Hear ye, hear ye!

After something of a gap owing to other commitments (including working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, darlings! Only the best for us!), our wonderful audiobook narrator Guy Hanson has just started work on the third Sam Plank book, “Worm in the Blossom”.  Guy has the perfect voice for Sam – warm, mature, humorous and gently London.  And having read both “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, he’s also a dab hand (throat?) at adjusting his voice to encompass Martha, Conant, Wontner and all our other regulars.

If you’ve not yet sampled audiobooks – ideal for car/train/plane journeys, and good company when gardening/jogging/dog-walking – did you know that you can get a free 30-day trial to Audible (the audiobook arm of Amazon)?  With a free trial you get:

• One free audiobook of your choice – which you can keep even if you cancel after the trial (and if you’re an Amazon Prime customer, you get two free audiobooks during your trial)
• Unlimited listening to the Plus Catalogue, which contains thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and select audiobooks (including mine, of course)
• After the 30-day trial, you can download one book a month, with unlimited access to the Plus Catalogue, for £7.99/month (which renews automatically)
• And you can pause or cancel your membership at any time.

(In the interests of openness and transparency, I should tell you that – should you take out a trial or membership through my link – I get what Amazon calls a “bounty”.  Sadly not a yummy coconut chocolate bar, but just some ordinary money.)

So if you’re tempted to meet Guy/Sam and make a Sam Plank novel your free starter audiobook, here are the links: “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.

Me, myself and I

Today I have been wrestling with the mechanics of writing.  I don’t mean printers or software, but rather the restrictions that a writing form places on the author.  As a reader – and I appreciate that this may be an unpopular and perhaps narrow viewpoint – I’m put off by experimental or (heaven forbid) “daring” writing styles.  For instance, I don’t like having speech without inverted commas, or without regular indicators for who is speaking.  I can cope with multiple narrators, as long as (a) there’s a good reason for it and it’s not used just to bulk out a word count by telling the same story from several points of view, and (b) again, it’s clearly indicated.  I really can’t stand stream of consciousness – although I know that many people love it, hence the enduring popularity of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.  My position is that I read for entertainment, escape and/or education, and if I want a mental puzzle I’ll do a cryptic crossword or sudoku.  But I know many readers do like to be challenged, and books like Anna Burns’ “Milkman” (where no-one is actually named) win wagon-loads of prizes.

However, one of the many joys of being a self-published author is that I can write whatever I like and my publisher (me!) will accept it without nagging me to be more modern or adventurous or rule-breaking in my writing style.  And what I like is clear, crisp story-telling that follows the rules of style and grammar that have been developed to enable the reader to ignore them completely and wallow in the story itself.

When I started the Sam Plank series, I knew I wanted a first person narrator, with all the stories told from Sam’s point of view, using the “I” pronoun.  I liked the idea of revealing his thoughts and developing a writing style that was his rather than mine – although I have started to adopt some of his mannerisms, I find.  But first person narration has one big limitation: you can write only what your narrator sees, hears or knows.  So if you want a scene in which your narrator is not present, you have to work out a way for him to hear or read or otherwise learn about it – or give in and have him hiding round the corner or listening at the keyhole.  Luckily for me, a constable often does both of these – but I still sometimes have to rejig a plot because it includes scenes which Sam could never know about.  And oddly, given how much I dislike written puzzles as a reader, I quite relish them as a writer.

Using adverbs wisely, judiciously, carefully and rarely

My heroic narrator Guy Hanson is in the throes of recording “Worm in the Blossom”.  When he started this one – the third in the series – I extracted from him a promise that he was in it for the long haul, and would continue to be Sam for all seven books.  And now that I know that the books are going to be audio-fied (you know what I mean) and especially now that I can hear Guy as I write, I find that it is affecting my dialogue.

For instance, I used to employ more adverbs: “he said quietly”, “she replied quickly”.  (And at one point I tried to find a gazillion ways to say “said” – he growled, she whispered, they spat – until thankfully I came to my senses and realised that it irritates me when I am reading someone else’s book, so why would I replicate it in my own?)  But I did stick with the adverbs for a while, until I heard Guy.  And it sounds rather silly for someone to say, angrily, “‘Why should I?’ he asked angrily.”  The context and words should be sufficient to convey the mood and tone, and if they are not, simply slapping an adverb on the end is not the answer.  As a result, my dialogue is – I think – much simpler and crisper in layout: it’s pretty much all “he said”, “she said”, “he replied”.  Guy is more than capable of supplying the right spirit when he reads aloud, and so are readers when they read to themselves.

You don’t have to take my word for it: Stephen King, who perhaps rather outsells me (so it must be working), is of the same mind.

