Practical advice for actors and voice performers aspiring to break into audiobook narration with Stefan Szwarc from 2020 Recordings.
In this episode we’re joined in the Spotlight Voice Booth by Stefan Szwarc, Head of Production at 2020 Recordings. 2020 Recordings produce a broad range of audio content and are an industry leader in audiobook production, working with publishers like Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin Random House, and independent authors from around the world to audibly bring stories to life.
We sat down with Stefan to unravel the world of audiobook production and voice acting. He shares a wealth of practical advice for actors and voice performers aspiring to break into audiobook narration from the audition process, the importance of preparation, knowing your vocal instrument, and how to tailor voice reels and your Spotlight profile to help be discovered.
Stefan Szwarc / Image credit: Nicholas Dawkes
The episode delves into the technical and creative aspects of audiobook recording—from pre-production preparation and recording styles, to post-production, pay structures, and even opportunities in localisation and non-English projects. Stefan shares invaluable audiobook narration tips and discusses the intricacies of casting, the challenges of sustaining character voices, and the collaborative process between actor, director, and engineer in the studio.
Whether you’re an actor looking to expand your repertoire or simply curious about what goes on behind-the-scenes of your favourite audiobooks, this conversation is packed with expert insights and tips.
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Stefan in the 2020 Recordings studio / Image credit: Andy Earl
Transcript
Edited for clarity
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to work as Head of Production at 2020 Recordings?
Stefan Szwarc: I moved around quite a lot as a kid, which I think had a big influence on me in later life and my decision to go into a creative career. I eventually settled in California for my formative years up until I was about 15-years-old, and then we moved to France, because that’s where my father was originally from. He was a filmmaker who spent a lot of time in Los Angeles and doing films in France. I was around acting and directing a lot as a kid. It was just something that was a part of our family and our experiences.
I took a real interest in acting as a 16-year-old, and I ended up going to drama school here in London. That’s what brought me here. I came out of drama school, I’m trying to be an actor like everybody else, and I was able to pick the directing back up and do both of those things at the same time, whether that was short films or theatre or voiceover work.
Eventually when the pandemic happened, like everybody else I got a little bit nervous about the landscape and I could see things closing. Unfortunately, a lot of my friends were out of work and if I’m honest with you, that made me a bit nervous. So when the opportunity came to work with 2020 Recordings, something that was a little bit more consistent as an expanding company, I leapt at the opportunity and I’ve never looked back.
Kristyn Coutts: And do you still do a bit of acting now?
Stefan Szwarc: Every now and then, yeah. I do some voiceover work, but it’s mainly just in the audio world.
What does 2020 Recordings do?
Stefan Szwarc: 2020 Recordings is an audio production house that is based in Tileyard Studios, which is quite close to King’s Cross in London. We produce all forms of audio content.
I would say our bread and butter, in terms of the number of titles that we produce is audiobooks. But it’s not exclusively audiobooks. We also do some corporate stuff, some English language training stuff, some video games and voiceover reels and all sorts of things. Anything audio, we’ll take care of it.
What kind of clients do 2020 Recordings work with?
Stefan Szwarc: Audiobook-wise we work with clients both in Europe and in America, which is great because although it is the same medium, they do have different quirks about them, which is really interesting to learn about. We work with some of the biggest publishers here from Hachette to Penguin. And then we recently collaborated with Macmillan US on an audiobook that ended up getting nominated for a Grammy, which was really cool.
Kristyn Coutts: Congrats!
Stefan Szwarc: Thank you.
We mostly [work with] clients across both sides of the pond, but we’ve also worked with some independent authors and some really interesting people have reached out in the past to get their dissertations recorded or whatever. It’s really interesting stuff.
Kristyn Coutts: You mentioned some quirks. What are the differences between the UK and the U.S.?
Stefan Szwarc: The union is a much bigger presence in America. That’s the SAG-AFTRA union. So of course a lot of the contracts and things are viewed through that lens. The UK, although the union is well represented, it’s a smaller country, so therefore it’s not going to have as big of a presence as you think about in America.
The recording set-up can be a little bit different in the sense that in America, there are, from my experience, a lot more home studios, a lot more people who have made narration their main bag, and that’s what they do all day. They’ve invested a lot of money and time and effort into these home studios. Those are increasingly creeping in over here now as well. But I think that in America it’s just been happening a little bit earlier.
Kristyn Coutts: I think we saw more of a demand for it, I think over the pandemic, obviously.
Stefan Szwarc: That’s right. That’s when the surge really happened.
