Kobo ReWriting Life Podcast – 11 – The Author and Narrator Relationship with Rachel Grant and Greg Tremblay

Welcome to the Kobo ReWriting Life Podcast! Alongside your regularly scheduled Kobo Writing Life podcast episode releases, we will also be featuring some highlights from our backlist. This episode features our conversation with author of mysteries, thrillers, and romantic suspense novels, Rachel Grant, and acclaimed narrator of many of her titles, Greg Tremblay. Rachel and Greg have a great conversation that illuminates much of the author and narrator relationship in this interview.

Author Rachel Grant and her narrator Greg Tremblay shed some light on the process of creating an audiobook. Rachel discusses the working relationship she has with Greg and how his narration has influenced her future work. Greg shares his experience as a narrator, and the process for creating audiobooks.

In this episode:

• Greg explains how he got his start in acting then narrating audio books, which is now his full-time career.
• How Rachel went from archeologist to author, and how her former career informs her writing.
• Both discuss the level of emotional engagement required in an audiobook, from both author and narrator, and how much stage direction is implicitly written into the narrative of a novel.
• How Greg deals with different accents and vocal styles, and his advice for authors considering doing their own narration.
• Rachel explains why she never considered narrating her own audio titles and what she looks for as an audiobook listener.
• How they individually approach marketing and how they engage with readers and with other authors
• The stylistic difference between an eloquent read vs. a dramatic read.
• Why Greg loves narrating Rachel’s books!
• And lots more – listen in for details!

Useful links:

• Rachel's website
• Greg's website
• Rachel's books on Kobo
• Greg's books on Kobo

Episode Transcript

Transcription by www.speechpad.com

Tara: Hey, writers. You're listening to the "Kobo ReWriting Life Podcast," where we highlight an episode from our backlist that will bring you insights and inspiration for growing your self-publishing business. I'm your host, Tara Cremin, director of Kobo Writing Life.

June is audiobook month, and I wanted to spotlight this episode from 2019 with author Rachel Grant and her narrator, Greg Tremblay, who shed some light on the process of creating an audiobook. Rachel discusses the working relationship she has with Greg and how his narration has influenced her future work. And Greg shares his experience as a narrator. I hope you find this helpful, and don't forget, you can publish audiobooks through Kobo Writing Life too. So, if you're wide with your audio, we'd love to work with you.

Stephanie: This week on the podcast, we're talking to author Rachel Grant and her audiobook narrator, Greg Tremblay, which is a first on the podcast. I don't think we've had a duo like this yet.

Tara: No, it was really great to be able to talk to the author and the narrator together and, kind of, just see some insights into their working relationship, and these two get on really, really well and love each other's work.

Stephanie: They're each other's hype men, which I really love.

Tara: So much hype.

Stephanie: We also saw how Greg's narration actually influences Rachel's writing, because he'll pick up a character from a first book, and then how he's portrayed it in the audiobook is how she actually writes it later on, which has been really cool to see and learn more about.

Tara: Yeah, and Greg gave us some insights into the narrating process, that it's not just reading a book, that he's an actor, and they have to act out everything. And Rachel's books have different characters from different places that have accents. So, yeah, like you were saying, it influenced her, kind of, creation of bigger characters further down the line.

Stephanie: Yeah, so it's a jam-packed episode, so please keep listening. So, thank you, Rachel and Greg, for joining us today, first duo on the podcast. First, I want to start with Rachel and ask you how you became a writer, and how your previous work influenced your writing that you do today.

Rachel: I knew from high school that I wanted to be a writer. I was editor of my high school's literary magazine, and writing was a passion of mine. I was a sophomore in college, and I was declared an English major when I realized I had this great opportunity to study anything, because I had the ego of, "Well, I already know how to write." And so I decided that I wanted to study something that fascinated me that would maybe give me something to write about when it was time for me to write.

So, I studied anthropology, archaeology, and worked for 10 years as an archaeologist. I'm married to an archaeologist. He's an underwater archaeologist. He works for the Department of Defense now. He doesn't do much underwater archaeology, but he has worked for Naval History and Heritage Command, which is the Navy's underwater archaeologist. And so I draw on his experience and my experience, because archaeology is actually really different from what people expect.

Most of my books have the heroine that works in archaeology or anthropology, in that field, although Greg has narrated two of my books where the heroine actually wasn't an archaeologist at all, and that just flowed from the story. And that was, kind of, fun, too. Books, let's see, 13 and 14, I'm writing heroines who are not archaeologists, and I can see doing more of that, but it's still very much part of my core story, is how the history shapes the future.

Tara: I really like the idea that you picked your subject like, "I need some interesting story like a rock star or an astronaut."

