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Elizabeth Bell, Author

Undeniable Love. Unflinching History. Unforgettable Fiction.

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    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 1: Necessary Sins
    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 2: Lost Saints
    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 3: Native Stranger
    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 4: Sweet Medicine
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Audiobooks

Now in Audio: The Complete Lazare Family Saga!

October 13, 2022 by Elizabeth Bell

It is finished! My marvelous narrator and I have wrapped the fourth and final audiobook in The Lazare Family Saga, Sweet Medicine! Here are the stats for the complete series:

526,397 total words performed

222 final audio files

60.75 final audiobook hours

14 songs performed in 11 genres and 5 languages
(Ballad, opera aria, Latin plainchant, lullaby, African-American spiritual, juba chant, American minstrel, American folk, Irish traditional, and nursery rhyme in English, Italian, Latin, French, and Irish Gaelic)

13 major accents
(General American, Charleston, Cheyenne Indian, French, Irish, African-American, British RP, Italian, German, Haitian Creole, Rhotic Southern US, Western US, Scottish)

10 spoken languages
(English, Cheyenne, French, Latin, Irish Gaelic, Haitian Creole, Italian, Dakota, Arapaho, Yoruba)

9 months of auditions, prep, recording, and revision
(on the texts themselves, 29 years of research, writing, and revision before that)

4 fat historical novels

1 exceptional voice actor!

Click on the video preview below for a peek behind the scenes of the magic* happening!

*Magic = the superlative talent and hard work of my audiobook narrator, Dallin Bradford

Dallin is like the voice of God + the nicest guy you’ll ever meet + the sexiest man you’ll ever meet. Which was absolutely perfect for my series exploring, juxtaposing, and merging sexuality, spirituality, and nice guys.

I swear, sometimes Sweet Medicine sounds like a full-cast recording and not a single actor. I’ve got a smorgasbord of characters, but Dallin is that good. Not only did he capture the accents, energy, and emotions of my characters, it felt like he was channelling me, my inner narrative voice. He deserves a combat medal for Chapter 18, and he deserves an Audie Award for Chapter 29. 

I was over the moon when Dallin sent me the following email during recording: “I just want you to know that, the other day, chapter 29 had me sobbing. I could hardly see the pages. I had to go hug my wife for a few minutes before going on.” At first, I wanted to apologize, but Dallin confirmed that he meant it as a compliment on the power of my writing. ðŸ˜Š

Since the reason I made my narrator cry would be too much of a spoiler, here’s another snippet from the Sweet Medicine audiobook, in which Dr. David Lazare does what he does best: undress Clare. ðŸ˜‰ 

If you’re new to my series, please start with Necessary Sins, Book One of The Lazare Family Saga. I’ve been thrilled with the reviews Dallin’s performance is receiving:

“SUPERB audiobook narrator. If you enjoy audiobooks, this is an absolute gem. There are about five million different accents and the narrator does them ALL. He also sings opera and Catholic hymns. I was absolutely transfixed by this performance.”

“I will be forever grateful to this book for instilling my new love of audiobooks. I had tried audio many times in the past without success but this book hooked me from the very beginning and it was an incredible listen.”

“Dallin Bradford’s performance was beyond exceptional. He did a great job keeping every character’s voice distinct. His accents were perfect for an audiobook – enough to get the flavor without forcing you to strain to understand him.”

“Dallin Bradford narrates a story with a voice full of emotion and a good sense of all the accents of the characters. It almost feels like he’s sitting down beside me with a glass of sweet tea to tell me the latest chapter in Joseph’s life.”

The complete Lazare Family Saga quartet is now available on Audible US, Audible UK, Audiobooks.com, Chirp, Kobo, Scribd, and all fine audiobook platforms. You can also recommend that your library purchase Necessary Sins and the rest of the series in audio. Here’s how to do that on Overdrive/Libby. Happy listening!

Filed Under: Audiobooks, Going Indie, Interpretation, Publishing, Release Day Tagged With: audiobooks, narrator, new release

Read or Listen for Free This Month!

October 3, 2022 by Elizabeth Bell

Are you new to my historical fiction quartet, The Lazare Family Saga? Perhaps you’d like to revisit where it all began, now that I’ve made a few changes. I’ve got great news:

If you’re a U.S. member of Amazon Prime, the Kindle edition of Necessary Sins, Book One of The Lazare Family Saga, is free to read now through November 30th!

