Ray Cole shares his experience as an actor and audiobook narrator, discussing his process for developing characters and preparing for narration. They also discuss the importance of hydration for narration, and compare ACX and Findaway Voices for finding audiobook work.
Key Points
- Ray talks about getting into acting at a young age, studying it in college, working in irrigation for ten years, and discovering ACX for audiobook narration.
- Ray comes up with character voices by drawing inspiration from people he knows or finds on YouTube, and prepares for narrating a book by reading it and taking notes on each character’s journey
- Ray discusses his process for recording audiobooks
- Lisa asks about outsourcing book outlines and Ray mentions a company called VA for VO that provides virtual assistance for voiceover actors
- Lisa suggests reading out loud and recording to improve writing, especially for differentiating characters in fiction writing
- Ray shares his experience with clunky writing and the importance of reading out loud to understand the story and characters
I’m here today with an actor and audiobook narrator. Actually, he even narrated my novel. Whiskey and Old Stogies. I believe I referred to him as a nice Southern boy. Welcome, Ray Cole.
I’d been at a writers conference here recently, and a literary agent said that audiobooks are presently the most popular segment in publishing. So I’m sure our listeners are wanting to hear about this phenomenon. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you got into acting and narrating and what kind of books you’ve narrated?
Ray: Well, let’s see. That’s a couple part question. I got into acting pretty young. I guess, a couple of teachers said ‘well, there’s that rambunctious kid. Let’s give him some parts to play so that he has kind of an outlet for his energy. I acted in plays in junior high in high school and went to college to study acting. I lived in Chicago for a little bit and did some theater there and then kind of stopped, had to make some money and then after about ten years of working in irrigation at a golf course, I discovered ACX, the audiobook creation exchange.
Lisa: And that’s Amazon’s arm for audiobooks.
Ray: Exactly. Amazon’s arm for audiobooks. And I took a weekend warrior voiceover master class, as they call it. And then I spent about seven or eight years just kind of using audiobooks as a hobby and trying to work on voiceover and trying to figure out really kind of what I wanted, if I wanted it.
Then I took about a six, seven week coaching class with Carol Monda, who’s really wonderful and really gave me the confidence to be able to do audiobooks and any kind of voice acting fulltime. So that’s a little bit of my background.
Lisa: hat kind of books do you narrate? What are your favorite books?
Ray: Well, my favorite books to narrate are mysteries. I like, you know, historical fiction, whiskey and Old Stogies was a lot of fun. I’m sure we’ll talk about that later. And I also narrate a lot of religious books. My dad is a retired Episcopal priest and my brother is also an Episcopal priest. So it kind of runs in the family.
Lisa: I know for my book, you did quite a lot of different kinds of voices, which I was very impressed with. And so how do you come up with what kind of voice you’re going to use for a character?
Ray: In the case of in the case of your book, most of the characters came from either people I knew, like, Jolene’s best friend, came from a friend of mine from Savannah, Georgia. So that’s kind of where I got that southern voice from. But for the main character, I YouTubed, honestly. I YouTubed Appalachian moonshiners. And there was this guy that got interviewed in North Carolina. His name was Popcorn. And he had the most incredible voice. So I lifted it off of YouTube and worked with it for a while. Until I had something that sounded good and that I could kind of age as I went along.
Lisa: You did a really good job with that.
Ray: Well, I appreciate that because, you know, what is it goes from 1920 to about 1960, I think.
Lisa: Yeah. 1950, yeah.
Ray: 1950. Okay. So I figure there’s 30 years in that. And you also said Jolene had to be neutral.
Lisa: So how do you, in general, go about preparing to narrate a book? What’s your process?
Ray: First you got to read it. You know, especially when it’s either fiction or something that’s not straightforward narration, like a how to book or something like that. You really need to read it. And then I take copious notes on each character to kind of try to give me a sense of who these people are and what their journeys are.
Like Little Joe starts out naïve, a really fun, wants to have a good time character and ends up, as they say, with the moonshiner sickness. So, I write out little ideas about how that’s going to be and then I do the performance.