Rachel: It was very mercenary of me. What is the most interesting thing I could study?

Tara: That's awesome.

Rachel: I was really lucky to be in a position where I could do that. I mean, college was a struggle. I'm actually the youngest of 14 children and the first to graduate college.

Tara: That's some Irish family.

Rachel: Yeah, so I'm the first to graduate college.

Greg: Holy mackerel.

Rachel: And partly because there were so many other kids that, by the time I was going through school, I was the only one in school, so my parents could afford to help me. So, I do look at that. I know that my mom freaked out when I told her that I wanted to study archaeology, because she wanted me to study something that was going to get me a job. And I am very proud to say that I was always able to support myself with archaeology. My husband has supported our family. So, there are jobs out there.

Tara: My friend and her husband are archaeologists, and they work in Ireland all the time. My other question is, is your husband searching for Atlantis? Is that underwater archaeology?

Rachel: That would be fun.

Tara: I promise no more stupid questions.

Rachel: No problem. It would be fun. Hey, you can write it off.

Greg: That's true.

Rachel: And then I could write about it.

Stephanie: And then I guess, Rachel, how did you move from archaeology to writing? Did you just one day be like, "I'm going to start writing now," or how...?

Rachel: Pretty much. My daughter was almost 2, and we were living in Washington state. And my husband got a job in Hawaii with Army Corps of Engineers. And so we were going to move to Hawaii for three years. And so I ran the numbers and I had been working from home for a small archaeological consulting firm with my daughter. And it was always a fun balance. And I ran the numbers, and I realized that we could afford for me to not work.

When we were in Hawaii, we wanted to have another child. And I basically declared to my husband the day he was offered the job, I was like, "Well, I've decided that I do want to move to Hawaii," because we'd been debating it for months. We knew he was going to be offered the job, but it wasn't official yet. And I said, "And I ran the numbers and I think I can quit my job. And I want to have another baby and I want to write a book." And so I did it. Before we moved back from Hawaii, I had the first draft of my first novel written, which is "Grave Danger."

Tara: Hawaii seems like a pretty great place to begin a writing career.

Rachel: It was fun. And, yeah, it was amazing. Yeah, it was a good experience. And it gave me that timeframe again, that three years, basically, I started writing the book and then I got pregnant and then my brain did not work anymore. And so it was when my son was nine months old, I looked at the calendar and I realized we had a little bit more than a year left in Hawaii. And I told everyone I was going to write a book there and it was like, "Well, I guess I'm going to finish it," because I didn't want to come back without having written that book. And so six months after that, I'd finished the first draft.

Stephanie: Wow.

Greg: Nice.

Stephanie: And then, Greg, I guess the question is, how did you become an audiobook narrator?

Greg: It's a little bit of luck and misadventure. When I was at university, I studied theater and computer science because I had a passion for the stage and also for making rent on time. And when I graduated, actually, what I really wanted to do was voice acting. And I talked with a few people. This was in, I believe, the turn of the millennium. I talked with a couple of people and I got some like, "Oh, yeah, you should move to LA and in a few years, you could probably find an agent or something." I said, "Well, that sounds less like a plan and more like the start of a cautionary tale, actually."

But I followed my then partner to Ithaca, New York, because she wanted to pursue a PhD in composite Irish archeology and history, and there was a program at Cornell that worked for that. And while I was here in the Finger Lakes where I'm still living, there was no vocational theater to be done. You know, there were no... There was a little teeny bit, but you really could not make a living doing that. So, I did the 21st century factory job. I was an IT guy. I did server admin and support work and looked for things to fill that hole in my soul. And I tried a bunch of different stuff. I was a paramedic for a while. I was a farrier. I shod horses for a while.

Tara: You were a farrier?

Greg: Farrier. I was a blacksmith. I built horseshoes.

Tara: Oh, I'm unfamiliar with that word. Wow. That's very different from being an IT guy.

Greg: Yeah. About six years ago now, I was talking with a friend who was an actor in the D.C. area. And she said, "The voice acting world has really changed with the technology updates. You should look at it again." And I was like, "Oh, all right, I'll take a look." So, I sallied forth and actually, my very first books were done through Audible's ACX system, which if any of your viewers are not familiar with it, it's essentially Match.com for audiobooks. It's sort of a, "Hey, you've got a book and you've got a voice and a microphone. We could make a deal."

And I put together a portfolio and a profile, and found a few books to audition for, and wrapped myself up in a warm blanket of hubris and sallied forth to make it happen. And audiobooks were something I'd always, always loved. I was listening to them in the '80s and the '90s and when they were still very expensive and there weren't a lot of them and most of them were abridged. And my perception of them really until that day was, first, you become a famous actor, then they'll let you make an audiobook. So, the discovery that I could be an actor and read audiobooks was enormous.

