How an Audiobook Narrator Organizes Her Days

Weeks/Months/Year/Life

This week’s episode of

The Culture Study Podcast

is all about the feminist playground of historical romance — and my cohost is *thee* Sarah MacLean!! If that name means nothing to you, you’re still gonna love it, because Sarah is such a pro at making the case for the exquisite subversions possible in the historical form. We also talk about navigating protagonist virginity, why first books are the most compelling (particularly when it comes to form), and offer a whole beautiful mess of recommendations.

Click here to listen wherever you get your podcasts — and if you want to become a paid subscriber, remember that newsletter subscribers get 35% off (but you have to click here to redeem it!).

---

In response to my piece on how How I Write Culture Study, I asked readers if they’d want to participate in a series where people from various professions talk about their work lives, explaining how they organize their days and weeks, how they protect their time, when and how they do their work and how and when they attend to their inbox, etc. etc.

We’re starting with a glamorous first entry in the series: a freelance audiobook narrator. If you’d like to volunteer to talk about a day/week in your life for a potential interview — crucially, this work does not have to be for pay; I’d love to hear from caregivers — here’s the very simple sign-up.

Now, let’s hear from Emily Ellet about the changing, AI-inflected, still joyful world of freelance audiobook narration:

---

Let’s start with how you described your job to me:

I'm an audiobook narrator, which is a job people always freak out in excitement when they hear about. "Oh I've always wanted just to read books all day!" Haha, well, me too. But it's truly a business and a job. I narrate, I produce, I do admin and social media and manage subcontractors, and then there are my other work streams I'm developing as a hedge against AI's relentless and unnecessary incursion into the arts. It's more than a full time job. But I feel very, very lucky to have it.

So tell me about how you organize your day — or your week.

Well, I should start by acknowledging that there is the ideal version of what my days and weeks look like and then the reality of what happens once life hits, whether that’s adjusting for holidays or medical appointments I can’t fit into admin days or tough mental health days. So what I’m about to describe is how I initially set up my schedule, which I then adjust when needed to accommodate whatever comes up. Sometimes this is exactly what my week looks like! Other times, not so much. (Also, it should be said: every narrator is different! This is just what works for me.)

There are two main types of workdays for me: recording days and admin days. Recording days are usually Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Having an admin day on Wednesday can give my voice a little break and allow me to relax a little between performance days, which are VERY emotionally and physically taxing, no matter the type of book I’m narrating.

Recording days are usually a block of six hours from 10am - 4pm, during which I record an average of 3 finished hours in my home studio, which is an acoustically treated walk-in closet with some very expensive recording equipment. A “finished hour” is an hour of final audio recorded, not how long it takes me to record that audio.

The audiobook industry calculates nearly everything (including narrator’s payment) by the final runtime of the book, so as your own boss, you really dictate how efficient you want/need to be. While I work hard to stay efficient, on some days it can be very, very difficult to focus (like this month, honestly). I have found that the best way to encourage focus and efficiency in the booth is to have an appointment later in the afternoon or evening that I can’t move, even if it’s just dinner with my partner. Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time allotted to it! So I try to cap the time available to myself.

Nearly everyone in the industry recommends taking frequent breaks, both for your brain and body. However, I have found that once I hit a flow state (especially in terms of focus), it’s better not to leave the booth until I’m done for the day. I mean, if I have to go to the bathroom, I do! But in general, I eat a really big breakfast and don’t leave the booth until I’ve hit my page count for the day. So I’m an outlier in the audiobook community in that aspect.

Side note: a question narrators often get is, “Omg, do you ever get a break?!” And the answer is, literally as many as we need! Most narrators work via a process called punch-and-roll (or PnR), where we can stop recording at any point we want, place the cursor over the spot in the audio we want to pick up from (usually after a sentence or a breath or sometimes even a comma), listen to maybe 2 seconds of the previously recorded audio, and start narrating without missing a beat. You shouldn’t be able to hear the punch point. This way we can correct mistakes we catch in the moment, redo a sentence if we want a slightly different vibe, try again at that brutal tongue twister passage, or take a break.

