Bugbears in audiobooks

Sadly also female actors are often not good at men's voices which come across as just generally gruff sounding. However, some are exceptionally good and don't just try to sound generically "deep" toned.

Books where an adult woman's voice (not the main character) is done in an annoying " little girl" voice..

Plenty of non fiction history books where the narrator is so poor they sound like a Dalek and mispronounce place names. I presume it's because so, relatively, few people will buy the book they can't afford better narrators.

Generally narrators are a bizillion times better than they were even a few years ago when audiobooks were a comparative rarity; mostly on CD, rare and expensive.

So now I wanna hear/read the book...

I’ve just finished The Running Grave. Robert Glenister did, in my opinion, a brilliant job, especially when it came to Strike, with a Cornish accent interviewing a character with a Norfolk accent.

I am very distracted by bad narrators on audiobooks. I have to speed them up to get through it.

There was a book I listened to where Niamh was mispronounced. I can’t remember exactly how (perhaps Nee-am) but that really grated

They are ‘proof listened’ to by the audio publisher but it’s more to check the recording against the text so mis-pronunciations can still slip through if the proof listener is not familiar with the place name or whatever. As with typos in printed books mistakes can be missed. Margins in publishing are tight so sometimes things are done on a budget, or there’s a tight deadline and things need to be moved along. This shouldn’t happen as much with the big name authors where there is more budget, but it does!

Some publishers let you listen to the audition tapes. I 'auditioned' my current reader - the timbre of her voice was just right for my kind of fiction. My previous publisher just made the audio books and didn't give us authors any kind of say. Basically you just have to trust the reader - a poor reader can mangle a book so badly that it can change the story. I've never managed to have a book re recorded, even though the reader was of the 'cotton easter' type of the example above - she didn't seem to have much of a passing familiarity with quite a lot of normal English words.

I had a favourite author who had a book with a pair of detectives all set around Peterborough (peri meno brain prevents me from remembering their names).

Anyway I looked SO forward to the new book coming out in 2020. Started listening whilst I was gardening. The narrator pronounced Cotoneasters (the plant) as "Cotton Easters". Most annoying thing ever. I stopped listening and abandoned the book. I know. Petty.

Also, overly egging the narration. Charles Cummings most recent BOX book had the most awful narrator.

I have a fabulous narrator now for my audio books, but I did have one that I asked to have re recorded - the narrator seemed to be completely unfamiliar with reading out loud, mispronounced several words (some were in Latin, to be fair, but not uncommon phrases) and ruined some of the jokes with bad timing and 'flat' reading.

I think it's the luck of the draw. Some narrators read the book first and take note of accents and stresses, but some just seem to be handed the book and read it 'cold'. And when you listen to an audio book, you have no idea how it's going to be handled.

I really struggle with male narrators doing female voices. It grates.
A recent one that bothered me was The Covenant of Water. Read by the author, and very long, but the female characters he all did in this whiny high pitched voice that completely belittled their strength as women. The Scottish accent when he naturally speaks with an Indian accent was awful too, it really spoilt the story.

I much prefer a range of actors when there’s different pov or lots of dialogue.

When it sounds like they badly need to clear their throat but they keep going and going and going because it’s far too late to take a break until they are wheezing and croaking their way to the end of the chapter…Caroline Lennon, looking at you.

Over-emoting.

I just listened to the audiobook of a memoir by a body positivity activist, and the voice actor read it as if she was Evita Peron delivering a speech on the balcony.