And audiobooks, if you are really in love with character and you're really in love with the dialogue and putting everything together as an actor are the most incredible playground because you get to play all the parts. You get to be the director, you get to be the stage manager. You're interpreting all these instructions that are already there textually, but then you get to take them and breathe life into them in your own way and live them and play around in them. And some things work and some things don't and you have to be ready to respond to that. But it's an astonishing and incredibly rewarding thing.

So, about four years ago, I left my day job and I'm lucky enough to be a full-time narrator now. And this is really essentially all I do as an actor. I do maybe one or two commercial voiceover things every other year. And I do a little bit of performance stuff on the side just as a hobby for my own enjoyment. But this is what I do now, and it's an amazing career. It's an amazing group of colleagues. It's a lot more emotional effort than it seems at the outset when you first start looking at, "I'm going to sit down and read a book." And then you realize how much work goes into the prep and into the sheer physical sustenance of a performance over the course of an entire 8, 12, 16, 25-hour audiobook, which is going to be several weeks of production to keep your energy level constant, to keep the engagement with the characters, to keep everything straight, and to keep it all going is really rewarding. But it's a lot more work than it seems like at the outset.

Rachel: And I just want to jump in and say Greg is amazing at the level of emotion that he brings to the story. And it's fantastic. I have one reader who said that she has listened to my "Firestorm" 30 or 40 times.

Stephanie: Wow.

Greg: Oh, my God.

Rachel: This is an 11-hour book. And as an author, to get to hear... I'm one of those weird authors who I love hearing other people read my book to me. But as an author, and I think of this particularly when I was listening to "Firestorm" narrated by Greg, to hear him nail the emotions that I intended to have on the page, you don't always spell out the emotion but he nailed it. As I'm listening to it and I'm hearing him hit all those beat points and he's just absolutely nailing all the characters' emotions in an intense scene and I just teared up. It just is pretty amazing. So, sorry to interrupt you, Greg, but I had to.

Greg: Thank you. I'll take that interruption. That one is fine.

Tara: It, kind of, leads into our question about the creative process behind creating an audiobook. So, maybe you could, kind of, both speak to that a little bit, from the concept to final product. Rachel, what's your involvement in the vision that you have for the book, or is it very much you're putting it into Greg's hands?

Rachel: On my end, it was very much putting it into Greg's hands. The first few books we did together were produced by Audible Studios. And so I had just suggested, I said, "Maybe we should look for a male narrator for this story, for "Tinderbox," which was the first one, because the book has a pretty heavy male cast. There's only a few female characters in that book. And so they sent me Greg's name, and I listened to a few of his books to listen to how he did dialogue and everything. And I just said, "Sure."

So, I had no contact with Greg until after he was essentially cast. And the book had been written months before, so that one was very much just handing it over to Greg. And then he sent me questions about pronunciation, and I told him what I knew about characters and especially characters who were going to be showing up as leads in future books, letting him know who was going to be playing a key role and everything. And so that was the initial process.

For "Inferno," "Inferno" was a little different because Greg had already narrated the first three books by the time I was writing "Inferno." And so I went back and I listened to Greg's narration of Carlos, the hero of "Inferno," because I remembered that I had told him that Carlos was Hispanic and he could have a slight Spanish accent, but I hadn't been specific because I didn't know Carlos' backstory yet. And so I listened to Greg's narration and he just had this amazing accent for Carlos, very subtle, which is what I wanted. And so I shaped Carlos' story from there like, "Okay, so that's how he sounds."

Tara: How cool. So, you were able to use the audio to, kind of, help you build the character?

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, very much. Yeah. So, yeah, so I'm curious to hear about Greg's then because I always want to know. I know he puts a lot of work into the prep, so I'm very curious for Greg's answer to this.

Greg: One of the coolest things about working with audiobooks is that... And authors sometimes don't realize how much stage direction you've written into the book from an actor's point of view, that if you read that book and you really... I'm a passionate reader anyway, although almost all of my reading currently is in audio, because if I'm reading with my eyes, it's for prep for the most part. But if you really love getting soaked into a book and getting swept away in it, and it becomes that real in your head, you realize you're picking up all of these very subtle things about, "What is the day like? And where are they standing? What's the weather feeling like? And how does this person stand and move and act?" And you get so much from the textual hints.

And frequently, it's better from my point of view, if the author can let me take it and run with it except to ask specific questions. Because frequently, the authors, when they really want to... When an author really wants to sort of do live direction of like, "No, can you do that line a little bit more like this or like that?" they don't realize they're rewriting the book. They've written the book. Now they're making some changes based on how they've changed or they've modified, but they've written the book already. So, sometimes, those desires of modifying come into conflict with the text as it's written, and you end up with points that become rough and difficult to manage. So, it often works best if... And I can let authors know this, if I'm working with them for the first time, to trust the direction that they've already written. Trust the world they've created, the characters they've described, and let me experience them the way that their readers experience them. And then we can ask some fine-tuning questions.

