
What It's Like To Be...
Curious what it would be like to walk in someone else’s (work) shoes? Join New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath as he explores the world of work, one profession at a time, and interviews people who love what they do. What does a couples therapist think when a friend asks for relationship advice? What happens if a welder fails to wear safety glasses? What can get a stadium beer vendor fired? If you’ve ever met someone whose work you were curious about, and you had 100 nosy questions but were too polite to ask … well, this is the show for you.
What It's Like To Be...
An Audiobook Narrator
Fine-tuning the perfect accent for a character, recording for hours in a sound-insulated booth, and tracking down obscure pronunciations with Sean Pratt, an audiobook narrator. What is "punch and roll"? And what kind of voice do you need to be a great narrator?
EXTRA
We spoke with Sean about his work narrating the David Foster Wallace literary behemoth Infinite Jest. That part of the interview didn’t fit into this episode, but you can listen to it here!
NEW BOOK ALERT!
You may be aware that I’ve written or co-written five business books, including The Power of Moments and Made to Stick. I’ve got a sixth book out now called RESET: How to Change What’s Not Working. It’s a book intended to help you and your team get unstuck, to overcome the gravity of the way things have always worked. Learn more about the book and order it here.
Got a comment or suggestion for us? You can reach us via email at jobs@whatitslike.com
Want to be on the show? Leave a message on our voice mailbox at (919) 213-0456. We’ll ask you to answer two questions:
- What do people think your job is like and what is it actually like?
- What’s a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know and what does it mean?
Dan Heath: Every job has a set of minimum requirements, things that you have to get right to do the job. For an audiobook narrator, one of the biggest ones is just saying the names of people and places correctly.
Sean Pratt: When you're reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time, you don't have to say those names, they're crazy, but my job is to know how to say them.
Dan: That's Sean Pratt. He's been an audiobook narrator for 25 years and has 1,200 audiobook titles under his belt. Here's how he nails down pronunciations. If it's a fiction book, he goes straight to the source, the author. He sends them a list of the tricky names.
Sean: I say, "Go to the voice memo on your phone, say this name slowly twice, and then I'll read it out phonetically on my end."
Dan: For names from non-English languages, he uses a website.
Sean: There’s one called Forvo.com. It stands for “foreign voice”. And so you can hear a native speaker say the word, like, "How do you say this name that's Turkish? Because it's got a funny looking C letter there. How do you say that?" "Oh, it's a C-H sound. Got it. It's an S sound or it's a Z sound," or whatever.
Dan: If that sounds laborious, that's because it is. He often hires researchers to help him track down pronunciations. Even with all those safeguards, mistakes can creep in.
Sean: I did this book on stoicism recently and there was a philosopher. She was a cynic and her name is Hipparchia. Unfortunately, I misread my researcher's notes and I said “Hipparchika” and I said it 75 times.
Dan: Oh, no.
Sean: Now I get to go back, and you don't go Hipparchia once, you have to read the sentence for the context. I got to reread 75 chunks of little sentences throughout the piece to go all Hipparchia. [laughs]
[music]
Dan: I'm Dan Heath, and this is what it's like to be-- In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a couples therapist, a stand up comedian, a cattle rancher. We want to know what do they do all day at work? Today, we'll ask Sean Pratt what it's like to be an audiobook narrator. We'll talk about how he develops character voices, why he advises aspiring audiobook narrators to record in their closets, and what AI voices get wrong about the way people talk. Stay with us.
Before Sean Pratt sits down to record a novel, he reads the whole thing cover to cover, he takes notes. He says what he's looking for in that initial read through, aside from potential pronunciation landmines, are clues about the characters and what they might sound like.
Sean: The more fantastical the genre, the more fantastical the character choices I'll make. If like a Western or a sci-fi or a fantasy, I'll have big, broad choices with my voices.
Dan: Recently, he narrated one of Agatha Christie's Poirot novels, and he wanted it to sound like an old black and white film.
Sean: The Americans sort of sound like that American in the 1920s, "Hey there, pal, how are you going?" Then you have Hercule Poirot, "How are you doing? It's very nice to see you." "Yes, I see. We should go over here and look at this thing." Then you have, "Oh, hello there." Sort of chippy-chappy guys. "Hello there. How are you doing?" You can go a little further with it because of the genre, the time period and so on. If it was a modern drama, I might take all that down several notches because it doesn't feel right for the era and also what the audience would expect. That's where the artistic part comes in.