You check with the author, make sure they’re happy with it, and then I try not to do extensive rerecording, but sometimes when you’re listening to playback, you’ll get to a section where you’re like, Oh, I didn’t hit that the way that’s supposed to be heard or why that was really good. But if I tweak this a little bit, this would sound so much better.
So that’s kind of my process right now. I mean, it’s still an evolution. I know there are a lot of narrators out there that don’t even prep books anymore. They’re so busy that they have to outsource it. They outsource and get a good 8 to 10 page outline. Then they go in and they do their narration.
Lisa: So how would they outsources? Are there companies that specialize in that kind of thing?
Ray: There are. A company called VA for VO, stands for virtual assistants for voiceover actors. You can outsource it to them. And you may know somebody in the industry that that’s what they do. It’s kind of like a copywriter, I guess, they read through everything and give bullet points or whatever. I don’t know anything about the publishing industry, so I’m maybe using that term wrong.
Lisa: I know that when I record these podcasts, I use Grain and they will give me not just a recording of the Zoom interview, but also a kind of a bulletin point list of important points from the transcript.
Ray: Well, that’s cool.
Lisa: It’s interesting how much AI is now being used for some of these things. I think I’ve heard some AI narration and it just bugs the heck out of me. I bet that it does that even more to you.
Ray: Oh, yeah. There’s no nuance. You know, I in fact, I heard a recording they used Kevin Conroy. They used his voice as Batman for some kind of PSA, but it was so flat and he was such a good voice actor that listening to it, you just like this is almost a disservice to the man, because you’re taking his voice and flattening it out where he had such amazing nuance to what he did. And so, yeah, kind of just irritating, for lack of a better word.
Lisa: And from what I heard from the people in publishing that I’ve talked to, they’ve said they’re even putting this into the contracts for authors now that say the author says no way will AI narrate the audio.
Ray: Oh, that’s great. Because I also know that the National Association of Voice Actors, they’ve created a rider for voice actors to give their clients that says, you cannot use my voice without my permission and you cannot use my voice for AI. because that’s been happening a few times, actually, probably more so than it used to.
There was a case a couple of years ago, Bev Standing I want to say her name was, heard her voice being used on Spotify for a spot she never did. And she fought and she won. So that was awesome.
Lisa: Yes. Well, I tell authors I work with to help them refine their stories, that there’s benefit to turning on Word so it will read it to you. You write a chapter and then you can listen to how Word will read it to you. And that that’s one way of listening to your own writing. But then also even for people who are thinking about doing their own audiobook narration, if they ever get published or even if they’re not, it’s good to kind of try to read it out loud and record it as if they are narrating their own book. Because in that way they can try to do what you’re taught, what you were talking about as far as getting the characters in there and making all the characters sound different.
Because I know with a lot of first time writers or writers that are just kind of learning the craft, a lot of the characters in fiction writing, even a lot in memoir, a lot of the characters will sound a like. I think that that is really important to get into the characters.
I know you do nonfiction, too, but have you ever seen that in fiction where it’s really hard to differentiate between the characters?
Ray: Yeah. I did a novel some years ago that all the characters were pretty one note. I mean, you know, it’s seemed I think one of the things you said about being able to read it out loud will take some of the clunkiness out of the writing. Because if you’re reading it out loud and you’re reading a dialog and you don’t feel comfortable saying it, then why would you write it?
And that was kind of one of those things that I dealt with in this book. I don’t want to say the name, but was that it was a lot of clunky writing that you kind of had to just work over and it and everybody was kind of one note, Oh, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do this, this is how you’re going to be and an so I think it’s really important for authors to read their novels out loud or have something read out loud just to give them a sense of what they’re trying to say. Because I know I’ve tried to write before and I forget about it. I’m much better interpreter than I am a writer.
Lisa: Well, you do character development well. So that’s good. And that’s one of the things that fiction writers have to learn. But what I’m curious about is do you do a script? I talked to a narrator once who said she marks each character in a different color. So she knows when. Who’s who?
Ray: Yeah, I do that occasionally. When it’s a lot of dialog that doesn’t have the names attached to it. I do most of my reading off a computer screen, which most of us do, but, you can with Word they’re places that you can annotate on the side. And I think there’s a similar program with Apple, but I’m not an Apple guy.
