The Rules – Will there be an Audiobook?

The short answer is yes, there will be an audiobook of The Rules. The longer answer is that I’m embroiled in a series of short stories (the collection, Brain Frieze, is due out sometime early this fall) and I must put on a very different hat to get a high-quality recording done for Audible.com. I also plan to produce an audiobook edition of Cave Paintings, a collection of poems. I’m hoping both of these audiobooks may be completed and submitted to Audible.com by mid-summer.

A subtler question about audiobooks is, “How much dramatization is appropriate?” Some poetry cries out for dramatic reading, even performance. But other works tend to come across pretentious or artificial when read with even a little “performance.” In the case of The Rules, I find that I do use somewhat different voices for Harvey and his internal partner, but it might be interesting to use voices with even stronger character differences.

How do audiobooks work best for you? To what degree do you prefer the reader to be “adding” to the words with more or less dramatic interpretations?

Allen