Dan: He mostly works alone, making the character choices on his own based on the text, but he does occasionally collaborate with authors to make different choices.
Sean: About two years ago, I did a fantasy piece, and the author was a public school principal in, I think, North Dakota. Steven Guglich was his name. We had a meeting. He sent over-- because he wants input. He's paying me. It's ultimately his baby to put up on Audible. We're going over the different character choices. We have elves and fairies and goblins and all sorts of stuff. He wanted the fairies, the little wee people with the pointed ears, as it were-- no, excuse me, the elves. He had mentioned he wanted them to sound Israeli. I think in his mind, because they're action-oriented elves, these guys.
I think he thought they were going to sound like that, and I said, "Steven, if we do that, they're going to sound like a bunch of old Jewish guys from Brooklyn who work at a deli," because that's my, "Hey, how are you doing? Let's go. Okay, fine. We're going to go fight the ogre. Okay, fine. Let's go." I said, "Let's not do that. I would vote for maybe a British accent." One of our hero elves, I modeled him after Errol Flynn. He's already had this sort of swashbuckling sound.
It is a conversation, because there are also some accents that-- People think that we're machines, that we can just pull these accents out of thin air, but you can't. Sometimes you have an accent come along that's actually quite challenging. For me, the South African accent is quite challenging to do. If I have a character that's South African, the character doesn't exist in the accent. It's part of the character. When you have an accent that's a little challenging, you just want one or two or three vocal affects that are unique to that accent. That's what you build the rest of it around.
Dan: Give me an example, if you remember one, where you had to consciously create the accent for the character. Maybe it was cobbled from different sources, but walk us through your process in getting there.
Sean: If I'm reading the text and it says this character, the way the author describes them, that they're a 70-year-old man from Georgia who's been a chain smoker and he's very angry. "All right. That just sort of tells you what this guy's going to sound like, like this. He's just going to have a voice like that." You use the adjectives to guide you. Other times, if they don't have that kind of a sound, then you cast from this catalog of people that you know.
A good performer is a good mimic, and a good mimic is a good observer. In this case, I'm observing with my listening to the people around me. I listen to people the way they speak. It can be anybody. It could be my brother-in-law or a celebrity or someone I know in my neighborhood or whatever. If they have a unique voice, I've cataloged it in my head. Going back to the fantasy piece I mentioned earlier, our villain, he had a very unique way of speaking. We ended up-- I cast his voice as James Spader, the guy from Blacklist.
James Spader: "Give me a name, Henry, or I'm going to drag you out, throw you in the trunk, fly you to Papua New Guinea, and have your head stuck on a pole."
Sean: It just felt right. Then I watched several episodes of The Blacklist to get a feel for his cadence and style, and then I apply it to the character.
Dan: I'm just in awe of the voice collection. I am terrible at accents and voices. I've always admired people who can shuffle among them. Have you ever encountered one that was that was an unusual challenge? Earlier, you mentioned South African accents. What's the hardest voice you've ever had to nail?
Sean: Oh, goodness gracious, there are so many. As you can hear my voice, when I have African American characters in there, because for the majority of Africa, they have a much lower voice. Of course, there's a different melody, rhythm, and tempo. You walk a fine line when you do different ethnicities. You want to acknowledge the ethnicity, the way they speak, but you do not want it to be a caricature. That's different. That's where you look to the writer, the style. Sometimes you're forced into a certain sound.
When I narrated Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, that was especially hard on a number of levels. It's only four chapters long, but each chapter is at least two to three hours long, and it's four different characters, their perspective of what's going on. Two of the chapters are written in stream of consciousness writing. In fact, one is a man who's mentally disabled, and he goes backwards and forwards in his own time as he's thinking. You have a character who is not fully present, going back and forth in memory to the present when he was 3, 13, 23, 33, and you have to make that coherent somehow.
Then he wrote the patois of the African American characters in their patois. It would be like if you were writing from someone from Boston and you took the Rs out and put an A-H, so “Pahk yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd”, kind of thing. What's tricky about when the author does that is you have to decipher their writing and then make it sound conversational on top of it. It's quite challenging.
