11/29/2015
Looking for a royalty deal? Not getting any answers?
There is a reason…
You, in all sincerity , are planning on marketing your book. You’re planning on making many sells, hitting as many markets as you possibly can. It’s what you would expect to do and to think there would be any other reason wouldn’t even come to your mind. But there are other reasons and most narrators have to their misfortune, come across them.
Let’s start with the studio. A professional studio can cost a hundred an hour, a thousand, many thousands. as you can see the cost is already up there and that’s without a single word being uttered. A home studio, that cost the narrator as well besides little things like the cost of electricity, the physical time spent recording, dubbing, cutting, downloading, etc. your book is only an hour long, no it isn’t! check on any professional
recording situation and you’ll be told that the average one hour of completed recording takes up to four hours to actually do.
Lets continue with the voicing of the material to start with. You have a person with a voice that people find Is one that they don’t mind listening to. That person has spent a long time learning how to do what they do.
“He fell from the tree…” “DUH,” boring as you can get! You
bet it is. Take that same line and voice it with some Inflection, put some urgency to it. Let the voice be raised and you can almost feel the action of the moment.
A good narrator pulls in the listener both with the voice
Itself and how they use it. You’re looking for a narrator so obviously you’ve listened to a lot of narration in the past. You want the gun fight at the ok corral to sound like a gun fight, not a popgun party in a kindergarten school yard. You want people to hear the words , to feel them. That paragraph came from
you, it’s a part of you. You know what you want and so does a good narrator.
We’ve only just begun . That four hours I mentioned earlier. There might be ten minutes of recording but it might take 30 or 40 minutes of recording, and rerecording and re-re-recording to get that sound just right. That line sounded like, that line should have sounded like, that line
could of sounded like…
Okay, now we have all the recording done. Now the narrator, or the person doing the dubbing of the material will have to go back and listen to every single word. They have to cut out all the parts that were wrong. didn’t sound right, weren’t loud enough, etc. there are many reasons to cut a line and only one reason to keep one, it’s a good one…. Now another hour or two have been spent to get the recording to sound good. Right timing, good action. This is not a movie, you can’t see
It. It has to be heard, felt.
Then there’s little things like, auto spectoral subtraction. Decibel levels. Back round noise. Believe it or not. Total silence In the back round is a bad thing. There is always a room noise Level and it has to be maintained before the recording will be accepted from any reputable audio company. And these are Just a few of the things that are checked before the recording can be accepted for sale or publication . For everything mentioned here. There are a hundred more that haven’t even been brought up.
Here’s one for you. This is the bane of any narrator out there. They spent the time doing an audition. The cost, well you can figure that one. That was free from the narrator by the way. He’s done your audition, you’ve decided that he’ll do okay for you so you’ve agreed. You said you wanted a royalty deal. sounds good to you. You share all of your sales with them. I mentioned that every narrator cringes at a royalty deal.
As you can imagine there are people who just wrote a book. Look ma, pa, uncle joe, look at what I did. Now they have a recording and they send it to all their relatives and friends. Oops, it wasn’t done through the audio company. Why should It be, they wouldn’t expect their friends and relatives to pay for it. No sale, no percentage for the narrator. Another job done for free. But you’re on the up and up. The narrator thought
They were to and they still can’t tell who is who out there….
So, you want a royalty deal….!
