THE SOUND OF A GOOD BOOK
Voice actors are in demand as publishers race to keep up with a boom in audiobooks,
In roughly five years since narrating his first audiobook, Braden Wright has given his velvety voice much variety — and an unyielding workload.
The Toronto-based Wright, who spent 25 years in feature film marketing before turning to acting, has narrated everything from Tanya Anne Crosby’s medieval romance stories such as Viking’s Prize, to Russell Blake’s high-octane JET series, down to Joseph Campbell’s clas- sic essay collection The Mythic Dimension, which takes 13-plus hours to listen to and required significantly more time to record. The surprising thing, then, given how busy Wright’s been? He thinks he could be feeling just the very first reverberations of an audiobook boom in Canada that doesn’t appear poised to soften anytime soon.
“The key phrase is: Audiobooks are a thing in Canada now. It’s a lovely boom as people adopt this,” Wright said. “Many people had thought about (audiobook narration), but in the past the opportunities really weren’t there. Now that the opportunities are there, people are saying: ‘OK, I can dive in.’ ”
It’s been almost a year since Penguin Random House, Kobo and the Amazon-owned audiobook platform Audible separately issued splashy announcements of their big plans for the Canadian audiobook market, and although no overnight transformation has taken place, Wright is hardly alone in his optimism about the future of homegrown audiobook production.
Over a period of mere weeks last September, Penguin Random House Canada announced the launch of its audiobook production program, Kobo kicked off its own audiobook subscription plan — while pledging to add more Canadian content — and subscription giant Audible recruited Margaret Atwood and Elisabeth Moss to herald the arrival of a new dedicated Canadian service that would feature more than 100 new titles from Canadian authors.
With the ubiquity of smartphones, the rise of podcasting and our collective obsession with multi-tasking, audiobooks have become the feel-good story of the publishing industry. Stateside, audiobook sales in 2015 leapt by 20 per cent — a $1.77-billion increase — and have only grown in popularity since. Audiobooks are so popular there that bestselling authors including Michael Lewis, Robert Caro and Jeffery Deaver have struck exclusive deals with Audible, leading to a situation where the subscription service is in some ways now in direct competition with book publishers.
In Canada, where audiobook sales numbers aren’t available, a 2016 BookNet Canada report found that audiobook circulation grew 33 per cent from 2014 to 2015. And, just two years after ECW Press became one of the first Canadian publishers to announce an audiobook production program, BookNet now reports that 61per cent of Canadian publishers are suddenly producing audiobooks. That’s up from 37 per cent in 2016.
That’s amazing growth, particularly considering that Canada’s always been a bit of an anomaly where audiobooks are concerned. When audiobooks were sold as bulky cassettes or CDs, it was prohibitively expensive for Canadian publishers to shoulder the cost of hiring actors, renting production facilities and tackling physical production. Moreover, the numbers proved Canadians then were uninterested in audiobooks to an almost curious degree.
“It was always a challenge to get sales of that format elevated in Canada,” said Random House Canada deputy publisher Marion Garner. “It was weird. It was always perplexing to us why it was a successful business model in the U.S., but with the number of people who commute or are visually impaired, there wasn’t a demand here.”
As a result, Canadian publishers made a habit of essentially ignoring audio rights to their titles — which means that agents and authors who were savvy enough to hang onto those rights rather than surrendering them for a pittance are now reaping the reward. So is Audible.
Toronto-based literary agent Denise Bukowski recalls that, in Spring 2017, representatives from Audible visited her office and took her to lunch. Armed with a list of her titles recommended by a consultant, Audible began striking deals, locking down rights to back-listed titles, current books and even forthcoming books (Ian Williams’ Reproduction).
Between April and December of last year, Audible snatched up the rights to a dozen of Bukowski’s titles, including Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal, Carrianne Leung’s That Time I Loved You and Leo McKay Jr.’s Twenty-six.
“They bought everything that wasn’t nailed down, basically,” Bukowski recalled. “They were really quite aggressive about it.
“I told Random House that Audible was in town and they should move fast … but they never asked me for rights until a couple months ago,” she added. “They all ended up going to Audible.”
Still, publishers here are making progress.
Since September, Penguin Random House has already produced about 55 audiobooks — all but two of which feature all-Canadian casts — including Joseph Pierre reading David Chariandy’s Brother, Carol Off reading her memoir All We Leave Behind and Rajiv Surendra narrating Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.
So far, Audible’s aggressiveness in securing audio rights isn’t sounding alarms. “Competition is good and healthy,” said Penguin Random House audiobooks producer Ann Jansen. And thus far, there’s no indication that Audible is trying to strike exclusive deals with bestselling Canadian authors, as it has in the U.S.
“I think they’ll have to watch how sales are growing in Canada, period, before I would assume they would start to bite off something like that,” Garner said.
Audible, while declining to provide numbers on their expansion into Canada, said in a statement that the company “is excited to be creating new opportunities for Canadian authors, performers and creators.”
Although it might seem as if Audible’s head start caught some Canadian publishers flat-footed, Bukowski suggests that if the competition does heat up, publishers are still in a good position to challenge the company. For instance, they could offer better royalty rates or a better contract than Audible’s, which she calls “very strange.”
“Audible isn’t paying a lot up front, especially for backlist books that weren’t huge, famous bestsellers,” she said. “So it could turn into an auction situation where we could have more than one offer and the best one wins.”
That sounds like music to the ears of any author or actor looking to benefit from this burgeoning industry.
Of course, audiobook narration is not easy work. Elements are appealing — you never get typecast, you never age out of roles, and you can portray dozens of characters — but the hours are long. Then there are the authors, many of whom are, let’s say, opinionated.
Wayne Johnston was pleasantly surprised that Penguin Random House chose his First Snow, Last Light as its first multi-voice production, with Newfoundland cast including David Ferry, Gordon Pinsent and Mary Lewis. Johnston reviewed actors’ audition tapes, but stayed away from the studio for fear of inhibiting their performances.
“They did ask for my input but interestingly, I found that my input — although valued I think — never really influenced their decisions, because I think they know more about it than I do,” said Johnston, who was thrilled with the production. “I know the book, but they know the medium.”
And sometimes, an actor knows an author, which doesn’t necessarily make the job easier.
Tom McCamus narrated In the Skin of a Lion after being personally recommended by author Michael Ondaatje, an acquaintance with whom McCamus had worked on a theatrical production of Ondaatje’s Divisadero. That relationship did nothing to quiet McCamus’s nerves, especially since he had little audiobook experience, and also because In the Skin of a Lion was a personal favourite that he recalls reading on the streetcar when he first moved to Toronto. “I was quite nervous,” McCamus said. Ultimately, the experience was “very good.” And it turned McCamus into something of a convert. In preparation for the role, he filled his phone with audiobooks and formed a new habit.
“I do a lot of driving. I work in Stratford but I live three hours away,” he said. “It’s a great way to listen to a book.”
“It was always perplexing to us why it was a successful business model in the U.S., but ... there wasn’t a demand here.” MARION GARNER DEPUTY PUBLISHER PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE CANADA