Audiobook Producers Editing and Proofreading Services

An audiobook is a manuscript that has to survive being said aloud, once, by someone who did not write it. Everything a reader's eye handles silently — a footnote, a table, a character whose name appears in three spellings, a sentence with two possible stresses — becomes a decision the narrator must make in the booth, at cost, with a director waiting. Production budgets are tight and studio time is the expensive part, which means every ambiguity left in the text is paid for in pickups.

We edit what audiobook publishers and studios produce — narrator prep scripts and marked-up manuscripts, pronunciation guides and character voice notes, front and back matter adapted for audio, guidance on handling footnotes, citations, tables and images, abridgement briefs and abridged texts, multi-narrator casting notes and character assignment documents, director and engineer session notes, retail metadata and audio sample selection, publisher style guides for audio, narrator agreements and royalty share explanations, accessibility and described content material, and marketing copy for audio editions. Our editors work on the source text so the studio does not discover the problems.

The pronunciation guide is where a producer either protects the session or loses it. A narrator handed a manuscript with fourteen unfamiliar proper nouns and no guide will guess, and the guesses will be inconsistent across a fourteen-hour recording — which is discovered at proof-listening and fixed at pickup rates. We build these so every name, place, technical term and foreign word is listed with a plain-English respelling rather than phonetic symbols most narrators do not read, with the stressed syllable marked; so recurring characters carry a note on relationship and register, since how a narrator says a name depends on who is saying it; so any word with two defensible pronunciations records the decision and who made it, because that is the argument that otherwise resurfaces in book two; and so the author's own preference is captured while the author is still reachable. A guide built before the first session costs an afternoon and reliably saves days of studio time.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, casting decisions and material under embargo. We are editors rather than narrators, directors or audio engineers, and we offer no view on performance or production. What we can do is prepare the text so the session runs, and we are glad to work from a publisher's existing house conventions rather than imposing our own.