Prefer the audiobook? I’ve also made the Necessary Sins audiobook free for the month of October! That’s how much I love my narrator’s performance: I want as many people as possible to hear it. Here’s how to claim the Necessary Sins audiobook: Sign up for a free NetGalley account and download the free NetGalley Shelf app. 

Necessary Sins is set to Listen Now, which means you don’t have to wait for approval from the publisher (my NetGalley co-op, BooksGoSocial)—you can start listening instantly. If you download Necessary Sins to your NetGalley Shelf app, you can listen for up to a year.

Click on the image above to go to the NetGalley listing!

If your library has Overdrive/Libby, you can also ask them to purchase my audiobooks. Here’s a help article, and here’s how I did it through my public library. Follow the gold stars in the images below!

1. Search for my audiobooks in your library’s Overdrive collection. I recommend searching by Lazare Family Saga or the book title rather than by Elizabeth Bell, which will give you lots of irrelevant results. You may need to broaden your search to “add titles the library doesn’t own.”

2. When you find Necessary Sins, click on the “RECOMMEND” option under the cover.

3. Fill in your email and hit the RECOMMEND button. If your library purchases my audiobook, you’ll have the first chance to borrow it!

My library allows each patron to recommend only one book every 30 days, so you may need to wait before you can recommend the rest of The Lazare Family Saga: Lost Saints, Native Stranger, and Sweet Medicine. 😉

Happy listening!

Filed Under: Audiobooks, Marketing, Sale Tagged With: audiobooks, library

Necessary Sins Is An Audiobook!

May 16, 2022 by Elizabeth Bell

At long last, my favorite format of Necessary Sins is live: the audiobook! I’m even more excited now than I was at the initial publication of this novel—because I think my writing is good, but I know my narrator is great! His name is Dallin Bradford. At the bottom left of the cover, tap the play arrow to hear a snippet of the audiobook:

Don’t you just want to listen to Dallin’s mellifluous voice for 16 hours straight? You’re in luck! My novels are literal epics, and the audiobook of Necessary Sins is 16 hours and 19 minutes of glorious listening.

You can hear a longer sample of Dallin’s performance on Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. I wanted to feature this additional excerpt because

A. It explains one of the sources of my title, Necessary Sins

B. You get to hear Dallin sing

In the full-length audiobook, Dallin also sings a 19th-century ballad and even a couple of lines from an opera! His talents don’t stop there: he excels not only at riveting, emotional narration but also at portraying my huge cast of characters, no matter their gender, age, or accent.

You can hear Dallin voicing my Charleston hero and Irish heroine in the 5-minute Audible/Amazon sample. For the rest of his performance, you’ll have to buy the audiobook. 😉 It’s now available from Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. If you already have the Kindle edition of Necessary Sins or want to purchase it, you should be able to add the audiobook for a reduced price through Amazon. In the U.S., I see “Add Audible narration” for $7.49.

And yes, Dallin will be recording the entire Lazare Family Saga in audio!

You’ll notice that in order to transform the ebook covers for The Lazare Family Saga into audiobook covers, my designer had to convert rectangles into squares. This is a legacy of when audiobooks were primarily on CDs. The conversion was tricky—we had to flip and rearrange elements—but I’m pleased with the final result. In particular, I love that we get to see more of Clare’s gorgeous skirt on the audiobook cover of Native Stranger…coming soon!

Filed Under: Audiobooks, Covers, Going Indie, Publishing, Release Day Tagged With: audio, audiobooks, covers, narrator

How I Found My Audiobook Narrator

April 6, 2022 by Elizabeth Bell

I’ve been an audiobook addict for years. I listen to an average of two books per week while commuting or doing housework. As someone with the equivalent of two full-time jobs, multitasking with audio is the primary way I experience books. If they weren’t mine, I wouldn’t have time to read my own epic novels! Having my four books converted to audio for book lovers like me was an absolute must. But how?

First, I educated myself about the audiobook production process. Great resources to get me started were Joanna Penn’s book Audio for Authors (I went for the audiobook, of course); this YouTube series by author and narrator Catherine Bilson; this Kindlepreneur post; and this FAQ at NarratorList.com. I also picked the brains of my fellow indie historical novelists with audiobooks to find out how they’d done it. They were Melissa Addey, Lars D. H. Hedbor, Susan Higginbotham, Susie Murphy, and Michael L. Ross, and they were so helpful.

I knew audiobooks aren’t cheap to produce—we’re talking thousands of dollars. Some indie authors narrate their own books, but this wasn’t for me. I’m not good enough with accents, and my books have a smorgasbord. Nor do I have access to a quiet space or the right equipment. I could have hired a production company to find a narrator for me, but doing the search myself helped keep my costs down.

