// Creative Commons image by Sarah. // There is an old joke about someone looking so homely that instead of having a face for television, the person had a face for print (think newspapers).

Well, after recording the audio for my first book trailer, I would suggest that I may have a voice for print, not the microphone.
 
It’s not that my vocalizations evoke flashbacks of nails on a chalkboard. My voice, to me at least, sounds normal enough, but summoning the right pacing and emotion on command is not easy. For starters, I tend to talk faster than most. For those old enough to remember record player speeds, I joke that I think at 78 rpm, while the rest of the world runs at 33 rpm, so the best that I can do on a daily basis is talk at 45 rpm. For example, when I have run mock doughnut auctions in my economics classes, I really don’t have to speed up my voice too much to sound a professional auctioneer. Maybe I missed my true calling.
 
So, when I sat down to record a four-line, 17 second passage from the prologue of my book, I did several dry runs to slow down to normal human speed. Then I recorded about 10-12 takes to get is as good as I could. Not exactly One Take Milbrandt. You can judge for yourself what you think of the final project.
 
As a point of comparison, my friend who is a professional voice actor with 50 audiobook credits to his name, sent me a clip of what he is recording for the audiobook version of Fool’s Luck. The quality was sufficient to induce goosebumps.
 
Let’s just say I know where my lane is and that I  might do well to stay in it.