Kristyn Coutts: We added a few voice features to Spotlight profiles as well, so people could let casting teams know that they have the studio set up at home.
Do you have any tips that would help an actor prepare for an audiobook audition?
Stefan Szwarc: An audiobook audition is a little bit unique in the sense that you’re only being given probably a two to three page snippet of what could potentially be a 300 – 400 page book. So I would certainly Google the book or do a little bit of research on the book. You might not be able to receive the entire manuscript, but you can do a little bit of research online about the author’s previous work, so you can start to understand the tone of the piece. I think that’s really important.
If we’re going to go very global, if you’re doing a fiction versus a non-fiction, you would audition those in completely different ways. You would deliver them in a completely different way so I would try and understand the tone first, and then I would break that script down and be like, “Right, okay, so do I have my narrative voice here? Is this in the third person? Is this in the first person?”
If it’s in the first person, that means we’re very much inhabiting that main character. So I think I can probably put more of my own personality into this narration, whereas if I’m doing a third person and I’m just the narrator who is telling the story of these characters, then I need to make sure that I have a very separate narrative voice, I have a very distinctive main character, etc.
It’s really about dissecting that material and making choices because that’s what we want to hear. Even if your choices are ‘wrong’, I know that I, as a director, like to hear that someone has thought about it. Someone’s put the work in. Somebody is bringing something to the table that even if we don’t end up using, maybe it’s a jumping off point for something else.
Kristyn Coutts: I take my hat off to people who can do the narration voice and the character voices. I do it in bedtime stories with my kids, and actually I trick myself up quite a lot with the various voices.
Stefan Szwarc: It is hard. Children are the hardest audience and they’ll tell you if you’re not doing those characters consistently.
Kristyn Coutts: Yeah, I’ve been shamed a few times.
Do you look for totally different qualities when you’re doing audiobooks for kids versus adults?
Stefan Szwarc: Yeah.
Kristyn Coutts: So is that again, something that maybe actors should call out on their CV – that maybe your style is for kids?
Stefan Szwarc: 100%, absolutely. Doing kids audio is fantastic. It’s very much a unique beast in the sense that, as you say, the normal audiobook rules can be bent a little bit for children’s books, which is a lot of fun.
Some of the characters can lean a little bit closer to animation characters. So if you’re an actor, you get to really have fun with that. I also think that it’s deceptively difficult, so when I see on an actor’s CV or Spotlight profile or on their reel that they really enjoy doing children’s books, of course that’s going to be an advantage for them when I’m casting a children’s book.
How involved in the casting process are you?
Stefan Szwarc: Oh, extremely involved, which is a lot of fun. At 2020 Recordings we have a tight-knit production team. Myself and my colleagues will receive the brief from the client, and then it’s our job to get the brief out to agencies or actors that we worked with in the past that we think would be really good for the role. We try to submit 6-10 voices, although there’s no set number really, to the client that we think would really suit the project. Then we have a discussion with them and eventually they select who they’d like and we get them in.
Kristyn Coutts: It must be interesting for you to be now on the casting side after being an actor.
Stefan Szwarc: It is. It’s very interesting. I’ve been able to take some of my experiences in the acting world and apply them here. Whether that’s offering more information in the casting stage — I’m sure a lot of actors have had the same experiences I have back in the day, where you really aren’t given that much information. There’s a lot of interpretation to be done at home, and that can A) be a little bit daunting, and B) it can sometimes feel like a little bit of a waste of time if you think that you’ve gone the wrong direction, for instance. So that’s something that I certainly try and put forward at 2020 Recordings, that we give as much information to the actor as possible because it just means they’re going to give a better audition, which will then in turn be better for the client and everybody wins.
What does the audition process look like for an audiobook job?
Stefan Szwarc: There are two varieties of audition for an audiobook. There’s the more traditional audition: somebody will receive a snippet of the text, one to two pages, and we’ll ask them to record this at home. It doesn’t necessarily need to be on an expensive set-up. A phone can work as long as it’s quiet and well understood. That way we can submit it to the client and see how the actor interprets the material.
The other way is a little less involved for the actor in the sense that we use their previous credits. So it could be their Audible profile or a title we’ve worked on with them in the past, and we’ll submit that to the client. So they’ll still be hearing the voice of the person, but it won’t be on that specific text.
Kristyn Coutts: Do you think there’s a benefit, if you’ve recorded something before, pulling it out and putting it on your Spotlight profile, your actor’s CV, etc?
