“You have to really be able to tell a story and perform a wide range of characters using only your voice.
Karen Yates, head of content at Audible Australia.
“It’s also an endurance test. Some of the books are 40 hours long. Stephen Fry’s performance of the Sherlock Holmes collection is 70-plus hours. So you have to maintain that performance for a long time. I have a huge admiration for narrators who can do that.”
Audible, a subsidiary of the American book distribution and streaming behemoth Amazon, was launched in Australia in 2017. In the past year, it has experienced an 18 per cent increase in local member listening.
Of the 750,000 books and podcasts available on the subscription service, 100 are locally produced Audible originals, and around 40 locally recorded. The employment opportunities for Australian performers is expected to grow.
Pay rates vary, with many narrators earning around $250 per finished hour – more for the more experienced voice-over artists.
“We are working with talent agents to really try to build that narrator community in Australia,” says Yates.
Actor and narrator Zindzi Okenyo. Credit: Kate Geraghty
During the height of the pandemic, actor and Play School presenter Zindzi Okenyo began reading Roald Dahl’s bedtime stories to her followers on Instagram.
“I was doing it for kids, but many adults told me how soothing they found it,” she said. “Reading books aloud is always my favourite thing on Play School.”
Soon after, her friend, Sierra Leone-born author Aminata Conteh-Bigar, asked her to voice her biography Rising Heart.
Over the past two years, Okenyo has voiced several Australian fiction books, Audible Originals by Caroline Overington and a multi-voice thriller by Jack Heath called Kill your Husbands, along with fellow actors Tai Hara, Ed Oxenbould and Jessica Bell. The Potts Point-based NIDA graduate says she often bumps into fellow actors working as narrators, like Sharri Sebbins and Jessica Tovey, at the Crows Nest studio where she records most of the books.
“Unlike stage acting, you only have one tool: your voice, so you are really crafting the narrative through pace, tone and accent,” she says.
Narrator Rupert Degas, who records audiobooks from his Paddington home studio.
Rupert Degas is an audiobook veteran, having voiced around 300 books in 22 years. Before leaving the UK to live in Australia 12 years ago, the West End actor had voiced some of the characters in the Bob the Builder animation, and since arriving in Australia has voiced various characters in Blinky Bill.
He narrates audiobooks in his Paddington home in between jobs as a professional voice-over artist.
With audiobooks I get to play all the characters… it’s like my own little movie, my very own Netflix series in my head.”
Narrator Rupert Degas
“I always liked the voice side of stuff. You don’t have to learn lines, get up at 5am, sit in make-up for two hours, and say the same thing 50 times. With audiobooks, I get to play all the characters. I get to direct myself. I am the producer, the composer, the editor. It’s like my own little movie, my very own Netflix series in my head,” he says.
Degas can mimic anything from a Dubliner to a Glaswegian brogue, back to a western Sydney drawl.
“People seem to like my nuance with accents and the timbre and tone of my voice,” he says. “I want to take the listener on a journey like a full radio drama. To forget it’s one person, but imagine a cast of 50.”
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Degas says authors usually give him a crib sheet on the characters with all their quirks before he starts recording.
“I don’t read the books first, especially in a thriller. If I don’t know who the murderer is, my pace will pick up when it gets exciting. There’s more natural drama like a horse racing commentator calling a race.”
His narration for Dead Man’s Pose by Susan Rogers and John Roosen won the best mystery audiobook of the year for 2023, and he was recently awarded Audiofile’s lifetime achievement award: the “Golden Voice.”
Audiobooks have changed not just the book business, but the relationship between the author and reader and the business of writing, Yates says.
“A lot of authors tell us they are considering audio now when writing – it is now a vital way to build new audiences.”
Top 5 audiobooks of 2023 in Australia (based on sales from Audible Australia)
- Spare by Prince Harry (read by Prince Harry)
- Atomic Habits by James Clear (read by James Clear)
- The Woman in Me by Britney Spears (read by actor Michelle Williams)
- Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (read by actor Miranda Raison)
- Never Finished by David Goggins (read by Goggins, journalist Adam Skolnick and narrator Jacqueline Gardner)
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
