidly, knowing what a busy writer he is, too. "I would," he replied, and that was that!

An experienced narrator, he works for himself as well as known recording studios. He showed me the cubby hole he has erected as a studio in his apartment on Salt Spring Island; it's basically three folding screens with a duvet over the top as a sound barrier, a chair, a mike in a baffle and a wall mounted-screen upon which is the text he is reading. I would get claustrophobic after an hour, but he sits there hour after hour reading. Then there's the editing and mastering that is needed to meet the standards of FindAway Voices, the recording distribution company he likes to use because they distribute more widely, "Not everyone listens to Audible, who make you sign an exclusive. I'd rather be inclusive than exclusive and distribute widely, although the Audible percentage is higher."

As for his time on task:"It takes about two and a half hours to do one finished hour," he said. This Son of York's final finished tally is 19 hours, so you figure out how long he sat there perfecting the book! Does he ever get any unexpected disruptive interruptions? "The worst were the birds that constantly visited my first studio down the hill," he remembers. "I used to have to run outside banging and shouting to get them to fly off."

A talented actor--in fact, his first career after leaving the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London was the stage, Chris uses his voice technique to create characters, differentiating between genders by range and timbre or with accents. "Distinguishing between women in your book was a little more difficult. You don't want to just give them stereotypical high voices," he explains. "Anne Neville has to be very distinct from Queen Elizabeth, for example, so I varied their speed of delivery, making Anne more deliberate and Elizabeth flightier and prone to moodiness."

Was it hard for him to go from stage and voiceover acting to reading many characters one after the other, and how many times did he have to read a passage before recording it? "I don't practice a lot," he said. "I am lucky that I have always been good at sight-reading especially after voicing lots of cartoons in the 90s, so it wasn't much of a stretch [to do narration]."

One mustn't forget that Chris, as C.C. Humphreys, is also a well known historical and fantasy fiction author. He promises his fans he is balancing his time between writing and narrating. Watch out for The Runestone Saga--a new series coming soon! 

Thanks, Chris, for a fun and hopefully profitable collaboration!