Illuminating History’s Shadows Through Fiction
Illuminating History’s Shadows Through Fiction
Listening – an Audiobook Journey
August 31, 2025
Big books too heavy? Too little time to read? Long commute or a travel ahead?
Long books are my bliss – but writing them can have its challenges. Obviously, they take more time to write and edit. Then there’s the reluctant publisher who knows it’s going to be expensive to print and ship. Enter the readers . . . while typically, historical fiction readers may be less resistant to digesting 600+ pages, many others shy away from what I call ‘fat’ books altogether. Then there are others with challenges reading, or those who just don’t want to sit that long!
While crafting my 600+ page novel, Red Clay, Running Waters, my writing process involves a lot of listening, as well as reading (and thinking). When I found the Read Out Loud robot voice in Word gave me a different perspective on how the words on the page came across (in addition to picking up all sorts of errors or repeat phrases) I used it often in the editing process for the book. So what if the voice sounded flat or misread inflection on the sentences?
Listen to a preview of the Ridges story
This, of course, brought forth thoughts of what an audiobook version of my story might sound like, once I recovered from getting my physical book in readers hands.
I soon learned my choices – Do It Yourself, AI Voice, Read-it-yourself, or Hire a Narrator. I would never, in a million years, attempt to read my own book and have people listen to it for pleasure, so that was out. One can only take so much of Mr. Roboto, even though, I confess, I did pay for a sample AI voice of the first 500 words but using that was abandoned after the second listen.
With only the one option, really, it was time to take the road leading into the land of audiobook publishing, narrators or voiceover talent. While the publishing process is nowhere near the tangled web that book publishing is – and it is faster – the range of choices and options for talent to narrate the book can be daunting. What do the characters in your book sound like? What voice do you want to listen to, reading to you, for hour after hour? What’s the pace and overall tone you envisioned. Do you need an actor or narrator? How much can you pay?
With the guidance of writer friends and my own personal experience with voice talent, I plunged in, thinking I knew what I wanted the narrator to sound like. . . until I tried to find one. Hmmm. This wasn’t going to be easy. Lots of listening followed. Could one of the voices I heard both sound great, do different characters, male and female, and read my complicated sentence, long letters, and poetry clearly? Could they make you believe the people in the story were alive and bring the times to life?
After listening to various samples, the first thing I quickly realized was that I needed an actor, one who could also narrate. With a story so complex, multifaceted, and peopled, the person I needed had to possess skills of Shakespearean proportions. The Ridge’s (and America’s) story demanded it. So, I selected a scene to be read (one that had some drama) and began to audition.
With samples from each candidate narrowed down, I needed help from some subjective writer-friends for my final pick. Which voice was ‘the one’, the one you could listen too for hour after hour, the one who would do justice to both the story and characters you loved so much? When one candidate consistently and enthusiastically returned comments like “Oh My!”, ‘He’s Perfect!’, and ‘I got chills’, I knew I had my man.
The scope and challenge of a single person narrating a 690-page novel, let alone a story with hundreds of characters to give voice to, requires exceptional dedication, effort, and skill, not to mention a huge creative range. I have been most fortunate to have found and worked with such a person, and remain ever grateful to Cameron DelGrosso, whose beautiful voice narrates the Audiobook version of Red Clay Running Waters. Cameron has reanimated the once-living characters in this story into flesh, blood, and spirits, turning the turbulent tapestry of the Ridges lives into a vivid, inhabited world for all who listen to this story. Without Cameron’s commitment, insight, and acting talents, the promise of my written words might never have been fulfilled as closely to what I envisioned as this listening experience. Even if you are not an ‘audiobook person’, listening to Red Clay Running Waters is an extraordinary experience, one equal to, but different from reading.
My Audiobook Journey might even get me ( a non-audiobook listener) to listen to more books from now on!
