Listen Up: Audiobook Writing Tips
Audiobooks continue to be the fastest growing sector of the book industry. Savvy authors should consider how their written book might sound in audio format—and the best time to consider this is while you’re still writing! Especially if you plan to narrate your own audiobook, paying attention to how you craft and organize your text will save you time and headaches later.
We’ve collected 5 writing and formatting tips you can employ while drafting your manuscript to set you up for future success in audio format:
1. Keep Your Chapter/Section Lengths Consistent
Modern audiobooks are a collection of audio files in which each file typically contains a single chapter. Most audiobook platforms have length limits for individual files, so if your reading time for a chapter exceeds that limit, you might have to break the chapter up into parts. This can be jarring for a reader and creates an unnatural break in the flow of your story or message.
When looking at an audiobook’s Table of Contents, potential readers can also see how long each chapter is. As many listeners are squeezing an audiobook in while doing other tasks—like during their daily commute, while jogging, or as they do chores—having a reliable and consistent length helps them to plan out how much time they have to listen.
When drafting your manuscript, you can anticipate these lengths by paying attention to word count. Many word processors enable you to review lengths by highlighting a section. Keeping each chapter or section of a comparable length will translate into roughly equal lengths for the audiobook files.
The average speaking speed is about 700 words per 5 minutes; a half-hour audiobook chapter contains approximately 4,200 words. While this isn’t a rigid rule, keep it in mind as you compose and review your text. You’ll be surprised how much easier your book is to read (and listen to) if it uses consistent lengths throughout!
2. Listen to a Robot Read Your Text
There are many free text-to-speech tools available that will be a big help in drafting and self-revision. While they may pronounce names wrong and sometimes deliver unnatural pacing, they also catch incorrectly used homonyms and typos that your brain just glides over when reading silently.
Where these tools can be of even greater help is in making repetition apparent. As you listen, you’ll notice that repeating patterns or overused words start to sound like gibberish through a phenomenon called semantic satiation. Have you used the same word (or phrase) four times in the same paragraph? Do you tend to use the same sentence construction over and over in a row? Have you composed over-bloated sentences that you couldn’t comfortably read aloud in a single breath? Do you overuse rhetorical questions (like these ones)?
By letting a robot voice read your text back to you, you’ll find yourself listening to your text like an audience member. You can better hear clunky sections, or where a shift in attention happens, so you can pause the read-back and adjust your text accordingly. Then you can rewind and listen to your revision to make sure it sounds better. Be sure to rewind to the beginning of the sentence (or paragraph) to get the most out of this review.
3. Practise Reading Aloud
Even if you don’t intend to narrate your own audiobook, it’s a good idea to practise reading your text aloud. Not only will you be able to do so more naturally than a robot voice can, you’ll also be able to assess places where the human tongue tangles in certain combinations. This might include annoying assonance applications, thorny thoughts through alliteration, uncommon or complex words like impecunious, perspicuity, or Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides. Audiobook narrators appreciate receiving lists of words that have specific pronunciations so that they can be sure to practise and pronounce them properly prior to recording.
If you are narrating your own text, you’ll save yourself some re-recording time by being equally prepared. If you’ve read through your text aloud throughout the drafting process, you’ll be more familiar with how it sounds when you’re ready to record. You’ll also be able to more smoothly transition when turning pages, to inflect more meaning and emotion into your performance, and be more relaxed so you don’t rush your elocution.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much more comfortable you’ll feel during author events or interviews when you read an excerpt of your text live.
4. Consider Simplifying Your Language
Keeping your ideal audience in mind is always an important part of the drafting process. This includes choosing words that are appropriate for your audience’s reading level and existing knowledge of your subject. As Mark Twain famously quipped, “Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”
While this is good advice generally, some books require you to roll out genre-specific terms or names that may need a bit more handling with care. If you have many names throughout your book, ensure context makes it clear who you’re referring to. In fiction, this often means changing names of minor characters to make them visually and auditorily distinct from your protagonists. In nonfiction, this may mean using full names to distinguish between three different Johns. Ensure you explain new terms or characters when they are introduced.
