While my cover artist is working on the spectacular cover for the first book in my new series, I'm finishing up the edits based on comments from my editor and two readers. Then, I go through again (argh!) and read the whole thing start to finish out loud.

I've heard the reading aloud advice before, but it really hit home when a friend of mine won a Hugo award for one of his amazing short stories. Shortly after, the magazine that originally published the short story decided to produce an audio version. Yay! Read by the author. Yay! Applause all around.

Then it came time for David to show up at the studio and read the story. This is a time consuming process, btw. I don't remember how long it took him to read it, but I remember it was quite a few hours, and might not have been done in a single day. Remember: this was a short story. You'd think that he'd be done in an hour, but no. Some parts had to be re-recorded because of a stumble or because his voice cracked, or he moved so that he wasn't in the sweet spot in front of the microphone, and so on. Plus, it's tiring, and pausing for a sip of water--so natural and unobtrusive when you're reading in front of a live audience--can complicate things.

Voice actors for books don't get enough credit. Just saying.

Anyway, David did plenty of prep work. Despite that prep work, it was still a difficult process. One of the things that he mentioned was that some of the sentences didn't read well. They were awkward. Neither he nor the editor caught this awkwardness when the story was accepted for publication. This shouldn't be surprising. When we read to ourselves, and we're engaged in a story, our minds mush around the words and make sense of things in context, and so an awkward sentence might not read as awkward in our heads. 

During the production of an audio version of a story, though, there's nowhere to hide. 

David really struggled with this. I'll ask you the same question he asked himself, and later our writer's group. When you're reading a story for audio production, and a sentence doesn't work, do you rewrite it so that it does work, which obviously deviates from the original (award-winning, remember!) story as-written, or do you fix it so that it's as close to the original as possible, following the same feeling and cadence, but a different structure or even different words as-needed so that it reads well?

I'm not saying that I expect that my new series will be produced into audio books. In fact, it's difficult to produce my books into audio books because they're very long, and my book sales aren't so awesome that a voice actor would be willing to do it on spec. At minimum, they might do it on a cost-share/royalty-share basis (I believe it was around $200 per hour at the time for my share, because studio time and sound editing is not free) or they might prefer to just be paid up front for the entire thing and then I would get all the royalties. If there aren't enough audio book sales, that would mean I would be in the red for the project in that case. That's not only fair, but I would prefer that second option. The problem is that the first book in the Lord Jester's Legacy is almost fourteen finished hours of audio book. If someone else is doing all the work, which includes reading, editing, and any additional sound work (like balancing, special effects, transitions, or even background music for some scenes) I might expect to pay $500 an hour or more. Anyone got $7000 sitting around? Sadly, not me.

But that's actually not important. What is important is that until a book is truly and actually read aloud, it's likely that there are going to be a lot of overlooked awkward sentences. Sure, the reader might overlook those same sentences. But, they might mentally stumble on them. For sure, the flow wouldn't be as good. Other than the time, there is no down-side to reading my work aloud before I format it. And after I format it, I'll probably read it again, because formatting often reveals typos and repeated words and all kinds of other things. 

It's incredible how complex writing is, how complex reading is, and how complex listening to the words being read is. That complexity is where the actual words on the page may deviate from the writer's intent. So anything I can reasonably do to make sure that I mean what I say, and say what I mean, I will do.