Meet the voice of Sam

As you know, the audiobook of “Fatal Forgery” has now been released.  Sales are going well: twelve so far.  It has been a great project, and one of the nicest things about it has been communicating with “my” narrator, Guy Hanson (or “AudioSam”, as he’s known in our house).  And I thought that you might like to know a little more about the fine fellow who has brought Sam to life (if you’re not keen on buying the audiobook, you can still hear an audio clip of Guy/Sam on Amazon, Audible and iTunes).  So Guy and I have done a little Q&A for you.

Me: I chose you as my ideal Sam after listening to dozens of voice audio samples on ACX.  But of course it is a two-way agreement, so when I offered you Sam, why did you agree?

Guy: I think very simply because I liked the character of Sam; he is a chap you could imagine running into in a pub in his later life and being able to spend hours just listening to his stories.

Me: And having now spent hours in his company, what do you think are Sam’s key characteristics?

Guy: Sam is a quiet, thoughtful person but tenacious in “getting his man”.

Me: I have written “Fatal Forgery” (and indeed the subsequent Sam novels) in the form of a constable’s notebook – short chapters, with dates, concentrating on action and dialogue rather than description.  Do you think this format works for an audiobook?

Guy: It works brilliantly and reflects Sam’s character too.  Interestingly it more of a challenging as a narrator, because you don’t have much of a lead in and you’re hitting the characters straight away.

Me: Many of the characters in “Fatal Forgery” appear in later Sam Plank novels too, and you have said that – if this audiobook is a success – you would like to do the others as well.  How do you keep track of each voice, so that, for instance, John Wontner always sounds the same?

Guy: I’m sure all narrators have their way of doing this, but my way is to start to build up a library of character voices.  I often add a note or two as well if there are certain thing about a character which I have used to “find” them in the first place.

Me: Most of the characters in “Fatal Forgery” are male but there are some women and girls.  How do you voice them without sounding like a parody?

Guy: Ah now, that an interesting question.  I don’t think that audiences actually have a problem with male doing female characters or vice versa (look at panto!); I think the important thing, as in any performance, is that you must be genuine and believable.

Me: Can you tell us a little about your narration process – for instance, do you read the whole book before starting, or just the chapter you’re about to record?  How long can you spend reading aloud before you have to give your voice (and perhaps your back!) a rest?

Guy: I first like to read through the first four or five chapters just to get a general feel for the piece.  I will then speak to the author and get notes on particular character traits or anything that might affect the voice or the way they speak, so accents, lisps etc.  I have to say that for the most part authors tend to let me get on with it, and then occasionally change something if it’s not right as we go along.  I will often record chapters in sections and tie them together during editing.  If you work on the principle that an hour’s completed and edited audio is around four hours’ work, you can see that a couple of hours’ narration is usually enough, before the voice starts to strain.

Sam comes to life

When I was at the Alderney Literary Festival (did I mention that?!) I said during my talk that I would love to have Sam made into audiobooks, but that I had made enquiries about Audible a couple of years ago, and it was way too expensive for me.  Afterwards someone came up to me and said that they knew of a new system, and – what can I say?  It’s miraculous.

The service is called ACX – Audiobook Creation Exchange – and it’s part of Amazon.  Basically you advertise the fact that you have a book that you would like audio-ed, and narrators and producers rush to audition for you.  If you’re CJ Sansom or JK Rowling.  (Is that where I’m going wrong?  Should I be SP Grossey?)  Of course, if you’re a nobody like me you have to chase them instead, but that’s fascinating anyway.  You set various filters to find the sort of voice you want – I went for male, mature (not old), UK, London, warm – and listen to their snippets.  And as soon as I heard one particular voice, I thought, that’s Sam.  I contacted the narrator – he works for himself, so no producer in the mix – and offered my project.  He liked the look of the book – obviously, if you’re going to spend hours reading something, it has to be something that interests you – and agreed to do an audition.  This afternoon I received his recording of the first chapter of “Fatal Forgery”, and it was spine-chilling to hear my own words read aloud to me.  And it sounded really, really professional – you know, like a proper book.  Long story short, he’s going to read the whole of “Fatal Forgery”, and has promised that he’s feeling hale and hearty and envisages being able to read all seven Sams.

What about the money, I hear you asking.  Well, ACX offers two basic arrangements: a 50/50 profit split between author and narrator, or a per-hour charge paid by author to narrator.  I offered the former, partly because I don’t want to pay a lot of money upfront for an untested idea (I have no feel for how much pent-up demand there is for audio-Sam) and partly because I think a narrator whose income depends on the sales of the audiobook will be much more involved in promotion.  And when it’s done, ACX puts it up on Amazon, Audible and iTunes – it’s an exclusive arrangement, so I can’t put it anywhere else, but I figure that they’re the big three anyway.

So that’s my latest project – apart from writing “Plank 4”, of course.  Which is going well, thank you for asking.