AUDIOBOOKS
Audiobook Narrator: Do Listeners Find You
InterestING Or InterestED? They'll Hear It ...
March 2, 2017
 By Jim Conlan
Voice Actor, Audiobook Narrator, Coach
What makes a story interesting?
For years I’ve been saying
that if what you’re narrating matters to you, it will matter to your listeners. But how do you make it matter?
Logically, you might say (and
I’ve heard many say it) that you need to "be interesting.”
Well… OK… but have you ever tried to "be interesting”? I
have. Any number of painful dating experiences comes to mind.
By when trying to be interesting
I was putting the attention on myself, not on the other person.
CHANGE YOUR FOCUS
So, what if we changed the adjective a little: instead of
trying to be "interesting,” how about being "interested”?
Whether you’re
narrating an account of the murder of Robert Blake’s wife (did that) or the
ascent of Mt. Ararat (did that) or an hour-by-hour description of the taking of
the Scheldt River Estuary in WWII (yeah, did that, too), you’ll keep your
listener’s attention in proportion to how interested you are in what you’re
narrating.
In practice it works sort of like this:
Before you narrate a
single chapter, adopt the attitude that you hope your listener will have: be
curious.
- Say, "I wonder what this is all about?”
- Read each page with a sense of
discovery – that you’re going to find out something new.
Hopefully, this will
generate an undertone to your narration that has an unspoken "Huh!” at the end
of each sentence.
The result is that, instead of trying to sound interesting,
you’re sharing a mutually interesting experience. Who wouldn’t be interested in
that?
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ABOUT JIM
James Conlan is a narrator with nearly 70 fiction and
non-fiction titles. He has trained dozens of extremely interesting audiobook
narrators.
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