Bugbears in audiobooks

[C8H10N4O2]

Inspired by this thread:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/5041058-inaccuracies-in-fiction

It made me think about my additional bugbears in audiobooks and wondering just how much "proof listening" publishers undertake and how much prep for is done for narrators in terms of pronunciation/accent. In no particular order:

• accents wackering around - character is Scots and has an accent starting in Edinburgh, veering to Glasgow via Belfast and Dublin. See also Somerset character who spends half of every sentence in Dudley and the New Yorker who does the vocal hop across to the West Coast mid speech.
• Novelty "furrin" accents (which may also go on geographic tours, I just wouldn't detect them as easily)
• Place names or famous names mispronounced. It is surely not beyond the publishers to make sure narrators have pronunciation guides for places such as "Woolwich".
• The same common word pronounced several different ways by the narrator in the book as if they don't know or remember the actual word
• Common words pronounced as by an untrained text-to-speech device. eg "shone" read as "shown" when its not part of a regional accent or dialect.

They bug me because they distract and break the suspense of the story - much as factual inaccuracies, it helps break the credibility of the plot.

It doesn't seem to be a "small name" vs "big name" author or particular publichsers - just random which makes me think the narrators are not given much of a briefing. This makes it more difficult to avoid the bad examples (although there are some narrators I'd listen to reading my shopping list, its harder to identify the consistently bad)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you have any input into casting the narrator - even at the level of male/female/type of voice? And do you have the option to insist on re-recording?

I remember Ben Aaronovitch saying at a panel that he was just lucky to get Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (who IMHO is perfect reading those books) but wasn't sure how they would recast if he ceased to be available.

It seems only reasonable for the author to have a decent say in casting the narrator or to request "corrections" for mangled names and words. Does anyone "proof listen" or is that down to you?

That is also one of mine - should have been on the list. Its very wearing to listen to.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Oddly my rant of an OP was triggered by a narrator who is apparently an award winner for narrating audio books. An Irish American actor - hadn't heard of her but she reads this book in a "British" accent and commits all of the sins listed in the OP, including the traditional "working class Londoners" all of whom speak a version of cockney learned from Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. And her landed gentry woman starts each conversation in Downton Abbey before meandering into seaside landlady.

I can see why people like her voice - its a good pitch and well modulated and quite pleasant to listen do, not bad at characterisation so possibly if you didn't know the correct pronunciations and accents it wouldn't grate. However for me its put me off listening to any more of the audiobooks because the errors distract from the story. Maybe British listeners are the minority for this narrator.

Do you get much feedback on this from listeners or do most of us just suck it up and make do?

Agree with most of your points - especially for non fiction narrating. I think the male/female thing is more to do with the individual than the sex. In general I quite like the narrator of first person story to match the narrator in the book and some voices just work for some types of story but I'm more interested in good narration than sex of narrator.

It bugs me when 2 or 3 books into a series the reader decides one of the main characters should have a completely different accent - it's annoying enough when a new voice-actor has taken over but when it's the same one it seems pretty unforgivable!

One of my favourite books has a (specified right there in the text!) Mancunian character with the reader giving her finest Liverpudlian. It's a very GOOD Liverpudlian, but not Mancunian, and that so gets on my wick!

Also not the reader's fault of course, but it bothers me so much when English books, about English characters, set in England and written by an English author have 'cell phones', 'sneakers', 'zits' etc swapped in for the sake of an American audience. If they really can't work out what 'pavements', 'mobiles' or 'flats' are (and I would have thought they'd be able to pretty quickly just using common sense!) why can't they just Google? I used to love the Judy Blume audiobooks when I was child, and if I heard a word I didn't understand I'd ask my mum. It was part of the fun of listening to the stories though, knowing they were authentic to the characters and setting.

I had to give up on the audio book of Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow because the narrator irritated me so much, it was like she was trying to be maybe whimsical, and drift off at the end of sentences as if she was staring off into the distance…

It was immensely annoying, I had to stop listening.

I prefer books with multiple characters to be read by several narrators and matched for sex. It really annoys me when for example, a middle aged male narrator tries to read the parts of all the females from young children to elderly woman.

Has anyone else ever noticed the odd random line in an audiobook being read by a completely different narrator in a very different tone to the rest of the reading? I've had this happen in a few audiobooks and it really grates. I wonder if it's been put in for a particular reason or if it's an amendment to a line but hey couldn't get the original narrator back to make it? Any ideas!

Listeners often leave feedback about narrators on Audible but rarely contact publishers directly with their bugbears. Authors sometimes get feedback via social media and some will pass that on if they think it’s worthwhile. Some publishers have in-house audio divisions and others outsource it.

In one of the Jackson Brodie novels there is a a character called Niamh. The narrator says 'neaaamha' all the way through. I cannot believe someone didn't step in at some point to explain the pronunciation.

The jack reacher books on audible are narrated by someone who sounds so wooden. Every sentence he says "she said" "he said" in such an annoying way!

SINGING

Was doing Crime And Punishment on audio which of course is Russian and they did loads of regional UK accents for no apparent reason. I didnt know it had Scousers or Yorkshiremen

@Putmeinsummer that’s the one I was thinking of…

Oh god, was it one of the Jackson Brody books? I refused to listen to any more after that it annoyed me so much!