Stefan Szwarc: 100%. So the Audible profile gets automatically updated. It works rather in the same way that IMDb works in that regard. You can write to them to make specific changes, but it pretty much gets updated by the publishers when they submit their work to Audible for it to be released. Pulling it out to have on your own reel is extremely important. The voice reel is exactly the same as the showreel — it’s your calling card.
What qualities are most important when it comes to casting someone?
Stefan Szwarc: It’s an interesting question because it varies from job to job. I think it’s important to establish what makes a good audiobook and, in my opinion, that’s an actor who does not impose themselves too much on the text. Of course, if you have someone who’s a huge star like Stephen Fry, that doesn’t apply because they naturally come through.
Somebody who is a neutral storyteller, someone who’s letting the text do the work, who’s letting the story sing out, that’s a quality certainly that I’m looking for. It doesn’t necessarily have to be somebody with a tonne of experience, but somebody who is just clearly passionate about the text they’ve received. Somebody who’s well-prepared and seems like they’re going to really do a good job with the product.
What sort of information should a performer include on their Spotlight profile or CV that would help them be discovered by someone casting an audiobook job?
Stefan Szwarc: I don’t think there’s necessarily a right answer or a wrong answer here. If you’re auditioning for audiobooks, it’s natural that we’re looking for a narration or an audiobook reel on your Spotlight profile. If you’re auditioning for animation or gaming, it would probably be a good idea to have that on your profile. Conversely, if you’re auditioning for commercials, the same thing. Really, there’s no right or wrong way.
Experience is great but if the project is quite unique, we wouldn’t expect actors to have that kind of experience.
To me, it’s showing a passion for the voice over world. Has someone been going to workshops? Have they been doing little voice jobs here or there? It shows that they’re trying to stay active in this industry, which to be honest with you, is very competitive. So the more active you can be, the better.
Kristyn Coutts: Okay. What about things like accents and voice type?
Stefan Szwarc: I think that the instinct is for everybody to go, “Oh, I can do this accent and this accent and this accent.” But the problem is that it’s so wide a range that unless you’re wildly experienced or have been doing it for a long time — and don’t get me wrong, there are people out there that can do this — my immediate thought is that I’d rather have someone that can do a handful of accents extremely well than someone who can do 50 accents not as well. I would personally recommend starting with three to four accents that you really know well.
If you think about the process of the audiobook, you’re supposed to be inhabiting these characters. It’s one thing to be able to do the accent for a couple of lines, but not only do you need to do the accent, you need to sustain it. You need to be able to keep it consistent. You need to be able to play with the accent so that you can put different characters on it: old, young, angry, sad etc..
I’ll use myself as an example. Coming from primarily America, I’ve spent a lot of time practising the American accent. So whether that’s a Southern accent or an East Coast accent or a West Coast accent, and then you can translate that to here. I think a good place for an English actor to start would be to really nail those regional accents.
Obviously, you’ve got what used to be called RP, but is much more commonly referred to now as a neutral accent. You’ve got various northern accents, Midlands, all that stuff is really important because a lot of books that are set in the UK jump all over. So if you can’t embody those accents and do them authentically, you’re going to run into trouble.
Kristyn Coutts: And just out of curiosity, if there’s accents in a book, how authentic is the casting? For example, if a book is set in Liverpool, would you look for a Liverpudlian accent primarily, and then search for people who can do a good accent as a secondary?
Stefan Szwarc: It comes down to experience, and the project. Let’s say we have a book that’s set in Manchester. When we’re casting our eyes are going to be drawn to somebody who is a native Mancunian and has spent a lot of time there or has a lot of experience with that accent. But on the flip side of that, there are plenty of actors that we know that are London born and bred and can do an absolutely fantastic northern accent that nobody would ever guess that they’re not from there.
What do you think is helpful to hear in performer voice reels?
Stefan Szwarc: With voice reels as well as show reels, it’s really important to know who you are and what your marketability is. At the end of the day, this is a business. I think it’s wonderful that it has so much creativity, and that’s what all of us get in it for, but it would be foolish to ignore the aspect of what your sellability is. What your marketability is. In terms of the voice reel, it’s really important for you to ask yourself, “What do I want to do? What do I bring to projects vocally? What kind of tone? What kind of pitch? Am I somebody who is very sing-songy with my delivery? Am I someone who’s quite flat with my delivery?”
I would consider myself to have a monotone delivery. I’m hyper aware of that and it’s something that I adapt accordingly. So whether that’s doing a scene where I really embrace that part of my voice and then doing a scene where I go completely away from that to show my range.
