TWO’S COMPANY….THREE’S A MULTICAST
Coming to you live from the 2024 SFWC, it’s a special blog post from Squeaky Cheese Productions!
TWO’S COMPANY….THREE’S A MULTICAST
by Ralph Scott, Producer/Narrator SQUEAKY CHEESE PRODUCTIONS, LLC, Petaluma, Calif.
(15 Feb. 2024)
AUDIOBOOKS ARE ON FIRE. A 2023 sales report from HarperCollins that broke this past week (‘Profits Soar at HarperCollins as Audio Sales Boom’) supports what anyone who makes a VO recording booth their office understands intuitively, while they’re busy transforming words on the digital page into an engaging narrative for the ear.
Fiction and Nonfiction, where the traditional audiobook was narrated by one professional narrator who covers the entire narrative and all of the characters (or in the case of nonfiction, interviews with special experts the author features in the story), the industry is seeing a surge in Duet, Dual, Dual-hybrid and, something our audiobook production company has pioneered: what we’ve dubbed as ‘Mini-Multicast’ (three, four, five, seven…up to 10 actors playing all the characters in your novel and all for one-twentieth the cost of a Big Production, full soundscape, scripted entertainment project heretofore akin to an ‘Audible Original’).
So what’s the difference between all of these formats, and how do you know what to choose for your fiction or nonfiction book? Take a listen to ‘Audiobooks 101’:
SOLO NARRATION = One narrator tells the whole story.
DUET NARRATION = One Narrator tells the story, but two narrators (usually a female and a male) play the characters.
DUAL NARRATION = Two Narrators/Two POVs. Each narrator plays the male and female characters in his/her chapter, and DUAL-hybrid NARRATION = Two Narrator/Two POVs. One narrator plays all the males in the other narrator’s chapter. One narrator plays all the females in the other narrator’s chapter.
Examples below cover both Dual and Dual-hybrid
FEMALE POV (Same Scene)
FEMALE POV (Same Scene)
MALE POV (Same Scene)
MULTICAST NARRATION = One Narrator but all the characters (fiction AND nonfiction) are played by 3, 4, 7, up to 10 actors). Usually the domain of Fiction but we have produced Nonfiction Multicast projects.
If two is company and three’s a crowd, the publishing party is getting very crowded with…audiobooks. Pull us aside at this year’s SFWC and we would be delighted to tell you all about it and how to get in on the party. Besides, as Audiobook Narrators, we live a monastic lifestyle locked inside a padded room most of the day and night. Seeing real people — authors — in the flesh is the highlight of our year! Let’s party!
