Frequently Asked Questions

After all the prep and our conversations about the book, I provide the first fifteen minutes for your approval. Once you give me the green light (with any notes), your book becomes my priority until I’m finished. After the initial recording, the files go to a proofer who listens through and catches anything I missed. I make those corrections, and then the editor assembles everything, edits in the corrections, and masters the entire project for upload to your preferred platform—Audible, Spoken Realms, wherever your audiobook is headed.

My voice can handle about four hours of recording per day at peak quality. I could push beyond that, but the performance would suffer, and that’s not a trade-off I’m willing to make with your book. On heavy recording weeks, I also build in rest days so I can keep delivering consistent quality throughout the project.

I use a method called “punch and roll,” which means I’m editing in real time as I record. When I catch a mistake—a misread, a mouth noise, a weird emphasis—I stop, roll back a few seconds, and punch in the correction right then and there. It’s a much cleaner process than recording straight through and fixing everything later.

Punch and roll is a recording method where you stop at a mistake, listen back a few seconds, and “punch” in the correction so it flows seamlessly. It’s different from “straight record,” where you press record and keep going until you’re done, then go back and cut out all the mistakes afterward. Punch and roll takes more technical focus in the moment but results in much cleaner raw audio.

Constantly. I’m human, and mistakes are just part of the process. I’ve fumbled “Chapter One” before—nobody is immune. The goal is to focus on the performance and the story, and then catch and fix everything technical afterward. That’s what the whole post-production team is there for.

More than you’d think! But that’s true of every narrator. The mistakes are constant and completely normal—tongue trips, misreads, a weird breath in the wrong place. I catch most of them in real time with punch and roll, and then the proofer catches the rest. By the time you get your finished files, those mistakes are long gone.

I appreciate the curiosity, but no. My acting process feels quite intimate, and the performance genuinely suffers if I’m aware of someone listening in real time. I get self-conscious, I second-guess choices, and your book deserves better than that.

That said, by the time I’m recording, you and I will have already talked through character notes, story questions, and vocab—so you can feel confident that I’m bringing everything we discussed into the booth. And you’ll hear the first fifteen minutes before I continue, so you’ll know exactly where we’re headed.

When I work with major publishers, live-directed sessions are sometimes part of the process, yes. If you’d like to hire a director to oversee the sessions, that’s very welcome—I love working with a skilled director. The additional fees would depend on the director being hired.

Usually via Zoom or a similar platform. The director and I are connected while I’m in the booth, and we both have the script in front of us. We’ve both prepped the manuscript, made character and story notes, and built vocab lists when needed. As I read, they’re listening and providing both performance and technical guidance in real time. It’s an immense help and honestly a gift to have a skilled ear in the booth with me.

In my experience, this hasn’t come up—I think publishers have plenty on their plates already! But if there were unusual circumstances that called for it, we’d figure it out.

Zoom, Riverside, and Google Meet are the ones I’ve used so far. I’m open to others if you have a preference.

Yes, unless it’s a duet narration where another narrator is handling some of the characters. For single narration, every voice in your book comes from me—and honestly, that’s one of my favorite challenges.

Great question—they sound similar but they’re quite different. Dual narration means two narrators alternating POV chapters. So if your book alternates evenly, I’d read 50% and another narrator reads the other 50%. We both prep for the entire book, though, so we’re on the same page.

Duet narration is a bigger production. The female narrator reads all the female voices in the book plus the narration for her chapters, and the male narrator does the same for his. This means the post-production team is stitching together a huge number of short files into something that sounds cohesive and seamless. I don’t think they get nearly enough credit for that work, honestly. It also explains why duet narration costs more to produce.

I’ll often listen back to a few minutes of my last recording session before starting a new one to get the tone and vibe right. My character notes help too—I keep detailed records so I’m not relying purely on memory for how a character sounded three chapters ago.

Ha—no, and there’s a practical reason for that beyond my singing abilities. Songs that require copyright clearance can get expensive fast, and it’s not best practice to sing them in audiobooks. If there’s an original song written by the author in the text, that’s a conversation to have about what makes sense. But this particular skill set is not in my wheelhouse.

No—audiobooks and audio dramas are different animals. Audio dramas include music, sound effects, and usually a full production team with a sound engineer. Audiobooks are the human voice only. There’s something really beautiful about that, actually—it’s just you and the narrator, and everything has to come through the voice. (That said, the line between audiobooks and audio dramas is getting more interesting, so who knows what the future holds.)

That’s certainly a choice. Some authors go with AI narration because it’s cheaper and faster to produce, and I understand the appeal on paper. My honest advice? Check out the listener reviews of AI-generated narration. Spoiler: they’re not kind. There are narrators who make a living just fixing bad AI narration—and that should tell you something about the experience of authors who chose it and regretted it. Some books might get away with it for purely informational content. But anything that requires emotional range—romance, comedy, erotica, grief, suspense—is very hard to pull off convincingly without a human behind the mic.

One of the things I love about long-form narration is that most authors write emotional and intense scenes with a buildup. You don’t usually land there out of nowhere—there’s a path that leads you into it. So by the time I’m recording that gut-wrenching moment or that terrifying scene, I’ve been living in the emotional journey that got us there. It feels natural because I’ve experienced everything the characters have experienced leading up to it. When a big emotional moment does happen right at the top of a chapter, it takes a bit more intentional preparation to get there—but that’s what the prep work is for.

It depends on the book. Reading a children’s book the same way you’d read academic nonfiction obviously wouldn’t work. But within genres, the performance tends to follow the text. A thriller doesn’t sound spooky from page one—it might start cozy or funny or light, which actually makes the scary parts even scarier when they arrive. I try to let each book tell me what it needs rather than imposing a genre template on it.