Audiobook Narration Tips: To Read or Not to Read Details for Non-Fiction Audiobooks

When you sit down to narrate your audiobook, you'll be faced with decisions around what you should read and what you shouldn't read. For example, do you read the copyright page? What about the footnotes? How do you handle charts and graphs? If you're going to be narrating your audiobook and you haven't decided how to handle all these awkward pieces of a nonfiction book, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, the founder of Book Launchers, a self publishing services company. I'm also a multi award winning author and the narrator of two of those audiobooks. We also help our authors narrate and produce and publish audio versions of their fabulous books. Now here's a few of our wonderful author's books that have been turned into really great selling audiobooks. We've talked a lot about audiobooks on this channel before, so I'll link to a playlist at the end so you can catch it. If you're wondering if you should do an audiobook, if you should narrate it or hire a professional, how, how you set yourself up to do an audiobook and where you distribute it. Oh, and how you market an audiobook. We've covered all of that. It's a big, wonderful subject area. So we have lots of great videos to help you today. We're assuming you're already on board to narrate your book and you're suddenly looking at your manuscript going, what the heck do I do about all these random pages, pictures and footnotes? Well, first let me tell you that everything is essentially a choice. There are common practices, but there are choices to be made there. The time to make those choices though is before you sit down to record your audiobook. I've talked about that before. Going through your manuscript to spot words which are usually names of people, places or things that might be hard to pronounce, and prepping that in advance, as well as going through and adding commas or places to breathe. But what about copyright, acknowledgments, dedications, et cetera? Well, let's go through the material page by page. Okay. All right, first up, opening credits. You would say the title, subtitle, followed by author and narrator name. For example, self publish and Succeed. Written by Julie Broad. Narrated by Julie Broad. This is always read. Testimonials or endorsements of the author, table of contents and material from the copyright page. None of those early pages in the book are typically read. Typically you would read the forward if there is one, but that is optional. Ready Reading the dedication is optional as well. But if you've followed my no boring books approach to dedications, I'll link to that video at the end. Then you can read it because it's for your reader and sets the tone. But reading it is optional. Now, if you've placed the acknowledgments at the beginning, I wouldn't recommend reading them. I would also recommend moving them to the end of your book. But if you did read them, you would read them at the end with closing credits when you thank your audiobook producer or the recording studio. I personally don't do that part, but it's your book and you can do what you want. If you've done some creative things in your book, you you'll have some decisions to make. Like for example, do you read that epigraph at the start? That's where you'll find the names that are hard to pronounce and you might feel a bit awkward, but that's a choice. You can read them or not. Just be consistent. If you read them on some chapter starts, but not all that's not good. So choose it and stick with it. Once you're into the meat of your book, read the text word for word. Some people like to take a liberal license and ad lib, but that's not ideal unless the audiobook is a completely separate product that you're creating and you're not looking to take advantage of whisper or other synergies that would exist between your ebook, physical book and your audiobook. Now for the weird ones. Footnotes and endnotes. What the heck do you do with those things? Well, it is your choice, but generally if it's material, you'll probably work it into the paragraph where you referenced it, but otherwise you just skip on right by like you didn't see it. Now the endnotes. Nobody is going to sit there while you read through a page of endnote material, and nor would that be remotely fun to read. So skip it. But what do you do about reference material like graphs, charts and images? Again, this is your choice. Have a listen to an audiobook in your category that has references and see what they did for inspiration and comparison. Your listener will likely be familiar with the practices of top sellers in your category, so doing what they do is a safe choice. And there really isn't an industry standard here, so it does come back to your choice. What I do is reference the chart or graph and then offer up a resource page on the website where the materials can be accessed. That could be like this and as illustrated in graph A2. The trend is upward for audiobooks and it's accelerating. Visit selfpublishandsucceed.com to view the chart and download other valuable resources. Now that's not real. You won't get those resources there. You will get an opportunity to buy my book though, then just carry on with the text. If you have cartoons or other sort of fun imagery, you can just carry on and disregard its existence. I personally like to send people to a website to download or see the missing references, but ACX also allows you to upload a PDF of these materials. It can be single file, not single file, a single file. It must be a single file and less than 99 megabytes. The instructions are on the ACX website. As we head to the back of the book, you may have an index which you absolutely would not read. Imagine what that would sound like. Aggregators 4281 29Amazon page 4121945 Apple Books 2291 oh my. Please do not read your index. And same goes for the bibliography. You can, however, read your acknowledgments at the end, but more commonly you would do closing credits, so more of a specific thing for your audiobook, not necessarily straight out of your book. You can have a call to action at the end of your audiobook to hit you up on social media or your website for your awesome download. I think I covered all the things you might encounter if you have a preview for a different book you've written. Don't read that. It's just an industry standard that you don't typically read previews. If there are two authors, you may choose to have one read parts of your book and the other read parts. Or you could have two narrators. It's not super common to have multiple narrators in nonfiction, but it's possible. And and again, it's your book, so you can do it if you want to. If you learned something or had your question answered, smash that thumbs up button. Oh wait. Music. We get asked this all the time. Can you or should you include music in your audiobooks? Well, once upon a time, music was common at the opening and closing of audiobooks. These days, the audiobook files tend to be music free. That said, you could include music, but here's some words of warning. Number one, make sure you have the license to use it for the very purpose that you're using it for. Be careful and conscious to make sure you have the rights for use in the audiobook. Number two the music must be properly edited so that it's at the same levels as the narration. I've covered some of the audiobook specifications before. That make professional editing and mastering invaluable. And if you're including music files, it will become even more essential or you'll end up in the never ending cycle of upload, rejection, revise, upload, reject. Quite a few people go through that. Number three. You would typically only use music at the opening or closing of the book to set the tone and close it out. Some people want to include it throughout, but it can be jarring to a listener because it's not common. Kind of like sound effects, it isn't received very positively by listeners. They seem to prefer high quality narration. I'll just give you an example. It's fiction, but check out the reviews of Grapes of Wrath Audiobook, which had a harmonica play between chapters. This book gets hammered in the reviews for little else but that harmonica. Also straight from the ACX website for audible submissions on music. We do not recommend adding music to your audiobook, as Audible audiobook listeners have told us that music can be a distraction when it comes to audiobooks. Additionally, adding music files can also cause whisper sync for the voice feature to fail. So overall, I would avoid it unless there's a really, really important and relevant reason for adding it. Okay. Oh boy. Okay. There is a lot to think about when it comes to audiobook production. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn the notifications on for the latest on audiobooks and, well, all things nonfiction, writing, publishing and promoting. Plus, then we can become besties. And I send my besties. Noboringbooks Swag. Cool, right? Okay. Now, if you're still trying to figure out what the heck an epigraph is that I mentioned earlier, don't worry, I got that for you right here. And as promised, let's make sure your dedications and acknowledgements are up to the noboringbook standard. Check that out right here. Oh, and that audiobook playlist I promised? Right here. If you have other questions or comments, definitely comment below. Otherwise, click on one of those videos. I'm waiting for you. See you there.