Dan: That's so interesting. How much can you get done in a session? You go into your home studio, you're ready to get started. Do you start the first page of a book or is there a logic to starting in a different order?
Sean: No, you want to go front to back. Obviously, in fiction, there's the narrative, but even in nonfiction, there's still a narrative. You, as an author, know that you set up your premise in nonfiction in the intro, preface, and forward. Then chapter by chapter, you take us on this journey, you're revealing your knowledge and sharing your truth with us, so you want to go sequentially.
When I'm working in the booth for a professional narrator, the ratio is about two to one. It takes about two hours of work to generate one finished hour of audio that now will be proofed by the company, or if I do private work, my own proofer.
Dan: That's pretty impressive, that level of productivity.
Sean: If you want an anecdote, so my very first book was 1996. I'd moved down to Washington, DC to start my life over. I'd met somebody and moved down there to be with her. I was going to be using a friend's studio, and I was going to have a monitor, a woman who sat outside and was basically proofing me in real time. She was on a headset. If I made a mistake, she'd click in like, "Sean, that was street light, and you said street lamp." "Okay, thank you." You rewind the tape, and then you hit record, and you listen to yourself, and then you punch in and record over the mistake, and you keep going. That's called punch and roll.
I practiced how to use the machine and I read the book and made my notes. The book was Cabbages and Kings by O. Henry, a series of short stories. In my very first session, it was a three-hour session, in three hours of work, I did exactly 15 minutes of material. Oh my God, it was the most stressful event of my entire life. When we finished, I thanked Bernadette, the monitor, and I said, "I'll see you tomorrow." I drove back to Alexandria, Virginia, where I was living at the time. I walk into the row house that we were living in, throw my bag on the floor, and just collapse on the rug in the living room. I'm staring up at the ceiling, and my girlfriend walked over and she said, "Are you okay?" I was like, "This is so much harder than I thought it was going to be."
Dan: Wait, so what made that first day so difficult?
Sean: I was running everything. See, that's the trick. It's like patting your stomach and rubbing your head or whatever. It's not enough-- I'm not just performing it. When you narrated your audiobooks, you went into a studio and someone did all the technici-- I'm doing all of that on top of the performance.
Dan: Wait, you're editing it too and recording?
Sean: Yes.
Dan: I was shocked to hear that Sean is essentially a one-man band. Not only is he performing the work, which is hard enough, but he's editing the audio on the fly as he records it. He's relying on a technique that he mentioned a minute ago called punch and roll.
Sean: It goes back to the days of tape. The idea would be, when you're recording on tape, you would record and then you'd make a mistake and you hit stop. You hit the rewind button for a few seconds and you stop, so you've moved the tape back. You hit play and you listen. Then somewhere before that mistake, where there's a pause somewhere, you hit record and the spinning magnetic head would punch into the tape, as it were, and roll over the mistake with the new take. You're punching and rolling. You are editing in real time.
Dan: This technique isn't just useful for basic editing. It's what allows him to do a whole scene of dialogue between a bunch of different characters.
Sean: You're not doing a live radio play. You not have to go, "I can't pay the rent," "But you must pay the rent." "I'll pay the rent." Curses. In my hero or whatever, when you have one or two people, that's easy. When you have four or five, it can get tricky. That's where a punch and roll can save your bacon. For instance, I had a scene a while back from the Agatha Christie mystery. I had a scene with like four people in this room. There was one British lady, there was Hercule, and there was an American, and then a British man. You build it literally one exchange at a time.
In other words, I'll start off with Hercule saying the first sentence and then stop, go back and listen to it as the next character and then record her response to him, and then go back-- so I'm building it sentence by sentence and I get a cleaner delineation between those different character voices.
Dan: Oh, that's interesting. It's like one comment, pause, replay the comment, respond as though in real time. Pause again.
Sean: Yes, that's how I do it.
Dan: Punch and roll helps him work just a little quicker. When you're recording, say, a 15-hour book, every ounce of efficiency you can squeeze out of your workflow, it matters to the bottom line.