I think it’s good to get a couple of different accents on there, ones that you’re particularly passionate about and feel strong about. When we’re talking about audiobook narration and audiobook voice reels, there’s something called the ‘narrative voice’ — which is either third person or a first person narrative voice although the majority of books are third person — and that’s a neutral voice telling the story and not commenting on it too much. Just quite literally bringing that listener along the story. That’s always very important for us to hear to see how effective you are at using that voice. It’s a lot trickier than it sounds.
Kristyn Coutts: Would you have them split out as separate reels?
Stefan Szwarc: A common practice is they have one audiobook reel that has three to four scenes. It could be previous work or it could be something they’ve done at home that they really want to show. Then they would have one for animation, a gaming reel, a commercial reel. Those are split into separate categories.
The format of an audiobook reel is very much the same as a show reel. Three to four scenes or snippets from titles you think really illustrate you and your range.
Kristyn Coutts: Lovely. If you’re starting out in the voice world and you maybe don’t have any material to include, would you recommend people record something off their own back?
Stefan Szwarc: Yeah, I would. I think that it’s important to think about how you’re going to do that. You wouldn’t film something on a video camera with bad lighting in your garage, right? The same principle can be applied to voice reels.
There are plenty of studios or voice reel companies out there where you can rent a space with an engineer or just rent a space on your own to mess around for an hour. I can’t recommend that kind of stuff enough.
Kristyn Coutts: Well, on that note, performers can actually hire the Spotlight audio booth that we’re sitting in right now. The team also set up ‘voice days’ where you can come in and use the booth.
Stefan Szwarc: Those are the kind of things that I cannot recommend enough. That is the kind of thing we look for, these people who attend those types of voice days, people who attend workshops and these seminars. Because it’s incredibly important that you know your instrument, which in this case is your voice. You need to know how to manipulate it, how it works, your limitations.
It’s quite surprising how many people come in and know their process for film and TV and theatre down pat. They can do auditions and self-tapes at the click of a button. But when it comes to voice, that same level of detail and care is not applied.
Kristyn Coutts: Why do you think that is?
Stefan Szwarc: Maybe time. The voice world differs a lot from the, for lack of a better term, regular acting world in the sense of time. If I’m going to do a theatre show, you have a rehearsal period where you can really work on the material with other people and with the director. You can try things out etc. You can’t do that when you come into the booth. Well, you can but there’s very much a time limit. That kind of work is expected to be done in pre-production on your own at your house, rehearsal room or whatever you’re using. It’s really important that you hone that process because the more prep you can do before you come into the booth, the easier your life is going to be.
What does the audiobook pre-production process look like for a voice actor?
Stefan Szwarc: The first thing you’re going to want to do is read the book to get a sense of the tone, the pace, how many characters there are, the locations, the accent requirements, the language requirements, etc. A lot of this information is given to you by the production company, which is really helpful. I know a lot of actors who have a cheat sheet next to them while they’re reading the book that has all of the big facts that the publishers or the production company will send to you — The characters, the breakdown and the ages and the accents, etc.
The actor will get to work on the nitty-gritty of the script, the book itself. I cannot impress enough that the best audiobook narrators all have one common theme going through them, and it’s the amount of prep that they do. It’s incredible, the amount of detail that goes into it, because that is the time that they have to do it. When they come into the studio, of course they can try something and listen to it back with the director and say, “Oh, you know what? That doesn’t work, let’s try something else.” But you couldn’t possibly do that for an entire book or even an entire chapter because what would mean a three-day audiobook record is going to take three weeks.
How long does a typical project take from casting through to recording?
Stefan Szwarc: When we receive the brief from a client, we try to get it out to actors and agencies within one week. Let’s say two to three days as that’s enough time for our department to digest the material, write up the brief and start targeting certain agencies or actors that we think would be appropriate. Then we receive the auditions and we get them to the client. The turnaround from the client is usually, let’s say, another two to three days. After that, it’s about scheduling and availability for when the actor can come in.
The post-production process is about two weeks normally, so you’re looking at about a month in total. I would say four to five weeks turnaround, depending on availability. Since the pandemic, publishers have increasingly seen the value of doing a simultaneous publication with the print and the audio. Often the publishers will time it so that they have the audiobook files and the print files ready to go so when the book gets sent out and published, the audiobook is launched as well.
Can you describe the production process when it comes to recording?
Stefan Szwarc: Most audiobooks are on average between three to five days. They’re long days. They’re all day with recording usually from about 9:30am until 5pm. There are, of course, breaks but it’s very much a slog of getting in there and recording the material slowly but surely. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
The actor will have received all of the information before. They’ll have collaborated with the production company if they have any questions for the author or the publishers. Then they’ll come in, we’ll do a sound check in the morning to make sure the levels are good and to make sure that everybody’s on the same page in terms of if they have any further questions.
