An Insider’s Look at Producing Full-Cast Audiobooks

By Jennifer A. Perry, Steve Wagner / October 11, 2024 at 10:46 am

by Jennifer A. Perry and Steve Wagner

Jennifer A. Perry is Director of Audiobooks at Barnes & Noble.

Steve Wagner is a Senior Producer at Macmillan Audio.

Bury Your Gays

By Chuck Tingle
Narrated by André Santana , Charlie Jane Anders , CJ Leede , Georgia Bird , Liz Kerin , Mara Wilson , Mark Oshiro , Sarah Gailey , Stephen Graham Jones , T. Kingfisher , TJ Klune

Audiobook $17.99 ~~$19.99~~

The Atlas Six

By Olivie Blake
Narrated by Andy Ingalls , Caitlin Kelly , Damian Lynch , David Monteith , James Patrick Cronin , Munirih Grace , Siho Ellsmore , Steve West

Audiobook $32.99

Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!

By David Zucker , Jim Abrahams , Jerry Zucker
Narrated by "Weird Al" Yankovic , Arne Schmidt , Barry Diller , Beau Bridges , Bill Hader , Bob Weiss , David Zucker , Dick Chudnow , Hunt Lowry , James Murray , Jerry Zucker , Jim Abrahams , Jimmy Kimmel , Joe Praino , John Landis , Jon Davison , Joyce Bulifant , Julie Hagerty , Ken Collins , Laura Orrico , Lee Bryant , Lloyd Schwartz , Lorna Patterson , Marcy Goldman , Matt Stone , Michael Eisner , Molly Shannon , Pat Proft , Patton Oswalt , Peter Farrelly , Rich Markey , Robert Hays , Ross Harris , Sarah Silverman , Tom Parry , Trey Parker

Audiobook $19.99

The Three-Body Problem

By Cixin Liu
Narrated by Luke Daniels

Audiobook $26.99

InvestiGators (InvestiGators Series #1)

By John Patrick Green
Narrated by Aaron Yamawaki , Christopher Hastings , Helen Laser , John Patrick Green , Lipica Shah , Max Meyers , Torian Brackett

Audiobook $10.99

Full-cast audiobooks are like a movie for the ears. While not every audiobook is suited for this narration style, when done right this approach can take an already fantastic story and turn it into an unforgettable listening experience. Here, Senior Producer Steve Wagner from Macmillan Audio shares a look at the casting decisions and recording process for multi-voiced audiobook productions.

B&N Audiobooks: How does Macmillan Audio decide which titles should be full-cast?

Macmillan Audio: Like all casting choices, it comes out of a collaboration between the producer and the author. The text needs to lend itself inherently to a full-cast treatment. Bury Your Gays, for instance, has these screenplays throughout the text. Author Chuck Tingle and I agreed that it’d be fun to have these done sort of like a radio play, which means different voices for each role. But then the other 95% of the book is a standard one-narrator audiobook.

Olivie Blake’s Atlas series (The Atlas Six, The Atlas Complex, The Atlas Paradox) has chapters that follow different characters, so we hired several actors in order to give each character’s sections a distinct voice. An adaptation of a graphic novel means very dense sound design and music, and an actor for each speaking role. In short, it all starts with the text.

B&N Audiobooks: What is an author’s involvement in the decisions around a full-cast production?

Macmillan Audio: We work really closely with our authors in the casting process. Producers gather the auditions, and the author reviews them. Finding the perfect narrators who can capture what the author is looking for is one of the best parts of my job.

B&N Audiobooks: What’s the recording process like? Are all narrators reading in real time together? Are they all in one location or separate locations?

Macmillan Audio: The answer to all these questions is: it depends. It varies from project to project. In books like Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin, Apostles of Mercy by Lindsey Ellis, and Olivie Blake’s Januaries, the POV switches between sections. So, while these audiobooks have large casts, the narrators don’t interact in the production itself; instead, each narrator records their section separately. Then we edit everything together as part of the post-production process.

Then we have books like Amy Tintera’s Listen for the Lie and graphic audiobook adaptations, like Shannon Hale’s Best Friends and Tegan and Sara’s Junior High, where the actors are on mic at the same time playing off one another. It can make the interactions between actors feel much more real, compared to recording their lines separately and editing them together.

B&N Audiobooks: How often do you add sound design to full-cast productions?

Macmillan Audio: It’s happening more and more, and I love to do it. Sometimes it’s subtle, like in our new edition of The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and read by Rosalind Chao. Sections begin with ambience to match the scene—characters speaking through phones or over loudspeakers have appropriate vocal FX, and so on. And then there are programs that get very thorough sound design, like Leigh Bardugo’s Demon in the Wood, or any of our children’s books like the Investigators series. The characters’ footsteps go from left to right in your ear as they walk by; you hear the ambience change gradually as your POV opens a door and heads into a new space; characters’ inner thoughts may be colored by some echoey dreamlike sheen to differentiate those from dialogue said aloud. These elements create an experience that’s somewhere between watching a film and listening to an audiobook.

B&N Audiobooks: What are some of your favorite full-cast audiobooks you’ve worked on?

Macmillan Audio: If I had to choose a favorite, it would be Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! It’s such a unique program. The book is full of quotes from around 60 people. Some of them are major players, like Julie Hagerty and Robert Hays from the film, John Landis, Molly Shannon, Jimmy Kimmel, Trey Parker, Sarah Silverman . . . Michael Eisner! And instead of having actors cover these roles, we thought it was worth a shot to ask everyone if they would take some time out of their busy schedules to record their quotes. I was thrilled to see how many people said yes. That film is so special to so many people, and they were happy to volunteer their time, making the end result an amazing patchwork of voices. A true oral history!