Sean: In the world of voiceover, I have lots of friends who do cartoons and video games and commercial VO and political spots, and that's where the big money is. That audiobooks are viewed as the ugly red-headed stepchild of the voiceover industry.
Dan: That's it. Why is that? That doesn't totally add up to me.
Sean: Because the amount of work for the amount of compensation we get, comparatively speaking, is a lot less.
Dan: That's sort of a chicken and egg thing. Why hasn't it become as valuable as some of these other--
Sean: Because when you do a video game, the budget is already there and they know it's only going to take the talent an afternoon or two or three hours to do the entire cartoon. It's a much bigger project in its scope and with the budget. With audiobooks, think of an audiobook as almost like you're investing in a stock. There's only so much money you can invest in it. Then it's going to take a certain amount of time to recoup your money. That's why you have audio companies that have such large catalogs.
Dan: As Sean mentioned, he recently narrated Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. That was because it went into the public domain in 2025, so the audiobook publisher wouldn't need to pay for the rights to record it.
Sean: That book, I think it was like eight hours long. Okay, well, they paid my fee, and I'm a union member, so they paid my union to scale and all the stuff with that.
Dan: Let's pretend I don't-- I actually don't remember what the end cost was. Let's say it's like $5,000 altogether.
Sean: Every download, they only get 40% because Amazon, Audible doesn't, obviously, make enough money, and Jeff Bezos needs a new yacht, so they take 60% of every download. It takes quite a while to recoup your money before you flip into black.
Dan: Do you get residuals once they do pay out that initial investment?
Sean: No. My work as an audiobook narrator is strictly work for hire, that's why I get a higher fee up front. I would much prefer that, frankly.
Dan: Got it. Why do you say that?
Sean: Because I would have to wait a lot longer to make that money over a longer period of time, and sometimes you do a book that just doesn't sell very well.
Dan: True. You get paid regardless. Maybe 1 out of 50 go on to be a big home run, but at least you have the certainty of the payment.
Sean: Yes, it's like Hollywood, they have a couple of what they call tentpole movies that support all those smaller projects. They're open for a wild card, a movie they didn't think was going to take off. It explodes and becomes the next big thing. I did a book, oh gosh, almost 10 years ago called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It's about how the body experiences trauma and how it actually physicalizes trauma. It was a wonderful nonfiction piece.
That book has sold, I kid you not, hundreds of thousands of copies in the audiobook world. Not to mention the physical book, it's been translated. It was a huge seller. More recently, I did a book by Jonathan Haidt called The Anxious Generation.
Dan: Oh, no way. You read that one.
Sean: Yes.
Dan: Boy, that book has been a phenomenon.
Sean: Yes, it's a huge phenomenon. I got it through circumstance. Jonathan had a vocal issue that happened. He lost his voice for several weeks. It was very tender when he finally did get his voice back and they were like, he didn't have the stamina to do the book because it was like, I don't know, 13, 14 hours long.
Dan: Paint us a picture of where you're working. Are you sitting? Are you standing? Do you have your finger on the mouse to click record and stop?
Sean: Presently I work in a little, it's a booth I purchased off of Amazon made of PVC pipe and blankets. It's designed for vocal recording. I put in a little desk and I have my equipment. Clipped on here, there's a flat screen so I can see the software. I have a book stand for my iPad because I narrate the text from the iPad so I don't make any noise. I'm just flicking my finger to make the page move up. The mic's here. You funnel in some fresh air from your floor vent and you try to find the quietest room in the house to record in.
Then it's really about what time of day you work best. I tend to record really well early in the morning and late in the afternoon because I also teach around that. I teach people how to become audiobook narrators. That's the other thing that I do. I coach authors like you who want coaching because they're about to go in and experience what you've done, like at least two or three of your books, haven't you?
Dan: Just two. I'm about eight weeks too late in seeking your coaching, sadly. Maybe next round.
Sean: Yes. I have authors come to me and I work with them there. My setup is it's in a little four by four box. I tell people all the time who are interested in getting into audiobooks, I say two things. I say, "Narrating books is more about temperament than it is about talent because you're really just running on your own. You have to make all those decisions, you have to engineer it to send to the client. Then if you can't make those kinds of decisions, if you need someone to hold your hand every step of the way, then you're in trouble." The second thing is, do you have the temperament to sit in that little box hour after hour and work? A lot of people can't.
