Audiobook opportunities grow for narrators of color
When actor and audiobook narrator Cary Hite learned he had been cast to read a novella for a sci-fi anthology, he was ecstatic — and not just because he loved the genre.
Until that point, Hite, who is African American, was mainly hired to narrate urban lit, from classics such as Iceberg Slim’s “Pimp” to Wahida Clark’s bestselling “Honor Thy Thug.”
“I was being pigeonholed,” the New York native said. He remembered wondering, “Will I ever get a shot to read something like ‘Catcher in the Rye’ or ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’?”
The sci-fi project, which he landed in 2017, helped him break out. His resounding voice has since chronicled a wider range of stories, including “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” a children’s audiobook based on the animated film.
And it’s not just him. Audiobook publishers are increasingly offering opportunities to narrators of color, said Michele Cobb, executive director of the Audio Publishers Association, a response to a broader range of stories and desire for the voice talent to reflect that diversity. Colorblind casting has been on the rise too.
“Ultimately, the color of the person behind the microphone doesn’t matter if it’s not the key point of the story,” she said. “It’s just about telling that story well.”
Spurred by the advent of smartphones and digital downloads, audiobooks have been booming for years. According to the audio association, American publishers generated $940 million in audiobook sales and produced more than 44,000 titles in 2018, the most recent year for which the trade group had complete data.
Before 2010, only about 100 to 200 people made a living from narrating audiobooks, Cobb said. “The books were less diverse, and the call for narrators was a bit less diverse as well.”
As the market has grown, so have opportunities for actors who, like Hite, are passionate about books and have the stamina to enact them. Now the need to make the field more diverse for narrators of color has become a central issue for publishers.
But the particular demands of the job, compared with film and stage acting, make this tricky. What does representation mean when actors can only be heard and not seen? What constitutes a Black, Latino or Asian voice? And to complicate matters, in most audiobooks a single narrator voices multiple characters, who may have a variety of ethnicities and accents.
“It’s our job as producers to be respectful and sensitive to those voices and characters,” said Dan
Zitt, senior vice president of content production at Penguin Random House Audio. His team of 15 producers is on track to release more than 1,700 audiobooks this year.
January LaVoy, who has voiced works by bestselling authors such as James Patterson, John Grisham and Harlan Coben, said publishers are working hard to find narrators whose lives and cultural experiences more closely match the characters in their books.
Her own career has benefited from the increase in stories featuring interracial families and diverse characters, said LaVoy, 44, whose mother is white and biological father is Black. In March, “The Ten Thousand Doors of January,” a fantasy novel she narrated about a mixed-race girl who, to LaVoy’s delight, is also named January, won an Audie Award — the Oscars of audiobooks.
But her acting range has also landed her books with no characters of color.
“I sound like someone’s stereotypical idea of an educated, uppermiddle-class, white woman from Connecticut because that’s what I grew up around,” LaVoy said. “There’s no such thing as what a white woman from Connecticut sounds like — that’s not a thing.”
Janina Edwards, an African American narrator based in Atlanta who recorded her first audiobooks in the late 1980s for the American Foundation for the Blind, said that actors with cultural ties to a book improve the listeners’ experience. “If you didn’t know anything about Black or Southern culture, you’d probably read ‘chitterlings,’ ” she said of the soul-food dish. “It’s pronounced ‘chitlins.’ ”
Edwards said she loves narrating African American women’s voices. Her resume includes titles such as Jasmine Guillory’s romance “The Wedding Date.”
But even though her accent would be hard to place — “Most people don’t know where I’m from or that I’m Black when I pick up the phone” — she has mainly been hired to narrate “quote-unquote Black books,” she said.