
Once you receive the text you’ll be reading from, you’ll need to do any appropriate prep work. As a freelance audiobook narrator, most of your clients will be authors or small publishers, and you’ll be expected to do the post-production on your audio files and deliver a finished product. When working on a project, you’ll have a text to read and a deadline for delivery either of raw recordings or the finished audio file. When working from home as a narrator, you’ll either be working with a production company or directly for an author or publisher. Get Paid to Read Books: At-Home Jobs for Book Lovers.Love reading but don’t think narration is right for you? Check out other ways you can get paid to read: It’s important to be able to match the tone of voice you had in your original recording when you go back and change things. After you’ve finished recording, you may have to do pick-ups, as well, which are mistakes you notice or changes desired for the final recording. While narrating text, you may have to do multiple takes to get a passage right. In addition to having a good voice and some acting chops, you also need a lot of patience and the ability to perform consistently. Not every actor would do well in a soundproof booth acting against nothing – most often, narrating is a solo activity – but those gifted with great voices and the skills to act with them are golden. Whether you studied acting at university or have taken some acting classes on the side, the skills and instincts honed in acting transfer beautifully to narration. If you’re interested in being a narrator of audiobooks, it helps to have some training as an actor. Poetry requires a certain rhythm, and children’s literature may call for silly voices. Fiction may require half a dozen different voices as you read dialogue or change points of view. Nonfiction often requires a narrator to take a dry text and turn it into something with energy that can hold a listener’s attention. Narrating a book calls on many different vocal skills, and the skills required depend on the genre.


Just having a good voice is not enough, of course. If you have a voice that people like to listen to – and you know how to infuse your voice with emotion – you may have what it takes to narrate audiobooks. Read on for my beginner’s guide on how to get paid to narrate audiobooks. If you’ve got a great voice and some acting talent, you might even have the chops to make a living on producing that content. The easy access most people have to smartphone devices these days – combined with long commutes – makes for a market hungry for audio content. Audiobooks represent a rapidly growing market for publishers and voice actors alike.