Dan: Sean says that when someone mentions to him that they think they'd like to be an audiobook narrator, he suggests they try it out.
Sean: If you actually sat in your closet for two or three hours a day and read a book out loud, you would understand exactly what it is I do and what you think you might want to do. It'll show you faster than any other--
Dan: Gosh, that is such a good point. This is an unusually trialable career, isn't it?
Sean: Yes. I've had people leave messages saying, "Oh my God, this is great. I loved every second of it." Then other people going, "I will never come near an audio booth again."
Dan: Hey, folks, Dan here. My new book Reset came out recently. We actually ran an excerpt from the audiobook last week, if you missed it. The book is getting some kind attention. Amazon called it one of the best nonfiction books of the month. Apple Audio called it a must listen for January. Oprah Daily called it one of the best self-help books of 2025. Adam Grant called it one of 10 new books to feed your mind this year. My mom and wife really like it and encourage you to check it out, too.
If you are looking to get unstuck this year, to move past the way things always work and make the changes that matter in your life and work, go grab it, Reset: How to Change What's Not Working, wherever books are sold. By the way, on a different note, stick around until the end of this episode. We're trying something a little bit new. For now, back to the show. What have you learned on the business side of this work over time? If you are a better business person today than you were 10 or 20 years ago, why is that?
Sean: When I started, the tempo of the work was much more relaxed. Now it's much quicker in the turnaround. You have to have all of your ducks in a row. I have a researcher, I have a proofer, I have a team that I can work with with a publisher. I just got offered a big book about World War II, the American army in the Philippines. It's going to be like a 15-hour project, but they wanted it under a very tight deadline and I still haven't gotten the official text yet. I've already lined up a researcher to work with me because I won't have time to do that.
Dan: What will the researcher do?
Sean: Research all the pronunciations. How do you say all those names in Tagalog, or this military terminology? We talked about pronouncing names. There's a lot of other things like, how do you say this math equation correctly, this chemical formula? That's what you hire the researcher for, unless you have time to do it yourself.
Dan: The publisher comes to you, they say, "Do you want to do this book?" What's going through your head? Do they give you a word count, or how do you scope the amount of work it's going to take you?
Sean: Every narrator, once you smooth out the cadence, the way people speak, eventually, everybody has a tempo. In other words, how many words per finished hour do you narrate? My rate is about 9,100 to 9,200 words per finished hour.
Dan: That's so interesting that you know that. [laughs]
Sean: You could go back to your own stuff, go back to your chapter, do a word count of the chapter and do the running time and do the math to figure out how many words in an hour. If you did a chapter that was 3,000 words and you did it exactly in 20 minutes, that means you're 9,000 words an hour. It changes. More complicated text is slower than easier text. Fiction narrates slightly slower than nonfiction because of all the schmacting that goes on. When you do a book about the history of brain surgery, which I did a few months ago, that was longer because you're doing these huge multi-syllabic words and it slows the rate down.
Let's say my rate is 9,100 and you come to me with your text and say, "Well, my book is 91,000." I said, "Well, it's going to be 10 hours long, at least." Then that helps you with your budgeting and me with my calendar. If I can get at the booth, say, four to five hours a day so I'm generating at least two finished hours, okay, that's five to six days. Then you give yourself a few extra days on the backend in case you have a train wreck of some kind. Then you put it in your production calendar.
Dan: There's a new technology that may one day upend the economics of audiobook narration. It's text-to-voice artificial intelligence. These are people's voices that have been modeled by AI to read text. The voices have gotten a lot better in recent years. We thought we'd write a question for an AI voice to ask Sean.
AI Voice: I'm an artificial voice built for reading text. I don't care if it's Reddit or Rilke, I'll read it on command. I am indefatigable. I do not require food or sleep or emotional support. While a voice actor might scoff at my very existence, most people wouldn't have a clue that I'm as artificial as AstroTurf. My question to Sean is, in this brave new world, do I worry him at all? Is it my voice he hears echoing in the alleyways of his brain in the dark of the night?
Sean: My therapist thanks you for all the extra sessions. I'm going to be going through for the PTSD of that.
[laughter]
Dan: This has to be in the air for narrators.