My admin days can encompass a million different things, including (in no particular order):

• social media creation (don’t judge my un-updated Instagram too harshly - I’m woefully behind right now due to surgery at the end of the year)

• prepping upcoming audiobook projects (which includes making a list of all the characters that speak along with any descriptions the author gives of them and/or making a list of any pronunciations I either need to look up, as in nonfiction, or ask the author for, as with fantasy and/or sci-fi worlds)

• medical/financial/mechanic appointments

• going to a local fancy afternoon tea to woo the pianist into working with me for one of my other career streams (actual thing happening this month, I kid you not! but decidedly not a regular occurrence)

• creating and sending invoices or tracking down late payments

• reconciling bank statements and/or doing tax prep

• communicating with authors who are interested in having me produce their book(s)

• communicating with co-narrators about how we’re voicing characters/pronouncing names so that we match reasonably well

• inputting new projects into my AirTable database (which I just overhauled and am sooo happy with and still have about ten things to add/update to get it to where I want! #nerd)

I also do a CEO date once a quarter, in which I run my business numbers (financial, productivity, auditions, etc.), evaluate my goals and set more for the next quarter, check in with myself on any trouble spots in my business, and do a three-card tarot spread about the current state of my business, which sounds so woo-woo but which has been surprisingly helpful!

I worked in professional admin for over two decades, as an executive assistant, office manager, and more, and all I wanted in those days was to have a job as a performer. Now, as a performer, I sometimes prefer my admin days to my recording days, in part because I always have so. much. admin. waiting for me, so tackling some of it reduces my stress levels, and in part because admin takes less energy than performing. Don’t get me wrong, I love performing! Especially when I love the book, it’s a joy to record, even with the physical and mental demands of it. But let’s just say…plenty of the books are really just for the paycheck. And those can be very hard to get through. :)

Sometimes I do work on the weekends, whether because I overbooked myself or because I had one of those mental health days or because it’s for one of my other income streams (usually coaching). The flexibility is one of the aspects of my job I’m most grateful for. But in general, and as the child and former employee of workaholic parents with no boundaries, I work really hard to keep my work schedule semi-normal and during the weekday.

How do you organize your future? (Planning for future work, planning for time off, etc.)

Every year between Christmas and New Year’s, I take myself on a business retreat up in the Colorado mountains. I rent a room at an AirBnB for a few days and dive into a million admin tasks and future-planning activities for both my business and myself. As part of that, I go through the upcoming calendar year in Google Calendar and block out my desired vacation days and holidays, as well as any business trips I might be making. I occasionally work through a bank holiday if my family isn’t doing anything, but I have done a LOT of work over the years to unlearn the aforementioned workaholism of my parents, so employee-me obediently respects manager-me’s mandated vacation time. (Learning to see myself as both employee and manager made a huge difference in my relationship to my current work and future career.)

I don’t have a lot of concrete plans for creating future work in audiobooks. I’ve learned that, for me (and again, it’s different for every narrator), the majority of my audiobook work comes from auditions, so when my schedule has gaps or I’m booked less far out than I’d like, I get really diligent about auditioning for anything I can. These days, open-call auditions seem to occur less and less (I’m not sure why), so most of my auditions come sporadically from casting directors I’ve worked with before.

A lot of other work comes from continuing books in a series and from authors now requesting me directly (or, well, requesting my pseudonym, who is more famous than me and who I keep very separate from myself for a handful of reasons; if you happen to know both me’s, please respect that privacy in public!). Occasionally, I get indie author cold emails through my or my pseudo’s website, asking for my rates and availability. Those communications take a lot of back and forth to explain the process and costs of working with my production company, and sometimes it results in a contract and sometimes it doesn't.

