USI English instructor, Yu-Li Alice Shen, is also an actor, a playwright, and most recently, an audiobook narrator.
Audiobook narration is more complicated than just reading out loud. This burgeoning industry requires narrators to audition for roles, analyze text, and prepare anywhere from 40 to 60 character voices per book. This preparation includes researching pronunciations, dialects, and technical terms and even editing and mastering sound files – among other freelance responsibilities like financial planning, portfolio building, and creative networking with professional entities such as the Screen Actors Guild and the Audio Publishers Association.
Art in the Time of Corona
During the pandemic, live theatres shut down, but Shen found other ways to perform. Through a Zoom class taught by her college voice professor, Andi Arndt (Audie award-winning narrator and founder of Lyric Audiobooks publishing company), Shen was introduced to the artistic and technical world of voice narration. This enabled her to still act, remotely, and get paid for it!
Most novice narrators start out on ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange – a site where independent authors can audition and hire narrators to record their audiobooks to be sold through Amazon and Audible). Narrators market themselves with headshots, bios, and voice samples, and they set their own per finished hour rate and/or work out royalty share deals with authors.
Armed with only a USB condenser microphone in a closet full of her own clothes to dampen noise, Shen sent out nearly 50 auditions on ACX over the summer. This effort landed her first book deals – mostly 3-hour health and wellness books that she edited and mastered herself.
After gaining more experience, she has progressed to full-length (7+ hours) books, has started collaborating with professional sound editors, and found work through other production companies like Findaway Voices and even “Big 5” publisher, Penguin Random House.
Shen would describe her voice as a reedy alto – smooth and self-possessed one minute, then sophomoric and impish the next. This makes her ideal for both memoirs and nonfiction, as well as young adult and fantasy.
Typecasting
Similar to other performance and media arts, the audiobook world is now paying more attention to cultural literacy issues such as diversity, inclusion, and representation. Since audiobook narrators generally voice an entire book themselves (unlike individual roles in a film or radio play), narrators might be portraying characters and accents outside of their own identities (e.g. sex, race, ethnicity or age).
Big publishing houses and independent authors alike are taking care to cast the primary point of view (main character) as equitably as possible. Narrators are now more thoroughly researching secondary POVs for accuracy and embodying real personas with respect. This growth in diverse content and accurate representation is fortunate. Shen can now voice myriad Asian American characters without being pigeon-holed as only her ethnicity, a problem that her predecessors have experienced.
What’s New & What’s Next
The push for accessibility in literary arts is one reason that more books are being recorded. The definition of reading is changing; the way we absorb information is changing. Education and entertainment in the pandemic era have become reliant on remote performance, and the audiobook industry is at the forefront of these developments.
In the past four months, Shen has completed nine books – including The Vegan “Beef” Guide by Lyanna K. Peterson (an approachable treatise on the ethical merits of veganism); Idriel’s Children by Hayley Reese Chow (a female-centric YA fantasy about warriors of fire and shadow); and a compilation of kids’ joke and trivia books about space by Fern Ortega.
She has also utilized her own Chinese language and heritage background for Rabbit in the Moon by Heather Diamond (an academic memoir about cross-cultural marriage, filial piety, and a white American woman’s expatriate life in Hong Kong) and the forthcoming The Freedom Swimmers by Tony Chin (a memoir about his mother’s escape from communist China by swimming to Macau).
Shen is currently working on two multi-book series: The Cure by K. A. Riley and PRAX and the Hazardous Countdown by Matthew Francis – both young adult dystopian novels set in post-pandemic futures.
Shen’s available titles can be found on Audible here.