When hiring a narrator, there are two main payment paths: Royalty Share (RS) and Per Finished Hour (PFH) as well as a couple of hybrid options. Royalty Share means the narrator records the book for no money upfront in exchange for a percentage of the royalties the audiobook earns over a set period of time, usually 50/50 with the author for seven years. Per Finished Hour means that the Rights Holder, in this case the author/publisher, pays the narrator an agreed amount for every hour of the finished audiobook, say 10 hours. A narrator can read roughly 9,300 words in a finished hour. The narrator puts in say 80 hours total on the book, but they get paid only Per Finished Hour. They’ve done prep work like mastering an accent and learning how to pronounce local place names. They’ve also done retakes because nobody sits down and records a whole chapter perfectly in one sitting.

Because of all the accents in my books, I knew I needed an experienced narrator to do my characters justice. I also write long books (requiring more hours in the recording booth) with steamy sex scenes (which some narrators don’t want to read). I knew these factors would narrow the pool of possible narrators. I decided to pay PFH. As an artist who values fellow artists’ work, this method made me more comfortable than asking a narrator to take a gamble on me with RS. So I saved my money, and an insurance settlement allowed me to afford PFH if I could find a narrator who wasn’t asking top dollar, which can be $500/PFH. On a 15.3 hour audiobook like mine, that’s $7,650. For one book.

How to find this narrator? An author needs to put together an “audition script,” selections from her novel that she asks prospective narrators to record. Then the author decides on the performance she thinks fits her work best. It’s important to choose representative excerpts containing both narrative and various character voices. The recommended length of an audition script is 3-5 minutes.

With a family saga like mine and such a large, diverse cast, I knew that length wouldn’t be enough. This narrator was actually auditioning for my whole series: four long novels, almost 60 finished audiobook hours total. The Lazare Family Saga is my life’s work, and I would be paying this narrator more than I’d spent on anything in my life. I needed to know the narrator was versatile enough to handle my epic books, that they could do a French accent and a Charleston accent and an Irish accent; male, female, and child voices; act in tragic scenes without going over-the-top; understand my sense of humor; read sexy scenes and not sound silly; and hopefully sing a few 19th-century songs as well.

My audition script was about 10 minutes long, snippets from five scenes. I saw this as part of the screening process: if the narrator didn’t care enough about my project to read it all, then they wouldn’t be a good fit. Only one of the 34 narrators who auditioned didn’t read the whole script. (But if everyone in your novel has similar accents and you don’t need so much versatility, don’t waste narrators’ time by exceeding the recommended script length as much as I did.) In addition to the scene snippets, I included the context of each scene, who the characters were, and how they should sound.

I posted my audition call in three places: ACX (owned by Audible/Amazon), NarratorList, and a Facebook group for narrators. The narrator I selected ended up seeing all three calls. I detailed the genre, the word count, the accents needed, the content warnings, the upper limit PFH I could afford, that my timeline was flexible—everything a potential narrator needed to know when considering my project. Since the text version was already published, I linked to it on Amazon so the narrators could see the reviews and read the opening pages if they wanted. In the Facebook group, even narrators who weren’t interested commented to praise the thoroughness of my audition call. If you want to do Royalty Share, you’ll also need to explain your current sales and future marketing plan so that the narrator has confidence the book will sell.

I left my audition call open for two weeks. I got the most responses in the first week and the majority through ACX. (I should note here that I hate the antiquated, clunky, frustrating ACX interface and its practically nonexistent customer service. If the site had been live when I was searching for a narrator, I would have started with Findaway Voices Marketplace.) I invited some narrators to audition after fellow authors recommended them and I’d already heard their samples. But for most, their audition was the first time I heard their voice.

Inside a recording booth: acoustic panels in the background and a microphone and pop shield in the foreground. A pop shield protects the microphone from “plosives” like p sounds, which produce harsh puffs of air that you don’t want to hear when you’re enjoying a story.

I anxiously listened to each of the 34 auditions as they poured and trickled in. I put these narrators into an Excel spreadsheet, noting who’d done well with the French, who’d done a convincing Irish accent, whose natural voice I particularly liked, who could do sexy, what their weaknesses were, etc. Did they understand and express the emotion in my words without overacting?

Sometimes I communicated with the narrator through ACX Messaging (again, hate) or email as well. If the person seemed genuinely enthusiastic about my book, that made an impression on me. Other narrators seemed to be primarily interested in showing off.