Most of the actors are in the studio with both a director and an engineer, but sometimes it can be one person who is inhabiting both of those roles. It’ll be a small room and you’re with that person for three to five days in a row. It’s great and it does feel like a partnership. Sometimes you really feel like you’ve been in the trenches with someone, particularly if you’re doing a non-fiction book on quite a heavy subject. By the end, you can really have bonded with that person irreparably.
Kristyn Coutts: Do you have any tips about how they can best work together?
Stefan Szwarc: It’s important to know that there’re two major kinds of recording styles. One’s called ‘fluff and repeat’ and that is when the engineer will hit record that’s just rolling. Then the actor will narrate. They’ll say, “I woke up in the morning and went for a glass of milk. I ran into my…” And let’s say they stumble. Then they’ll pause, do a little clap or a little noise to indicate where that has stopped, and then they’ll pick up that sentence again and just keep going straight forward. In post-production, the editor will take out all of those little gaps or noises.
The other one is called ‘punch and roll’, or is sometimes known as ‘rock and roll’. That is when the actor cues themselves. So in the same scenario, “I woke up and I went for a glass of milk. I ran into my…” They fluff the sentence, instead of just immediately picking back up, the engineer would play the last clean sentence to them in their headphones, and then the actor would continue from there. So in essence, they are cueing themselves. That reduces time in post-production, and in my personal opinion, it gets a better performance because it helps with maintaining tonal and character consistency. I think it helps the narrator stay in the zone. It’s very easy when you make a mistake to get frustrated with yourself, and very often I completely sympathise. I’ve seen actors get frustrated with themselves, and then we kind of come out of that zone which can then take a bit of time to get back into.
The tips that I would give for preparing for recording days is to treat your voice with respect. You’re about to put it through its paces. Make sure you get a good rest. Avoid things with too much dairy and hot drinks. Warm up your voice, do vocal exercises before you come in to warm up your mouth and your tongue. It’s going to be a long day and the more that you can prepare that way, the easier your recording day will be.
How well recording goes is very much dependent on how much prep the actor has done. If the actor comes in with something to contribute, something to bring to the table, it immediately makes me and other directors more excited, because we’re like, “Great, okay, we’re going to work here.”
That feeling—I’m sure every actor and director has experienced in their lifetime—when you get in that creative flow, it’s just addictive. There’s nothing quite like it. So your prep is extremely important. Taking care of your voice is extremely important. Being prepared for the stamina that it’s going to take is extremely important.
And also, just try to have some fun. A thing that’s underestimated is that directors want to enjoy their work just as much as you do. So if you come in and you have a great attitude and you’re a lot of fun to have in the studio, naturally you’re going to be asked to come back.
Do you have any advice about what a performer can do to prepare themselves for a day of voice recording?
Stefan Szwarc: It’s a great question. Each production house and each recording studio probably has different ideas about this. Actors should definitely bring their own water, of course they’ll be provided some but it’s really good to come prepared.
A lot of actors and narrators put all of their material on an iPad. They use an Apple Pencil and I can’t recommend that enough. Technology can be your friend. Although, I worked with an actor recently who had all of his notes on pen and paper, and it was really refreshing to see someone use that system.
It’s the studio’s job to make the actor feel comfortable and to give them the tools that they need to help do the best job they can do. So if you need water, if you need a cup of tea to keep your voice warm, don’t hesitate to ask. I’m sure that they’ll facilitate that.
How much creative freedom would a performer typically have when it comes to interpreting the material?
Stefan Szwarc: For audiobooks, I would argue a lot. Maybe even more than other mediums within acting. It’s very much you. It’s really important not to underestimate the task here. We all know when we listen to an audiobook that’s really well performed, it’s bliss. It really is just an incredible thing to listen to. And I think that’s because the actor has taken ownership of that title, they’ve really, really understood the task here, and they’ve given it the amount of work and focus and prep that it needs in order to shine.
In terms of creative freedom, they can have as much or as little as they want, really. I think that the best ones take all the creative freedom that they have. Obviously, you’re performing somebody else’s work so of course the author will have some influence in the beginning about how they’d like things performed. And you have constraints that you need to stay within because it’s not your writing, but at the end of the day, you’re the only voice that the listener is hearing. You’re the only one in the studio, and you’re the only one who is representing this work in this audiobook. I think that you can have as much or as little as you’d like, and I highly recommend you take as much as you can
How do you handle different characters and dialogue within an audiobook? Will multiple actors work together and, if so, what does that look like?
