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What is Narrate Your Own Book?
Since 2005, David H. Lawrence XVII has been teaching actors and voice talent up-to-the-minute audiobook performance skills, technical workflows and business strategies. His goal: to help those actors and VO performers add audiobook narration to their performer careers.
Lawrence been a narrator of audiobooks since the late 1980’s and has been witness to the hockey-stick-like growth of audiobooks since the introduction of smart phones. And he knew he could help performers who wanted to do the same work.
Over the last couple of decades, he’s trained nearly 3,000 professional actors in this skill set and they are collectively responsible for over 7,000 books now on sale on Audible and their partner sites.
And every so often…
…an author would sneak into the course to get this training…so they could narrate a title they themselves had written.
Noticing this, David decided to create a bespoke training program, based on the training he gives actors and VO talent, focusing on the author who wants to narrate their own book.
And thus, Narrate Your Own Book was born.
If you’re an author who has always wanted to be the voice of your work, to learn how to do it the way Hollywood actors and voice talent are trained, with the same group and private coaching David’s acting students receive and with the same gear David uses provided as part of the course, then Narrate Your Own Book is for you.
Your instructor
Your instructor is David H. Lawrence XVII, an actor, voice talent and technologist. Lawrence helps actors create their own voiceover careers with his award winning VOHeroes voice consultancy, and has been BACKSTAGE’s Readers’ Choice for Favorite VO Teacher and Favorite VO Demo Producer for five years in a row. He has taught his classes online for over a decade and has honed and refined the online teaching techniques he presents here with over 3000 students.
Watch a sample lesson:
Watch this space for the sample lesson. We’re deciding on which one, as we speak!
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Curriculum: Narrate Your Own Book
NYOB 101 – How To Take This Course
- How to take this course: modules, lessons and topics
- How to use this website: navigation and resources
- Your NYOB Connect private discussion group
- Your NYOB Workouts
- Your monthly workout schedule
- Your coaching team
- Performing in workouts like a boss
- Curating material for your workouts
1: Claiming And Preparing Your Manuscript
- Planning your path
- The players: Amazon, ACX and Audible
- How you make money: Royalty Share
- Why an AI-voiced audiobook is a very bad idea
- Setting (and meeting) your release date
- Audiobook-ifying: making your manuscript listener-ready
- What you’ll be narrating
- Handling visual/print references
- Creating a related PDF for listeners
- Creating your account on ACX
- A quick tour of ACX
- What info you need for your account
- How to add/edit profile information
- Claiming your title on Kindle
- Readying your manuscript
- Making the jump to ACX
- Managing your project on ACX
- Your title page
- Your production tab
- Your sales dashboard
2: Creating Your Home Studio
- Creating your home studio space
- Recommended computer equipment
- Recommended (and provided) microphone
- Recommended (and provided) earbuds
- Recommended (and provided) software
- Accessories that make life better
- Setting up your gear
- Where in your home?
- Achieving enough quiet
- Outside versus inside noise
- Deadening the room
- Laying out your audiobook workflow
- Your first recordings
- Organizing your hard drive
- Finding things when you need them
- When to record
- Being at peace with the typos you’ll find
- Backing up your work
3: Audiobook Performance Training
- Performing Non-Fiction
- Creating the non-fiction neutral narrator
- Non-fiction has dialogue, too
- Your most important non-fiction vocal quality
- Meeting your audience where they listen
- Non-fiction enunciation
- Steps, lists, processes and other data
- Non-fiction coaching
- Performing Fiction
- Creating the fiction neutral narrator
- Keeping track of characters
- Male vs female vs child/teen characters
- Fiction presentation
- Fiction coaching
- Accents and dialects
- “I can’t do accents.”
- Accents and subtext
- First Person vs. Third Person Voice
- Voicing non-manuscript content
- Credits
- Your retail sample
- Your audiobook trailer
4: The Audiobook Production Workflow
- The Stairstep Method
- The System
- How everything works together
- The Stairs
- The Steps
- Accelerating Your Work
- Recording your chapters
- Avoiding common time-wasters
- Being the storyteller
- The basics of The Stairstep Method
- Meeting ACX/Audible audio standards
- Room noise
- “Silence” lengths
- Using AudioCupcake to master
- Audiobook artwork
- Proofing your recordings
- Editing your work
- The keyboard equivalents for editing
- Your top track
- Doing pickups and finalizing your chapters
- Using Pozotron pickup packets
- Executing pickups
- Opening and closing credits
- Creating your retail sample
- Choosing inviting content for your retail sample
- Editing your retail sample
- Recording other material for your book
- What parts of your book to narrate
- What parts of your book NOT to narrate
5: Releasing Your Audiobook For Sale
- Polishing your final submission
- Telling ACX “I’m Done”
- Sending your audiobook to retail
6: Marketing Your New Audiobook
- Setting your retail date
- Creating your title’s trailer
- Using Headliner
- Seeding your trailer
- Spreading the word
- How the Amazon “stack” promotes your title
- Live events: online and IRL
- Podcasts, posts, streams, meetups and other options
7: Your Audiobook Future
- Which files to save (and for how long)
- Bundling series
- Beyond Audible/ACX
- Narrating for others
- Lather, rinse, repeat – your next title(s)
Curriculum subject to change and timely updates.
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