Into Deep Waters audio, step 3

And we have a signed contract. 🙂

The narrator Jonathan and I chose for Into Deep Waters is Kaleo Griffith. He’s an actor and a voice artist, with quite a few audio books to his credit (mostly M/F). He’s also starring in an upcoming feature film Six Gun Savior with Eric Roberts, which premiers next month. And he’s not half bad to look at…

Of course that played no role in choosing Kaleo. (Really – I carefully didn’t look at pictures and bio till afterward.)

I actually chose Kaleo as our narrator because, amid all the good auditions, his most closely fit my vision of how Jacob and Daniel would sound, both as young men and as old guys. I also appreciated the way he made me not just hear but feel the more intense narrative passages. Kaleo told me afterward that he actually read almost all of the book before doing his audition. That extra effort showed, I think, in his approach to scenes – knowing how they fit into the story made him give the right quality to his tone.

I’m excited to see him get started, which may happen as early as next week. Right now Jonathan Penn is working on preparing the book text for audio. As newbies to audio, we’re finding some things that need altering. There are times when I use placement on the page and italics to separate out internal thoughts from other parts of dialogue. There are scene breaks that say “****”. So part of the job is deciding where such things need elaborating or tagging for the listener. It’s interesting.

I do want to say there were several other very good auditions. I’d like to give a little shout out, for other self-pub authors thinking about audio, to Buddy Hatton, who was one of the unsolicited auditions we received. He made our top 5, and had a lower hourly rate than most others. If you are inviting auditions, especially if your characters are older, not in their teens, you might add him to your invited list. I really appreciated the time all the narrators gave in sending us their work.

So there we are – next step is sending in the finished script, and seeing what Kaleo does with it. I can’t wait to hear it!