But this advice goes deeper. Make sure that sentences are not overloaded with names, terms, or shorthand that may obstruct your meaning. While asides can help (such as in parentheses or offset by em dashes), don’t underestimate the power of a full stop. Breaking up overloaded sentences makes them easier to follow.
While jargon or abbreviations may be crucial to understanding your subject matter or worldbuilding, be careful not to include too many in a single sentence. These can quickly become tongue-twisters when put in an audio format, not to mention some acronyms are actually initialisms in disguise! The former are pronounced like a word, like AWOL (A-wall), while the latter are pronounced like their individual letters, like MIA: (em-eye-eh), and some tricksy ones can be pronounced both ways depending on the individual or regional dialect, like ASAP (did you read that as eh-ess-eh-pee or A-sap?).
Consider which of the following two sentences is easier to read aloud (and to comprehend):
“When investing in professional BCC for ARCs, especially for audiences in NA, you’ll get your best ROI if the editor uses CMOS and keeps the WC under 500.”
“When investing in professional back cover copywriting for ARCs (advanced reader copies), especially for audiences in North America, you’ll get your best return on investment if the editor uses the Chicago Manual of Style and keeps the word count under 500.”
You may also want to decide how asides (like in the parentheses above) should be performed. Some narrators will use a vocal pitch to indicate an aside; others will ad lib a transition, like “ARCs, that is advanced reader copies.” See what sounds better to your ear and note your preference for when you’re ready to record.
5. Integrate Supplementary Materials
Supplementary material like maps, graphs, lists, and references are aids for reader comprehension. They are included in books because it’s more impactful and efficient to review the data in a visual format, rather than having it explained longhand. However, this poses a challenge for an audiobook when the reader may not be visually reading along in a print or eBook copy. Often, if an audiobook relies on visual aids, it will offer a PDF download with its purchase. This PDF will either be a copy of the full eBook, or just a bundle of the supplementary materials for the reader to reference at the appropriate times during the recording.
Consider what’s crucial to be included in the flow of your text. If comprehending your work is largely dependent on these visual aids, an audiobook may not be the best fit.
However, if you occasionally use these devices, you can consider your framing text. Can you clearly explain what your supplementary material provides? For example, “The following graph (see fig. 4) compiles the data of census reports from 2005 to 2015, showing that readership has increased among the Millennial demographic.” This enables the performance to proceed smoothly, while also providing the reader a cue to pause the audio so they can open the provided visual aid.
Lists might need to be read aloud, so can you construct them in a way that doesn’t lose your listener? Full sentence constructions only work if they are parallel. For example, in the following list, each item has been presented:
to work grammatically with the lead-in sentence,
with suitable capitalization and punctuation,
so that each clause works independently or together as a complex sentence.
If you find yourself repeating the same introductory clause in each bullet point of a list, see if you can work the framing text into the lead-in instead, and keep the list items unique and simple.
Also consider how references like footnotes will be read aloud. If they are placed at the end of a sentence, it’s fairly easy to slide them in between sentences; if they fall in the middle of a sentence, it gets a bit trickier. If you have multiple footnotes for a single sentence, there is even more to consider. Can your placement or sentence constructions be adjusted to avoid footnote pileups? If these notes absolutely must be placed mid-sentence and together (such as when contrasting points or making humorous asides), ensure there’s an organic pause between ideas for these footnotes to be interjected in a performance, or allow your narrator to ad lib segues back into the running text.
As you’ll notice, not every solution that makes sense for audiobooks will be as efficient in print. You may need to keep annotations for your audio version where liberties should be taken. Having a few intentional differences between your editions can ensure the best possible product in all formats. But by writing your manuscript with audio in mind, you can tease out the majority of your sticking points to ensure your text is a smooth and enjoyable read—regardless of what format your reader chooses.