Jacob Szymanski

Kathleen Jones is a producer of audiobooks at Penguin Random House Canada.

Kathleen, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for making time.

So happy to have you.

Now, I have lots of questions, but they all fall within this meta question of what is the job of an audiobook producer?

And we'll get the long version of that answer in the next 30-ish minutes.

But I want to start with the short version.

So if somebody's in the elevator with you and asks you, what do you do?

What do you tell them?

That's so cool.

Okay, now let's move on to the long version, which I think we'll frame as a timeline.

From the time that you get given a print book and your boss tells you, hey, Kathleen, turn this into an audiobook.

What's the very first step?

Let's go through the whole timeline together.

So you have to get a sense of what the book is in the sense that like you have to understand the content.

Do you have to read the book from cover to cover?

So in a situation like that, what are your options?

This is interesting because you're editorializing in that case.

You're actually adding words to the text that weren't there before in the process of adapting for audiobooks, in which case you have to communicate with the authors and the editors, I would presume.

But then there's also things that are more complicated, like graphs in tables.