Keeping character voices consistent across a 12-hour audiobook.

01Why Character Consistency Matters

Audiobooks give the reader an immersive experience, and so they notice when their favourite characters are suddenly sounding slightly off... It might pull the listener out of the story, make the dialogue choppy and confusing, increase the number of revisions your author requests and affect your reputation as a solid narrator.

02What is Voice Drift?

Voice drift is common, and can happen to even very experienced narrators. It's when the voice you started off narrating with slowly, over the chapters changes, until it's absolutely not the same as it started out as. But why does it happen?

• Long recording schedules
• Large character casts
• Interrupted recording sessions
• Series of books over a period of time

03How do we nail the character delivery every time?

So, we're bit biased but we swear it's absolutely solid advice. Keep a character log! We here at Earful Narration Studio call it the character memory, and it's where you log all the information that you know about your character before you even start. Then gradually when you're prepping or recording, you add more and more. This is an amazing reference tool, you can refer back to character relationships, backgrounds, accents and personality traits. They're reminders of performance choices.

04Keep voice references

This is such an important step, and the most helpful thing when it comes to maintaining consistent character voices. When you start recording your characters, and you feel like you've really nailed one of them, bounce that track and save it into Earful for your future reference. Then you can listen back and slip seamlessly back into that character, exactly as you had performed them before.

05Pronunciations matter too...

Especially in the fantasy genre, pronunciations matter. The readers rely on you, as the narrator, to tell them how these words sound, and so if you suddenly change the pronunciation of a Kingdom or character name halfway through the series, they will know. And they won't be happy. Keeping a pronunciation library is essential, and it's also beneficial to get this checked by the author beforehand. Anything you're unsure about, it's way easier to confirm before recording than to revise hundreds of mentions of Faethryth or Qęrķ days or weeks into recording. We also have our Pronunciation Library for this exact reason. Give your author the 'author link' and they can upload their own audio clips of them pronouncing it, or phonetic spellings so you have them forever to refer back to. Thank us later!

06How we help!

At Earful Narration Studio, we built the site based on how narrators actually prepare audiobooks, and their workflow. Instead of juggling notebooks, sticky notes, drive folders and files littering their desktops we wanted one place for all of that. Store your character profiles, pronunciations notes, markup and prep your manuscripts, and keep all your audiobook projects in one place. When you return to each audiobook project days or even a few months later, you can step back into the booth with confidence. Because your goal isn't just to create memorable character voices, it's to be able to recreate them, every single time. Consistency isn't a talent, it's a system! And we're here to help you create yours. Whether you're narrating your first audiobook or your hundredth, building a reliable audiobook narration workflow will help everything; your performances, your editing time and the experience for both your authors and listeners!