![](\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/12\/12\/16\/78865805-12850369-image-a-7_1702398530988.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Professional accent coaches might seem absurd, but audiobooks are big business. Last year, sales increased by 25 per cent and the market was valued at more than \u00a31.2 billion; it\u2019s estimated that by 2030 it will be worth \u00a328 billion. Two months ago, the major book publishers all signed limited streaming deals with Spotify, giving the platform access to a catalogue of 150,000 audiobooks.<\/p>\n
Even celebrities are cashing in \u2013 in August, Meryl Streep recorded the audio for Ann Patchett\u2019s novel Tom Lake<\/span>. However, the booming industry has also created a hierarchy of professional narrators known only for their voices. Take Simon Vance, who moved from England to the US with his wife in 2006. He\u2019d worked as a newsreader for the BBC and, through a friend of a friend, got a job narrating audiobooks. Now arguably the best-known reader in the industry, the 67-year-old has received 50 nominations for The Audies, an Oscars-style audiobooks awards ceremony \u2013 more than any other male narrator. He\u2019s recorded more than 1,000 titles, including Game of Thrones, Wolf Hall<\/span> and rock autobiographies by Eric Clapton, Bernie Taupin and Rod Stewart, who was so pleased with Vance he took him to supper then flew him to his concert in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n Vance thinks he was lucky with timing:<\/p>\n \u2018I caught the wave.\u2019 He\u2019s modest but also, partly, correct. In 2008, Audible \u2013 the world\u2019s biggest audiobook producer \u2013 was bought by Amazon for \u00a3150 million. The once tiny industry exploded. \u2018They wanted to make audiobooks of just about everything.\u2019<\/p>\n This had its problems. Amazon employed small producers who hired inexperienced narrators, which made for bad audiobooks. Also, narrators were paid for each hour they spent in the studio. \u2018The system didn\u2019t work,\u2019 says Vance. While he can record around 10,000 words in an hour \u2013 about 100 pages a day \u2013 depending on the text, \u2018A lousy narrator, who took four hours to record one hour of narration, got paid more than a good narrator who did it in two.\u2019 Now, voice actors are paid per finished hour of work. The wage used to be \u00a330-\u00a340 an hour; today it\u2019s around \u00a3140-\u00a3160. As for the problem of bad narrators? \u2018The cream rose to the top\u2019.<\/p>\n If \u00a3160 sounds like a lot for 60 minutes, recording an audiobook requires hours, possibly days, of research. Actress and narrator Fiona Hardingham has been in the business since 2009, when she moved from London to LA. She\u2019s since been nominated for four Audies and recorded 350 novels, from Dickens to Sophie Kinsella. \u2018When I get a title, I read it through,\u2019 says Hardingham. \u2018I highlight it and make notes of all the characters: their quirks, their idiosyncrasies, their accents.\u2019 Narrating is a tricky balance between knowing a text very well but also managing to \u2018find surprise\u2019 in it. \u2018You still have to discover the book with the audience,\u2019 she says.<\/p>\n A-listers like Meryl Streep are getting in on the act, while Zadie Smith is among the novelists who have narrated their own audiobooks<\/p>\n But you can\u2019t just blind read as you go along. \u2018The fear of god\u2019 says Hardingham, would be to record a whole book in an English accent then realise that a character was actually Italian. Hardingham has come close once, recording the first instalment in a series of novels. In it was a French cameo character, and she voiced the accent accordingly. When book two came out several years later, the character had been made Russian-French, \u2018Which is, in itself, so hilarious to get into the mouth\u2019, she says, demonstrating her best hybrid Russian-French accent. Strangely, it works. (Accents can be pesky. Vance struggles with Geordie.<\/p>\n \u2018I probably drift into Birmingham or something. It\u2019s like when you\u2019re doing Welsh, and you end up sounding like you\u2019re from India.\u2019)<\/p>\n Hardingham records mostly from home, self-editing as she reads. In her garage she has a small booth, with cladding \u2013 it beats her first home studio, which shared a wall with her neighbour\u2019s bathroom. \u2018Every time they had a shower I had to stop recording \u2013 and they were a very good singer.\u2019<\/p>\n Noisy neighbours aside, recording at home may be less embarrassing than in a studio. Author Marian Keyes once said there was a sex scene she dreaded narrating from her novel Again, Rachel<\/span>. \u2018I did it with Roy the sound engineer. I was f*****g mortified.\u2019 Hardingham is diplomatic: sex scenes are fine for her, but she\u2019d rather narrate a thriller than a bodice-ripper. Once a sound engineer, on hearing her record a particularly sexy scene, said: \u2018I\u2019m really sorry you\u2019re doing this title.\u2019 What was she doing that was so awkward? \u2018It was sort of\u2019 \u2013 Hardingham pauses, thinking about how to phrase this \u2013 \u2018moaning.\u2019 Preserving the vocal cords is something of an extreme sport. Hardingham warms up with humming and does rigorous face, mouth and tongue stretches. (\u2018You look a bit like a loony.\u2019) She also drinks cups and cups of hot lemon and honey as well as a herbal tea called Throat Coat. \u2018It\u2019s a secret within the industry, but everyone should know about it!\u2019<\/p>\n In January, The Guardian<\/span> reported how Apple had quietly released a series of audiobooks recorded by artificial intelligence. The panicky headline wondered if this was \u2018the death of the narrator\u2019. Vance isn\u2019t too worried. Currently, all audiobooks \u2013 the highest and the lowest sellers \u2013 are read by humans, some better than others. \u2018I think AI will take over the lowest-selling books because, in some ways, AI is better than a bad narrator. A bad narrator can sometimes be very distracting. AI is built in such a way that it\u2019s not distracting.\u2019<\/p>\n Still \u2013 and apologies to the robots \u2013 AI is boring. \u2018It can send you to sleep,\u2019 says Hardingham. \u2018I don\u2019t think it can engage you in the same way a human narrator can.\u2019<\/p>\n Take the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope. \u2018I love his writing,\u2019 says Vance, \u2018but, boy, does he go on sometimes. To be able to lift a long paragraph, and to know which bits to emphasise and which bits not to, is a skill that is only learned over time.\u2019 And to learn that skill requires human instinct.<\/p>\n Early in Vance\u2019s career, he narrated David Copperfield. Published in 1850, the novel is 768 pages long; Vance\u2019s final recording lasts 33 hours and 54 minutes. In response, an American author, Orson Scott Card, wrote, in an opinion piece in a local newspaper, that he\u2019d never \u2018got\u2019 Dickens until he listened to it. For Vance, that\u2019s the purpose of audiobook narrators: \u2018Texts can be difficult. Not everybody reads well, whether it\u2019s dyslexia or it\u2019s just hard. We\u2019re the gap between author and listener. We are storytellers.\u2019<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/12\/12\/12\/78865813-12850369-image-a-168_1702384079549.jpg\")
\n![](\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/12\/12\/12\/78865811-12850369-image-a-167_1702384079545.jpg\")
<\/p>\n