Sean: Oh, yes, absolutely. Let's break it down, because I deal with this with my students all the time. Text-to-voice is already here. It's being used for things like newspaper articles, magazine things, phone trees and so on. Basic learning, e-learning, it's making big inroads there. It's a tool. It just also depends on what you want to do with the tool and what is the expectation for the listener when they encounter the audio.
If it's just learning the facts, man, like a textbook, AI is the way to go to a certain degree, because the language that the computer used was very simple. What happens when they have to deal with citations, with charts, with all the other stuff that's on the page? There's that piece of it. You get points for being clever. I had no idea what was coming when you said that. I thought it was my mother going to appear on it like, "Sean, I just had a question." Anyway, so there's a place for it. It's already here.
The thing that is interesting with the audiobook world is, once again, what is the ultimate yardstick in an audiobook performance that you want is to be entertained. It's fine for the two minutes or whatever it was that he was speaking, but is that voice going to be varied enough for a 10-hour book? What makes for an interesting and engaging performance is that, well, like I tell my students, that their narration needs to be consistently inconsistent, because that's the way we actually speak.
You'll notice, just in this my response, I've used melody, rhythm, and tempo in a variety of ways that force your brain to pay attention to me. AI has yet to figure that out. That's about text analysis. Someone said, well, AI can tell a joke. No, they can't. It can say words in a rhythm that we interpret as a joke. It doesn't know that it's told a joke.
Dan: What makes a good voice for an audiobook narrator? A lot of the best narrators, they don't have showy voices. They don't have like Morgan Freeman voices. What is it that makes for a good one?
Sean: There's a couple of things happening. At the core of it, Miles Davis, the jazz trumpeter, once said, "It takes a long time to learn how to sound like yourself." When you hear a really good narrator, they sound exactly like themselves. They're not putting on a voice when they narrate. They sound like themselves. That's my goal, both as a performer and as a teacher, to pass that on to my students. That's the first step.
Then they sound off their generation. You can spot a 20-something voice as opposed to a 60-something voice. Then it's about the acting portion. It's about connecting emotionally with the text and responding to it. Yes, there's no special voices. In fact, a lot of people make that mistake. They come to me like, "People tell me I have a very nice voice and I've done radio for 50 years and I've done this kind of voice for—“ I can't listen to you do even a five-hour book. "Once upon a time, there was a knight and he did this thing." I'm like, "Oh God, no."
Dan: Sean, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here it goes. What's the most insulting thing you could say about an audiobook narrator's work?
Sean: You sound just like AI.
[laughter]
Dan: You haven't heard that, I expect.
Sean: No, I'm very grateful.
Dan: What's a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?
Sean: Speaking of AI, there's a product called Positron. It's a subscription service. What it allows you to do is you can upload a text to Positron. It will do a word frequency search to help you generate a word list to do your research with. Also, you can upload the audio of the chapter you just did and the text, and it will proof it for you. If you said street light and it was street lamp, it'll flag it.
Dan: Whoa.
Sean: Yes, it's ridiculously fast. It still needs a human set of eyes to go over the corrections because sometimes it may not recognize a foreign language or an oddity that I had to add in the text for explanation to make it listener-friendly, but at that speed, it saves everybody a ton of time and money.
Dan: What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of an audiobook narrator?
Sean: When you hear the engineer come back and say, "We can't get a vocal match on your corrections."
Dan: What does that mean?
Sean: Okay. When you record, like I'm recording this right now, let's say I record it and there's a certain audio quality to it. Weeks and weeks later, I get my package of pickups. These are the sentences I got wrong in the piece. What you do is you record them as one long track. You record each sentence and then the engineer will go back and drop it in to that spot with a correction. It's like cutting out the tape and then putting in the new section of audio there.
There are times, for whatever reason, your voice may be really off, or maybe you're traveling and have to use somebody else's studio, or there's ambient noise that wasn't there before, so you can really hear the change in the audio through it and becomes distracting. When an engineer comes back and says, "We have a problem with your audio corrections," that-- Oh my God, just chill ran down my spine just thinking about it.
Dan: What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?