However, because a number of audiobook and AI companies (and even some major publishers) would like nothing more than to eliminate humans from storytelling to pad their executive suite’s bonuses, this beautiful career I love so much constantly feels under threat. I know of quite a few renowned and award-winning narrator friends who cannot get enough work to qualify for health insurance with the union, let alone pay their bills anymore. Some have found their income stream has completely dried up. It’s really scary for many of us. As Audible and Apple and others push their virtual voices (which generally get terrible reviews but still get listened to, I don’t know why) at an extremely low if not free cost to authors, the market is being flooded with AI slop, and narrators are losing their work.

(If I can get on my soapbox for a minute: if you care about storytelling, PLEASE don’t consume AI in the arts. Don’t use ChatGPT (which strongly appears to have used lots, if not millions, of copyrighted works to train its models without compensating the artists) or similar LLMs, don’t use MidJourney or other art-generation models, and don’t consume books or audiobooks written or narrated by AI products.)

As a result, I have been aware of the fact that my revenue stream could disappear overnight for many years, and so I’m working on a couple other income streams as an “offramp” from this career in case I ever need them, namely cabaret/cruise ship headliner singing work and coaching/teaching musical theatre and audiobooks. I never have as much time as I want to develop those side hustles, due to trying to do as much audiobook work as I can while I still have it, but they’re constantly moving forward, even if only a few steps each year.

How do you manage your income streams? Software, specific accountant needs, etc. etc.

AirTable is how I manage my projects. The database I’ve most recently set up is nerdy AF, with tons of data cross-referenced across different, interconnected tabs. Information tracked includes:

• Book titles and series titles

• Authors, narrators, casting personnel, producers and/or publishers, and post-production personnel, including all social media tags when applicable

• Status of the project across the production process

• Date due, date delivered, payment due date, release date (and Audible link)

• Estimated runtime and final runtime, along with expected total payment to myself and for union health and retirement contributions

• How many finished hours I recorded each session, how many studio hours it took, and how many auditions I sent in

• Social media captions and workflow for my social media assistant

• Any awards or press mentions for each book

Each book is entered as it’s contracted, and now, courtesy of some extensive data entry after the new year, I’ve got everything included from the very beginning of my career, including over 350 books I recorded for the Library of Congress’s Books for the Blind program. Financially, I use YNAB Classic, an old, offline version of the budget software You Need a Budget. I started using it for my personal budget over a decade ago, and when I split my business off from my personal financials after establishing an LLC, I just used the same program for my business budget. What I like most is that it shows how many months of expenses I have covered based on the income I’ve received so far. Because my income can be so variable (I typically get paid two months after recording something, and unfortunately not every client is even that prompt), I needed some way to visualize my financial security, and I’ve not yet found a professional accounting software that can do that specific task, despite trying out several.

My tax accountant doesn’t seem to mind, fortunately. After I reconcile all my January statements, I spit the entire previous year’s data into an Excel spreadsheet and prep it all for her. It only takes me a few hours of SUMIFS formulas to get it all done, and it is genuinely my favorite time of the year. (I feel like I should be embarrassed about that, but I’m not!) Seeing everything neatly categorized and documented (and you better believe I have all those receipts) is intensely satisfying. I then have to wait for all the 1099s to roll in, track down the ones that didn’t, and double-check my Everlance mileage log (which manages to get most of my trips captured). Once it’s a clean, neat package, I upload it all to my tax accountant.

How do you think about “coworkers?”

While I have a large network of utterly delightful colleagues, I don’t have any co-workers (except one of my cats that desperately wants to be a booth kitty but has no chill and makes too much noise). This is both GREAT for me, because I have always preferred to work independently, and AWFUL for me, because I’m an extrovert who craves connection and community. As a result, I tend to be verrrrry chatty when I leave the booth, and if there’s no one I can talk to in person or on the phone, I can get very lonely. (I suspect this is one of the reasons I talk to my cats so much.) I prefer this situation to having coworkers and bosses that drive me crazy, but there’s definitely a downside.