Most narrators had websites or at least profiles on ACX or NarratorList. I listened to the samples they’d posted so I could get a sense of their range beyond what I’d heard in their audition. I found the books they’d narrated on Audible and Overdrive, where you can listen to 5-minute samples. What other genres had they narrated? Any historical fiction like mine?

I left the call open to both male and female narrators. Did I want someone who could be me, only better? Or did I want a male voice, since most of my point-of-view characters are men? I received 24 auditions from men and 10 from women. Of my Top Five, the narrators who were so good they gave me chills, three were men and two were women.

I sorted the narrators into the very scientific categories of: No, Probably Not, Low Maybe, and High Maybe. None of the narrators were “perfect.” None of them read every line with the emphases I would have given each word, and almost no one pronounced all the French names correctly. I’d already learned from Mr. Hedbor that I would have to “let it go” as I listened, that no narrator would recreate the voices in my head 100% of the time.

But on some things, I would have to stick to my guns and ask for changes, like the narrator who made my thirty-one-year-old priest protagonist (who’s supposed to be sexy) sound like a gawky, drooling teenager. “How easy would this person be to work with?” became a significant factor. Did the narrator seem like someone who would take offense if I insisted they change a voice or pronounce Ève the French way, or did they seem like a true collaborator, someone who could take feedback and run with it—as long as I trusted them most of the time? Did I think I could trust this person to get my books right most of the time?

The official process on ACX is that after the author has approved the audiobook’s first fifteen minutes, the narrator proceeds with the rest. The only changes the author can request after that are proof listening errors, where the narrator skipped or changed a word. One of the reasons I chose the narrator I did is that he’s allowing me to listen to each chapter as he records, and he’s open to implementing feedback beyond the first fifteen. But I am endeavoring to “let it go” unless he’s pronouncing something incorrectly or his performance is changing the meaning of my words.

Before I made my decision, I asked for a callback, a second audition script with different scenes. I’d ended up with very few lines from my heroine, Tessa, so I asked for more of her as well as a full verse of song. Price was also a factor. Most of my auditioning narrators did not provide their PFH rate; but of those who did, I was pleased to discover that price did not necessarily equal quality. My top two narrators, who did provide their rates, were at the low end of the scale. Before I signed a contract with my final pick, I contacted a couple of the authors who’d published audiobooks with him to ask if they’d recommend him.

After years of anticipation, months of research and preparation, and fourteen days of anxiety, I found a narrator who is the total package—even if he did pronounce Ève the English way in his audition. We fixed that, because he’s open to feedback. He is a consummate actor—he also plays roles on the stage. He’s great with accents. He’s American, but he studied acting in Ireland. And boy howdy, can he sing! He seduced me with “Danny Boy” before I even asked for a song. Above all, his speaking voice is perfect for my priest and doctor characters. His voice is warm, versatile, rich, expressive, and soothing—he has great bedside manner, so to speak! He sounds like someone I want to confide in because I trust he’ll truly listen and give me good advice.

His name is Dallin Bradford, and I know he’ll win an audiobook award someday. Don’t take my word for it. Have a listen for yourself. Do you think I chose wisely?

You should be able to enjoy Dallin’s full performance of Necessary Sins next month, May 2022.

P.S. Since there can be only one, I wrote kindly-worded rejection letters to the 33 narrators I decided not to choose. Most of them wrote back to thank me. One even said it was the best rejection letter she’d ever received! Apparently letting narrators know they didn’t get the part isn’t industry standard. But I’ve been on the other side of rejection letters as an author querying literary agents. I know how heartbreaking it is to receive a form rejection and how frustrating it is to receive NO RESPONSE AT ALL. Writers and narrators are fellow artists who owe each other the courtesy of a kind, definitive answer. If you’re an author auditioning narrators, I encourage you to send every one of them a reply.

Filed Under: Audiobooks, Going Indie, Publishing, Writer's Life Tagged With: audiobooks, indie

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Recent Posts

  • My Debt to Colonial Williamsburg
  • Character Art!
  • Now in Audio: The Complete Lazare Family Saga!
  • Read or Listen for Free This Month!
  • Necessary Sins Is An Audiobook!
  • How I Found My Audiobook Narrator
  • Anatomy of a Book Cover, Part 2
  • Anatomy of a Book Cover, Part 1
  • On Second Thought…
  • Necessary Sins Has a New Cover!
  • Do I Get An A+?
  • What I’m Working On Now
  • A Lazare Family Tree
  • The Sweetest Medicine
  • What’s in a (Character) Name?

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