I’m very much looking forward to conducting my first in-person audiobook narrators’ workshop—“Upgrade Your Audiobook Demo”—this October 1st, in Washington, DC.
The workshop will consist of evaluating participants’ current demos, a review my recent interviews with (to date three) major publisher producers-casting director on what constitutes a job-winning demo, and working with me to improve and/or create new demos.
I’m particularly excited about addressing what, according to many producers/casting directors that I know, is an increasingly important part of their job: finding new talent! Often, the talent’s first foot forward is by way of their demo, or samples placed on publishers’ sites, such as AHAB (Penguin-Random House).
It is fair to say that publishers do not always regard narrators’ foot-forward as their best, or at least what they desire to hear. Additionally, many narrators are themselves uncertain about how to create job-winning samples: how long should a sample be, genre variety, number of selections, accents, how much fiction/non-fiction, etc? Based on my interviews, some differences were expressed, but all were far, far outweighed the similarities.
Assisting narrators up their demo-game, especially given major publishers’ quest for new talent to narrate their increasing number of titles, is this workshop’s agenda. I’m looking forward to it.