Stefan Szwarc: There are more and more of these different sorts of audiobook structures coming in. A very common one in the detective crime thriller genre would be to have two points of view. They would employ two narrators to do that, to bring these two unique voices together. So let’s say Stefan and Kristyn, I would have chapter one, you would have chapter two, I’d take chapter three, chapter four is you etc.
From a director point of view, the difficulty there is just making sure that things remain consistent. Because let’s say I’m in my chapter, I’m doing some dialogue between you and I, then I might do your voice differently than you do my voice. So that’s probably something that I’d like to collaborate on with you beforehand and maybe even record a little bit of myself to send to you or vice versa. That way we can make sure that it stays consistent all throughout the book. So that’s the challenge there.
Kristyn Coutts: So we wouldn’t be in the same studio recording at the same time?
Stefan Szwarc: No, not in my experience. That’s more of the audio drama radio or radio drama world. In the audiobook world, it’s more individual recording.
Kristyn Coutts: Okay. So they wouldn’t necessarily meet beforehand either to do any rehearsals, it would be sending voice notes to each other for example?
Stefan Szwarc: Yeah. Again, technology can be our friends here. Sending voice notes to each other and Zoom is still a presence in our lives. It really helps though, in this instance to meet the other person and collaborate. At the end of the day, you’re working on this together. In my opinion, it’s the same as if you were doing a two-hander. If you’re doing a two-hand show, you have that rehearsal period together. You’d never just turn up and be like, all right, “Well, I’m doing what I’m doing, don’t worry about the other person.”
Kristyn Coutts: Would there be chemistry tests or anything like that as part of the audition process?
Stefan Szwarc: No, that’s more on the shoulders of the production company. It’s absolutely something that we listen to. It sounds like a silly thing but if two people have quite a similar vocal quality about them, it’s quite easy for the listener to get confused as to who’s speaking. So it is something that clients as well as production companies are certainly aware of, that if you’re doing a two-hander, you definitely want to make sure that there’s a nice contrast of tone there.
Are there any common challenges you see performers facing when it comes to narrating audiobooks?
Stefan Szwarc: The stamina that it requires. I think it’s probably comparable to theatre in that regard, in the sense that you’re very much taking a story from start to finish in chronological order. You’re doing the whole piece, looking after all of the details, rather than in camera work, which in my experience is a bit more fast and furious. You’re doing things out of order, things can change very quickly on the fly, etc. So yeah, the stamina of it, and I think that the challenge there is that people come in and they’re very excited and they put a tonne of energy into that first hour, which is great, and we love that. But then you’re going to have to maintain that energy for the next three days, which is very difficult. So it’s just about preparing yourself for the long journey ahead.
Another common challenge is with accents. Making very bold choices in an audiobook can be detrimental sometimes because it can be difficult to maintain. I’ve seen actors who do a voice where they’re crunching their vocal box and that might work for a short form audio, maybe a quick video game character. But let’s say that character has to come back over and over and over again. Well, by the end of the day, their voice was in ruins. If you’re going to make those choices—which I think are great, I love bold choices—they need to be informed bold choices. They need to be choices that have been really well thought out so that you don’t trap yourself further down the line.
The other challenge is the flip side of that, which is actors who don’t vary their voice enough for minor characters. A common critique that you get from listeners is, “Oh, all the characters sounded the same.” Which is obviously not ideal. It goes back to that thing of you really having to map out, before you come into the studio, and thinking about the vocal quality you’re assigning to the characters. What range am I going to use for the main character? So that you have an idea, a map of what you’re going to do. Because if you go in there just winging it, my hat’s off to you if you can pull it off, but it’s certainly less likely.
What’s the post-production and sign off process?
Stefan Szwarc: The files will go to an editor, and the editor will spend time proofing the text as well as editing out any noises, fluffs, mouth noises, whatever. But importantly, they’re proofing the text. The director and the engineer should be doing that in the studio anyway, but you know what it’s like in there, you’re essentially spinning a bunch of plates so it’s easy for something to get missed. So the editor would note that down, the files would be returned to the production company, and then we’d collaborate with the publisher on whether we’re going to get the actor back in for any pickups.
