What we look for in a voice varies from project to project – but generally speaking, we like intelligence, warmth, being easy on the ear … the usual things. And experience is VERY important, particularly for a small publisher like us – studio time is expensive, so narrator fluency is crucial. We need to be able to record and edit with a minimum of fuss.

Ali was head of Audio at Macmillan Publishing for many years, and I have been a voiceover for more years than I care to admit to, so I like to think we have an instinct for good readers! Additionally, we are lucky to have access to a pool of great narrators – both British and American – here in the UK.

We tend to record in 3-hour ‘blocks’, and – since you’ve asked – our pay scale is pro-rata consistent with the major audiobook/educational producers in this country.

Setting up a publishing company in this economic downturn has certainly had its challenges – but we are loving every minute of it! (We’re particularly proud to have had an iTunes best seller with our title ‘The Lowdown: Improve Your Speech – British English’.)

As I hope you’ll agree, audio publishing is a great field to work in. It’s a privileg to meet and collaborate with so many very talented, funny, hard working people.

Here, in the U.S. my experience with some of the larger publishers tends to be somewhat different, with one in particular that asks the talent to send them raw recordings with marked up scripts to indicate edits, which then gets sent to an editing house.

One of the other large publishers asks for seperate files for each chapter and full edits along with normalization, breath reduction and so forth.

Another publisher I have worked with has file naming conventions for every paragraph.

Pay levels tend to be all over the place as well.