Janus Quadrifrons - Audiobook #Wattys2018

J.Q. - Ch.3 - Edited Version

The challenges of the first version were mostly about getting a descent audio within 12 hours which was the total amount of time that we had in the studio. The wonderful narrator did it a prima vista. It was his first time reading the story and narrating it instantly so we were based on his previous experience to get it right. He had already narrated a pc game that's on line for sale but it was his first effort as an audiobook's narrator and I adored what he brought to the story despite the challenges. 

Once we got about 12 hours of recorded material, I started editing it, taking out the bloopers e.t.c. up to the point I got about 5 hours of audio. (If we had more time for recording I would have way more than 12 hours of recordings.)

As soon as I had the narrated story, in chapters in a descent form, I uploaded them so that another friend of mine who is a proffesional sound engineer would convert our demos into masters. He did what he know best and with his magic touch our voice got even better. (My piece of advice, if you ever try to create an audiobook and you narrate it yourselves, try to reach out for a professional help from a professional engineer to maximize the quality of your audio, it does make a difference!)

When he was done with all the files, he uploaded them for me, I downloaded them and started converting them into files for YouTube so that everyone could have free access.

Despite doing our best for a descent and interesting outcome the first version prooved to be a failure. People enjoyed the narrator's voice yet they found it "flat" and "boring" after sometime since the story was too difficult to keep up with it. That was the point that I thought to change the key words and just leave it there for insomnia's freaks to listen to it in order to fall asleep. 

I was writing the rest of the story and decided to leave it to rest, a R.I.P. kind of thing, like every failure before that yet even though I belived I was done with Janus, she wasn't probably done with me. One day as I was walking around with a cup of coffee on my hand thinking of something completely irrelevant, it hit me! I would redo it!

It wasn't possible to do the narrating part all over again so I decided to add some sound effects to make it more interesting and help listeners to keep up with the numerous transitions and plot twists. So I started searching for royalty free sound effects on line to match the story. It's like directing a play but without any budget :) It's a real challenge, especially when you are dealing with a sureal, absurd storyline and this is the main reason why it takes so much time to get the edited versions on line.

This is janus' journey so far.

If you are interested in learning more about it or if you think about creating your own audiobook just write your questions, comments, whatever you wish to share at the comments section below.

In case you want to try it but you think that you could never accomplish such a thing let me remind you that no one in the team is an english native speaker (we are all greeks, so it's even harder for us to keep up with an other language), we had no budget to do this (no one was paid for this, dear friends joined forces to help me out) and even if the second version proves to be a failure as well I will be happy that I managed to do it despite the challenges. :)

Till next time...

Keep writing, keep reading, keep listening!