I also have a spiral notebook I keep a lot of notes in so I can follow along with the story and have some annotations and then some underlining.
But a lot of it is just the prep work into the character, you know, like Rufus, you’re taking a kid that had a lot of baggage he walked in with. But you don’t want to give that away. So you develop it along the time. And as he got older, he was able to face it more. And so you bring that out in him, but yet because he was uneducated, he always had that kind of side to him. That, at least for me, was that innocence, even though he was, you know, caught up in a whole lot of stuff. So all that stuff I wrote out.
Lisa: You mentioned that you did YouTube. Do you use any other resources for researching when you’re developing characters?
Ray: I like to get a sense of the time period. So I’ll read, or I’ll Google search or if I’ve got a book on the time period, I’ll go research it. I didn’t know anything about making moonshine other than what I saw on M*A*S*H*.
So I did a little research on that, just about how they do it. I’ve had some moonshine before, so I know what it tastes like, but I never knew how it was made. So, knowing all that stuff kind of helps going in. The more you can inform yourself on who you’re going to be, the better off you are.
Lisa: I want people to hire you to do narration, but if there are, say, people who want to do their own audio narration. Do you have any tips for them?
Hydrate, Hydrate, Hydrate
Ray: Find a quiet room. Trick it out as much as you can to keep the sound levels low because it’s not hard to hear background noise. My room is still a work in progress. But some of the other trips are to know your characters. And if you really want to narrate your own book, make sure that you take some time. Go to YouTube and look up tongue twisters. Just because there are so many people that can get on there. And I mean, I love Stephen King, but I listen to him narrate Needful Things. And not only are you listening to the Maine accent, but he’s also got a nasal thing going on that you just hear all the time.
If you can do the tongue twisters and you can make sure that you’re not taking any dairy before you start talking, and if you hydrate. Also, I drink about two of these a day. That’s about four liters. So hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, because then you won’t have all these crackling noises in the background that’s coming from your mouth.
So those are the main suggestions. But really, you know, know your characters. That’s a big one.
Lisa: I know one author I talked to who narrates his own audiobooks. He said one trouble he had was his microphone was so good that it picked up his stomach growling if he was hungry.
Ray: Yeah. I’ve had that a few times. There’s a couple times where my wife, who sells houses and she’ll walk by the door. I need to put on a much nicer door on the, on the studio so it won’t happen. But I’ll hear her talk about the house that she’s about to sell or something like that. So I got to do a little more rerecording on that.
Lisa: It’s been so nice talking to you. Oh. Do you have a preference between ACX or Findaway Voices?
Ray: I find a lot of more auditions on ACX than I do on Findaway. It’s one of those ones where they find you and give you an audition. Whereas, as Johnny Heller famously said, ACX is like Tinder for audiobook narrators. They just put people together and you then you move on from there.
I just love the story of how I got Whiskey and Old Stogie, which is I sent you a birthday message and you were like, you’re still alive.
Lisa: Because there was another Ray who did voiceovers I found on Facebook because I actually found you when you were doing script…I can’t remember the website.
Ray: Yeah. Scripted audio or something like that. That was a cool little website that I, I was kind of on there for a minute. I hooked up with a guy named Will Lewis and we did about six audio plays together before that kind of fell apart.
Lisa: The platform didn’t make it. I did put the first page up there and you were one of the couple of people who sent in the, I don’t know what they call them, but the an audio clip for it. I thought I want to flag this guy so that when or if I do go look for an audiobook narrator, I want to approach him. So I searched you out on LinkedIn and Facebook, I thought. So I followed this Facebook page and I went back to that when I was thinking, Well, maybe I should consider it. And I saw messages about, oh, so young and so, RIP and I’m like, oh dear. The guy I wanted to narrate the audiobook passed away. That’s a bummer. Then I got a message on LinkedIn. People same name, same kind of voiceover kind of stuff, but you’re alive.
Ray: Yeah. That’s a crazy story. That’s amazing.
Lisa: And I’m going to write a blog post about it here soon. I get a chance.