Inside Audiobook Production with Producer Kathleen Jones
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Audiobooks don't appear out of nowhere. There's a whole infrastructure around their creation. And sure, I've interviewed lots of narrators on this show to give us all an idea of the goings on in the background. But what about the other people involved? Narrators are like the movie stars, front and center. And for every Timothée Chalamet or Jennifer Lawrence, there's a nameless producer in the background wrangling everyone together, making sure everyone's on the same page and on schedule. In the audiobook world, the role of producer encompasses so much more than that. Today, I'm talking to a veteran producer of audiobooks. This is Audiobook Cafe. I'm 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.
Thank you so much for having me. It's so exciting to be here.
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 a great question. I'm essentially managing the whole process of taking a print book, words on the page, through all the steps of getting it to a listenable product that people can download on their phone and enjoy in their ears.
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.
Great. That's a great question. So we get assigned our books broken down by this span that they're coming out in. So the spans are essentially seasons. There's three different spans in publishing. There's spring, summer, and fall. There's no winter in publishing. I don't know why. I've never asked, but no one's ever volunteered that information. And the spring books are usually ones that are coming out between January and end of May. And then summer is... beginning of May, usually to the end of August, and then fall books are any that are coming out from beginning of August to the end of December. And so we're assigned all of our books a span at a time. So I'll usually be given eight to 10 books that I need to turn into an audiobook within- Per season.
Yeah, exactly. So I have my eight to 10 books per season, depending on how many books we're publishing that need to be made into an audio book. And then the process kind of starts from there. So there is some overlap between those seasons. So there's a lot of, you know, it's not a clean, like, I finished this season and I'm on to the next. And what the process looks like for us is that Usually once we have our, all of us producers, there are five of us on the team. Once we have our assignments, we're usually quickly checking what exactly the book is. We always have a sense of what's coming, but it's sometimes been a while since we last, you know, heard about the book. So we'll have a look and see if,
Is this going to be like a short kids book? Is this like a really lengthy, you know, nonfiction about trains or adult literature and get a sense of.
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?
We do. Yeah. There's actually like quite a bit of work that goes into lightly adapting the book before we can do the audio.
Yeah.
So part of our kind of information gathering phase is having conversations with the book's editor to find out about how complex the book might be. If there's a lot of other languages in it that we're going to need to research.
What does an audiobook producer do?
If it's a book that's going to be full of diagrams that we'll need to figure out a way to convert into something that makes sense for people. Figure out some kind of alt text for it.
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