All I could think was: if I’d known I was going to have to say this whole book out loud, I would have written a better one.
I narrated my own audiobook in 2014, an experience that I described at the time as being akin to an exorcism: three long days in a dark room, tripping through the minefield of my own words. N arration may sound like an easy way to make money – you just sit there and read – but I can assure you, it isn’t.
Some of the biggest British voices in audiobooks belong to faces you might not recognise, but may well have seen – on stage, on Coronation Street, or in any number of Carry On films. In the US, 81-year-old actor George Guidall is considered narration’s undisputed heavyweight champion: his baritone voice has graced more than 1,300 audiobook recordings, including works by Dostoevsky, Jonathan Franzen and Stephen King. The real professionals, however, are people you might not have heard of.
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“I’m so impressed with professional readers,” says Bryson, “the Martin Jarvises of this world, or people like Stephen Fry, who can really bring extra dimensions to it.” Any movement creates extraneous noise: fabric rustling, chair creaking, foot tapping’īut while technology has transformed the industry, it still relies on an army of audiobook narrators to meet the demand. Today, Audible’s catalogue contains more than 400,000 titles in 2018, its members downloaded nearly three billion hours of content. In the 1990s, before the iPod was launched, Audible was selling a proprietary digital media player that held about two hours of audio downloaded from its online library. This growth has largely been driven by the rise of Audible, the Amazon-owned platform that dominates the digital audiobook market through its subscription streaming service, though there are other players, including Storytel, which operates largely in Scandinavian countries. In the US, audiobook downloads generate revenue of close to a billion dollars annually. In a climate where print and ebook sales are stagnant, the UK audiobook market rose to £69m in 2018, an increase of 43% on the previous year.
In the two decades since Bryson recorded his first narration, the audiobook market has grown from a publishing industry side hustle into a huge global business. “You know what it’s like when you’re writing – you don’t think about anything, really, except trying to get words right to yourself on the page.” “Now I’ve probably worked with five or six producers,” he says, “and they’re all really kind, and they’re always very encouraging, but I can’t help feel that I should be better at this, that I should be able to pronounce the words in my own book.” Does he not realise by now that when he commits a word like glomerulonephritis to print, he will eventually have to record it? “You would think so, but no,” he says. Bryson’s audiobook experience goes back 20 years, when he was living in New Hampshire and the nearest recording studio was in the neighbouring state of Vermont.
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