Pickups in the very sort of general regard in the sense of, “Oh, they’ve made a mistake on this sentence. We’ll ask them to come back in, we’ll play them the original sentence and we’ll ask them to say the correct text.” That can be anywhere from one to two hours. Sometimes it can be as short as 20 minutes. Other times the mistakes are fixable. For example, they added a word that can be edited taken out or they’ve fluffed and we can just fix it. Sometimes the actor doesn’t need to come back in at all. That’s the ideal and when it happens it’s very impressive.
So once the pickups have all been recorded or perhaps not recorded, if they weren’t needed, then it goes through the mastering process, which the post-production team will do and master it to the specifications of the client. Audible’s specifications are very much the global specifications because they’re the biggest platform. And then we will send it back to the client who in turn will distribute it to Audible or any of their partners.
When is a performer’s job finished?
Stefan Szwarc: As the pickups are done, I would say that that is pretty much the end of the performer’s job until it gets released.
Publishers and authors are more than happy to have the actor shout about it on social media and to tag themselves and to do some promotion. There are actors who are now beginning to do that more and more in the studio, which is great, but obviously got to walk a fine line in terms of NDAs and books that haven’t been fully announced yet, so you need to be careful when you do that. But I’ve seen a lot of success from actors who engage with the author and the publisher. It goes back to what I said earlier, whether we like it or not, this is a business, and for us to ignore that is a bit of a detriment.
As I said earlier, the best narrators that I’ve worked with have been the ones who went into a deep level of detail in their prep. If I was to go into more detail about that, a technique that I like to use is to start out as wide as I possibly can so I’m looking at just the bare bones facts. Where is this book set? What timeframe is it set in? Does it go across multiple time frames? Is there one main character? Are there two main characters? What is the tone? What are the themes of the piece?
Once I’ve established all that, I’ve got my main character. What kind of vocal quality am I going to assign to this character? A common mistake I think is that people think I’ve got to do this bold, crazy voice for this character, but if you think of it like a deck of cards, everybody only has a certain amount of cards in their deck for these voices and these accents that they can do really well and authentically. So you want to be careful how many cards you’re dealing out throughout the book. So rather than doing a character voice, I think about it as assigning a quality. Something as simple as putting a little rasp in my voice changes my voice immediately. It’s the little subtleties like that that I think really make a narrator interesting to listen to.
Audiobooks are a game of subtlety in my opinion. I think that it’s very easy to think you’ve got to go big and bold when actually the more subtle choices, the more informed, the more intelligent choices you can make during your prep, the richer that your audiobook will be.
I think it’s really interesting to talk about what happens when you come into the studio, because very often as the director, somebody will come in with all these ideas that are contrary to my own and I think that’s always an interesting dynamic. I think that it’s important for the narrator to understand that they might not have all of the information that the director has. The director often has been collaborating directly with the author or with the publisher and so while it’s important for the narrators to come in with an idea or solid plan of what they want to do in the studio, conversely, and this is what makes voiceover work so difficult, they need to be ready to throw all of that out of the window. Because if it’s misguided, then they need to be able to adapt it accordingly with the director. If voice actors or actors in general are too married to their prep then it can all of a sudden tip into over prep and then you’re in trouble. Then your hands are tied and it can become a very difficult recording process.
We’ve been talking about English language audiobooks but what happens if you need to record the French version, the Italian version etc – do you do that all in the UK?
Stefan Szwarc: There are certainly instances where that’s happened. It all depends on the studio and what they have at their disposal. If you look at our studio for instance, we’ve got people who speak French, people who speak Spanish, people who speak Italian. So that’s something that we can provide. That localization process actually happens a lot the other way. So very often we get brought products that are huge in Japan or Germany, and they want to record the English version with us. So that is a market that a lot of actors get involved with over here, the localization market.
If you look at something, say for instance, video games are a common one where the cut scenes will be recorded in English here, but if that game is bought by somebody in Spain, then those scenes will need to be in Spanish. Those will get dubbed sometimes here or sometimes in Spain. It’s those things where if speaking another language is something that you have in your bag and you feel confident with it, I would be shouting it from the rooftops on your CV.
Kristyn Coutts: When you’re thinking about casting for these, do you know at the briefing state what languages you’re going to be recording in?
Stefan Szwarc: That’s right. We’re told specifically who we’re looking out for. There are some agencies that are purely international here, which are great resources and of course Spotlight is a fantastic resource. People who put languages they can confidently speak or their ethnicities or their nationalities [on their profiles] is a great way for us to filter and find these people. We found some very unique voices in the past, thanks to Spotlight.
Kristyn Coutts: That’s good to know!
