0688 – Non-Fiction Audiobook Narration Skills

2022.11.19 – 0688 – Non-Fiction Audiobook Narration Skills

Non-fiction for an audiobook narrator

Recording a non-fiction text is considered by some to be more straightforward than recording fiction. That’s because you’re delivering information, instruction, or facts, rather than navigating a narrative of characters and conflicts.

Others say that’s just why non-fiction is difficult: the text can be flat and featureless and was usually not written to be read aloud. Indeed, the ‘read’ may include foreign phrases, maths equations, sidebars, footnotes, charts, illustrations, abbreviations, explanations and appendixes, all of which (depending on the director’s instructions) may have to be read and recorded.

Non-fiction texts can be detail-rich, with long dense paragraphs littered with parenthesis and sub-clauses which can be difficult to vocalise with intonation. It may help to break the sentence up with some / marks so you can more easily see the different phrases which link together, which ones balance or oppose each other, or add extra information. Try and see such convoluted sentences, at first glance complex and unwieldy, more like a tree: the main trunk from which there are branches, and then twigs, to help you use a different tone for each section of the structure.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no ‘acting’. Help communicate the message of the book by imagining taking to several people in the audience, possibly with a sense of (almost ‘ad-libbed’) fluency to make you appear to be the expert author: conversationally authoritative.

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