Sean: Oh, ironically, we would hear it, but the listener never would. That's things like lawnmowers and jet airplanes and cars or Canadian geese while you're recording. There's no such thing as a sound proof booth. The booth cancels out the majority of sound, and inside the booth, it's what we call sonically dry to make it a nice clean recording. If you've got leaf blowers and you're in your house-- If your neighbor is using a leaf blower, you can't have a career.
Dan: No, you're hosed.
Sean: Oh, no you do. You just start working at night. When I was married, my ex, we were both narrators. There were times, depending on the time of year or what was happening in the neighborhood, our schedule just got flipped. We still had to get the kids to school and feed them, but we worked all night and slept during the day because you just didn't have a choice. You were on deadline, and right in front of your house, they're doing road work from 9:00 to 5:00, you're hosed. It's the noises actually the listener never hears that are the ones that resonate most with the narrator.
Dan: When I was narrating my book, we had to stop several times because my stomach was growling so loud they could hear it. I never thought of eating as a preemptive problem-solving intervention.
Sean: Yes. You eat what you eat, or depending on which end it comes out, you've-- I belch a lot when I narrate, but if you get gassy, well, good luck there. Those are all real things that happen, or sounds like, I've worked with authors and I have a checklist and I say, "Eat light on the day, wear clothes that aren't what we call scratchy." If you have a nice starched shirt on, it's going to go “shwet-shwet-shwet” every time you move your arms around. You want to wear sweats like cotton and you want to have plenty of water, but you don't want to have too much because then you're going to start gurgling.
Dan: I love these like insider tips. This is so good. [laughs] What is an aspect of your work that you consistently savor?
Sean: In the world of fiction, it's when you really play a scene with the characters and you go back and listen and they sound like four different people, that you really nailed the dialogue. The subtext is there, the voices are unique, and it flows at the right melody, rhythm, and tempo. In nonfiction, I really enjoy when I get a challenging piece with really well written but dense material and I make it accessible to the listener.
You can feel it when you had a good day, you're like, "Oh man." You get that groove with the text and it just starts coming out. The next thing you know, it's not the author speaking anymore, it's me. That's a really wonderful feeling, that blending of their words with my style of speaking and it just locks in. It keeps me coming back year after year.
[music]
Dan: Sean Pratt is an audiobook narrator. He also coaches aspiring audiobook narrators. You can find out more about his voiceover work and his coaching at seanprattpresents.com. I had such fun talking to Sean. I've narrated two audiobooks and he's narrated 1,200, so I feel like we're pretty much peers. A couple of things stood out to me about his work. It's a job that requires such an odd combo of skills. You've got the narration side, which is all about performance and artistry. Then you've got the sound recording and editing side, which is completely different.
Now, obviously those skills can go together. Just ask Sean, but there's no reason they should go together. I love jobs like that. I think of them as odd couple jobs. It reminds me of the TV meteorologist episode, and remember the way she had to be both an expert on the science of weather forecasting as well as a likable onscreen performer? The other thing that's striking about being an audiobook narrator is that it's a very high autonomy job. You can pick what you work on and how you work on it. I'm thinking of some of the other high-autonomy jobs we've had on the show; the mystery novelist, the Christmas tree farmer, the standup comedian, even the long haul truckers to some extent.
For the young people listening, this is one of those things that it would be useful to figure out about yourself early on in your career. Do you need to be your own boss or do you thrive more when you're part of a larger team or system mastering the art of punch and roll, workshopping the perfect accents for a host of characters, tracking down obscure pronunciations, scoping the workload of new projects, and using your voice as an instrument to bring an author's world to life. Folks, that's what it's like to be an audiobook narrator.
The new thing I mentioned earlier is that we have an extra for this episode. First time, it's a five minute clip of Sean talking about his work narrating the famous David Foster Wallace literary behemoth, Infinite Jest. Now, it didn't fit into this episode, but if you're a DFW fan, you might enjoy it. There is a link to this extra in the show notes.
A shout out to recent Apple podcast reviewers, MeganBridget, NajwatR, Sadie Barcelona, Amaballah, Sarah Ellen Atwood, À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, sorry, I'm not Proust, Banitadoo, KE287!, and California Sandman. Thanks to Paul Fowlie for connecting us with Sean. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy, who, by the way, folks, also created the theme music for the show. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.