Stefan Szwarc: It feeds back to what I said earlier about knowing your saleability, your marketability and what you can bring to the table. Actors who are in theatre, television or film know how many other actors there are out there. The same principle can be applied to voice actors. There’s just as many voice actors if not more out there so it’s about knowing what you can bring to the table, whether that’s a particular language, whether that’s a particular voice, a particular experience. Knowing your marketability is so important.
Kristyn Coutts: I think it’s good for people to know actually, because we get questions from European actors who come to the UK and say, “What can we be doing?” So I think it’s good for people to understand that there is work available, that’s being recorded here, if you’re French for example.
Stefan Szwarc: 100%. If you’ve come here as a French actor and you have a bit of a French accent when you speak naturally, of course that’s something that you should be working on to be able to get rid of in the studio if you need to but in my personal opinion, I would be honing it, and that’s what makes you unique. That’s what makes you interesting to listen to. And to me that’s a weapon right there that you should be really working on and honing and being proud of.
The voice actor, their job is to be a vocal chameleon. In the studio you should be working on those muscles to be able to, at the drop of a hat, change from an American accent to a British accent. But your natural voice is also incredibly important in that process, and the more you know it, the better.
Can we talk a bit about how an actor is paid for their work? What’s the payment structure for audiobook work?
Stefan Szwarc: There’s probably two very common pay structures, which is a day fee, and I’ll be honest, those are usually reserved for the more experienced narrators or for lack of a better term, A listers. And that can be for a variety of reasons. In my experience, the most common pay structure is the per finished hour rate. It’s really important to understand that it’s the per finished hour rate, not per hour. What that means is that you’re not getting paid for the amount of time that you spend in the studio, you’re getting paid for the amount of time that the entire audiobook is.
I’ll keep it simple. Let’s say you get paid £100 per finished hour and you have a book that ends up being 10 hours long. You will receive £1000 at the end of that project. The reason that that was brought in is because people would take their time in the recording studio and so that bill would end up getting bigger and bigger for the client.
The biggest enemy, as it were, within the voice world is time. Everything is run to a very strict time schedule A). because the production is a lot faster than doing a Ridley Scott epic, and B). everybody can fit in more titles. They can fit more content in.
Kristyn Coutts: Thank you. I assume that pickups would be included in the fee for the per hour?
Stefan Szwarc: Exactly. The pickups would be included within the finished hour, but that’s not strictly true all the time. Every studio is different and every agency is different. It’s something that is still being worked out within the industry. The audiobook world really took off during the pandemic and I certainly didn’t see it coming. I don’t know if other people did. And I think there’s a bit of a hangover from that pandemic period when the popularity of audiobooks skyrocketed and has stayed up there. So now people are trying to work out the way that they can make it fair for everybody who’s involved.
Do you have any recommendations of industry events, books or podcasts that performers looking to improve their voice skills can look into?
Stefan Szwarc: Definitely listen to audiobooks. I’m always really surprised at people who come in for audiobooks and when I say, “Do you listen to audiobooks?” And they say, “No, not really.” I can understand that if you do something all day, you probably want to take a break from it but I do think it would be important to listen to some audiobooks to identify an actor or a writer that you particularly resonate with so that you can get familiar with their work and understand what makes them tick.
There’s obviously podcasts, like this one. Workshops. A book that I would recommend is The Voice Over Book: Don’t Eat Toast by Stephen Kemble and David Hodge. That’s a really good book that gives a very authentic look into the voice over world.
There’s no set way to get yourself into this industry. Like acting in plenty of other genres, it’s very competitive at the moment so it’s about putting yourself out there. The more experiences you can take on the better. Whether that’s renting out a booth like you talked about earlier, for an hour to play around and get some stuff on a material, whether that’s reaching out to student productions, things like NFTS who I know do a lot of dubbing and student films. You’d be amazed how often they’re looking out for narrators who will do it for the experience and for not that much money. ACX is a really good website. ACX is a website that’s in conjunction with Audible, and essentially is a platform for independent authors to look for narrators as well as to self-publish their own work. As a narrator, I can’t recommend that enough because you can get your profile on there and then you can start taking auditions from independent authors. Getting used to that process, finding out what your process is for those auditions, all of that stuff is highly important.
To really simplify it, your time in the studio is very brief. Sometimes you can prepare for a video game for two weeks, and then you’re in there for an hour. You can prepare for an audiobook for over a month, and then you’re in there for three days and that’s it. So it’s really important to understand that dynamic because you don’t want to walk out of the studio and be like, “Oh, I should have done this. I should have done that. What was I thinking?” The more work you can do before you get in the studio, the better.
