This extra Friday post is for the purpose of picking your collective brains, O Esteemed Readership.
I’m looking at the prospect of producing audiobooks of my novels.
Generous friends provided me with equipment, and I think I’m near the point where I can make good enough quality recordings to satisfy ACX, the Amazon audiobook publishing arm.
My plan has been to start with the Erling books, but now I’m uncertain.
So I ask you – if you bought an audiobook where the narrator is declared to be an Irishman, would it bother you if the book was read in a Midwestern US accent?
I contemplated trying to master an Irish accent, but I’m pretty sure it would never be really right. I could probably carry the accent for a few paragraphs, but over many hours of reading, the illusion would wear off. I’d slip too often into flat Minnesota tones.
So now I’m considering hiring an Irishman to do the Erling books (if I can find one; you can hire narrators on a percentage-of-royalties basis) and just doing my Epsom books myself.
What do you think? Would it disappoint you if I had somebody else play Father Ailill?
I like what Tolkien told his son Christopher about his enjoyment of the movie, The Song of Bernadette (Letter 94a: 7-8 January 1945): “I did not feel the American accent any trouble at all: it is just as good or bad a substitute for French and Provencal as Oxford English.”
Well-read, I expect the author’s voice or a good Irishman’s would be equally appealing.
An English reader I enjoy a lot, Simon Stanhope (of Bitesized Audio Classics), does nice British dialectical accents (recently, a Welsh policeman in The Red Headed League) but I have read comments of his expressing his hesitation to read American stories. On the other hand, I have thoroughly enjoyed the audiobooks by an American, the late Nicholas Clifford, for LibriVox, of many a novel by Anthony Trollope.
How about posting an own-voice audio sample, to see what Erling lovers think, as an additional step?
It’s a thought. I’m evaluating.
An Irish accent does have appeal, but I can’t say it would be better than your own for this application. The smoothness of the reading will be better than any accented pronunciation.
I agree with Phil that smooth reading is the key. I live in a rural area where I put on a lot of miles so I listen to a lot of audiobooks while driving around. The commercial ones from the library are generally read by a professional actor with a producer and/or director listed in the credits. Those are generally pretty good.
Librivox has volunteer readers so the results are quite variable. Some are quite good. Some mumble. Often they mispronounce words, demonstrating a poor vocabulary. More often my complaint is that they don’t maintain a good pace or flow. Other times I found it distracting to the point of irritating when the reader of a George MacDonald novel did a very bad Scottish brogue. That’s what came to mind when you asked about doing an Irish accent. Do it well or don’t do it would be my recommendation.