For many of us narrators, Facebook is the virtual water-cooler, for better and for (much) worse. I am the senior moderator for one Facebook group of narrators, so I can’t leave the platform. Not to mention, because lots of narrators also produce, it’s often an occasional source of work for me. There’s too much keeping me there for me to delete my account, even though I would really, really like to. But having colleagues to ask for advice on handling an unreasonable producer or to commiserate on a particularly brutal pronunciation is super valuable. The narrator community, even with its much larger ranks as of the last few years, is remarkably kind and supportive of one another. (It’s something of a unicorn in performing communities in that sense!) I am grateful to have such wonderful colleagues.

I also have a handful of subcontractors I work with, most regularly my post-production team that handles editing, mixing, and mastering the final files. But those relationships tend to stay pretty professional and business-focused. Most of them, I’ve never met in person. Though that’s true for most of the narrator community, too! You develop a lot of very close long-distance friendships.

What’s the thing people misunderstand about how your life and work, well, work?

I would say it’s that most people think being a narrator is just a cozy, relaxing job of reading all the time. It’s not.

Even when you love the book, it’s physically and emotionally demanding labor. The microphone picks up an amazing amount of sound, so you’re constantly keeping one ear attuned to whether there’s any outside noise the mic is picking up while at the same time keeping your body as still as possible so as not to be the cause of noise yourself while at the same time listening (lightly!) to your performance as your own director while at the same time balancing interesting and varied character voices with healthy vocal technique while at the same time reading ahead with your eyes while speaking the previous sentence while at the same time visualizing the story like you’re actually living and feeling it in real time. It’s genuinely exhausting.

And when you love the book, you care so much about doing the writing justice that you can overthink your choices and/or psych yourself out of actually being in the moment as an actor. (A couple of the fan-favorite Rachel books for the Animorphs series were super tough for me to record, in part because it was a hugely influential and formative series I read as a kid, and in part because I knew people were so excited to listen to those key moments! No pressure!!) And often…well, you DON’T love the book, so then you’re fighting the bored/disdainful/annoyed/disgusted parts of your brain just to be able to perform at all.

That being said, I love this career with all my heart. I originally wanted to do musical theatre at the Broadway level, but after a while of narrating audiobooks as my “day job,” I realized that I would be happy narrating for the rest of my life. It’s creative work, it’s a “day job” in my field, it has both variety (each book is different!) and stability (the process for recording each book is the same), and I get to be my own boss. Listeners regularly share how my work has impacted their lives (one woman told me that she had listened to one of my pseudonym’s books as the only way to get through her divorce!), which is deeply moving.

And honestly? I love how people’s eyes light up when they hear I’m an audiobook narrator. It’s fun to have a job that people find interesting. I’m so grateful to have this career, for as long as I get to keep it. ●

---

For every “Day in the Life” interview like this we publish on Culture Study, I’m donating $500 to a non-profit organization of the author’s choice. Here’s Emily’s choice:

The Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (RMIAN, pronounced “remain”) is a Denver-based charitable organization I volunteer with. Immigrants, especially Spanish-speaking and Muslim immigrants, are being targeted unfairly and dehumanized in a variety of horrifically cruel ways, and it’s only going to get worse as the current administration rolls out its plans. RMIAN is doing such important work to support the legal rights of immigrants of all nationalities across Colorado. Thank you for supporting that work!

And here’s my receipt to RMIAN!

---

You can find Emily’s website here and follow her on Instagram and TikTok. Now what other questions do you have for her?!? And what other jobs/lives would you like to see here?

And if you enjoyed that, if it piqued or satisfied something in your curiosity centers, if you value this work and want to support it or just want to participate in the comments section — consider subscribing. Remember, this is our once-a-year sale — it won’t happen again until next March!