As Rachel says, the one that is an exception is I do need to know about characters that are minor parts in this book that... This is very common, especially with the broad romance umbrella, to have the linked series, the series that's not necessarily following a character or a specific event but where the characters within the world are linked to each other. And then there'll be another book about these two or three, and then this one, and etc. So, every now and then you will find things out like Sadhbh O' Riordan actually grew up in Texas. And so even though her name is spelled S-A-D-H-B-H her parents actually pronounced it "sabd" or something, because they're from... She's got this accent. So, if I don't find that out until Book 7, then I'm going...

Tara: I was just going to be like A plus pronunciation there on the Irish name. That was very good.

Greg: Sadhbh, yeah.

Tara: Sadhbh, yeah.

Greg: Sadhbh, yeah. Yeah. So, those are good things to know. But those are more factual than artistic interpretation.

Tara: Was it interesting for you to work on a book that had the sort of archaeological elements, seeing as you have that, kind of, link as well. So, maybe some of those phrases weren't scary.

Greg: And we had a lovely interaction moment because particularly with field school archaeologists, there is a little bit of cache to having the proper brand of trowel.

Stephanie: Wow.

Greg: The Marshalltown trowel is the accepted... Everybody's got that in their box. It's the good one. It's going to hold up right. And so if you don't have it... She's got it on her desk.

Rachel: I actually have for those listening...

Greg: So, my partner had Marshalltown trowels when she was going through field school, and I knew about them. And so when that came up in a little throwaway line, I sent this little sort of laughing email to Rachel going, "Ah, I love that the Marshalltown came up." And we talked a little bit about anthropology, archaeology, because I did geek out about some of the things that especially were in "Firestorm" just because of the way that they clicked into things that I had known.

Stephanie: So, how long does it take you to make an audiobook? How long do you do just reading and making notes and stuff and then actually recording it?

Greg: There's a little bit of math that's not always spot on, but it gets me close enough. And for me, there's about 9,500 words per hour of audio. So, it always helps me most to have a word count on a book that I'm getting ready to look at, because page counts are tricky, because pagination changes that. It takes roughly all told... Including all of the preparatory and review stuff, it takes about 11 to 12 hours of effort per hour of finished audio. And so that includes my prep time, the actual recording time in the booth, editing time, mastering, external proofing, changes being made, and then a final proofing pass. So, my portion of it's about 7 of those hours. The other ones are usually done by somebody else.

So, my prep process has changed a little bit. I used to go through the script and mark up the script like I used to when I was a stage actor. And then I discovered that it wasn't really benefiting me, that I spent a lot of time making notes that I realized I wasn't paying any attention to, and they were just in my way. And now what I do is read very much like a reader. I jump into the story and I read it a little bit fast. I do miss the occasional typographical error or something when I'm doing prep because your brain scans through that so fast and fixes a lot of those things without you realizing it. And I analogize it to driving and walking along the edge of a river you're going to kayak or canoe. I go down the whole river, but I don't actually swim it or wade it and do it multiple times. I prefer to then know where I'm going. I know where there's rapids, where there's slow stuff, where I'm going to have to carry the canoe or whatever.

And then when I'm ready to do the book, I've got some notes about that. I know where I'm going. I know that it's going to rain that day, so I've got a raincoat or whatever. I know that I've got characters I need to prepare for. I've got whole Russian phrases that I need to make sure I've had recorded for me so that I can get them right. I have had people ask me how I speak 17 languages. I don't. I'm just a natural mimic. And then I get in and I do the book. And I like to get lost in the flow of it because that's the fun. And a story should be moving. It should be fun. It's not always enjoyable fun or it's not always fun enjoyment. I don't know which way we're going to go with that, but it should be something that grabs you, that moves you and not feel overly restricted or overly thought through. It needs to be an emotional experience. So, I like to experience that emotion while I'm going through, but I still know where it's going.

And you'll hear a little bit of argument from some people about, "No, no, you shouldn't read the book first because then you won't be surprised by what's happening." And then I was like, "Yeah, okay, but it's called acting." We do that for a reason. Lin-Manuel Miranda was still great as Hamilton the 127th time. It's why we have a job. Yeah, and so that's my process.

Rachel: I have a question for you, Greg. I've wondered about this because my characters do have a bunch of accents pop up here and there, and you have another compliment for Greg. He has a real gift for accents because it's so easy to slip into parody, but Greg doesn't do that. He's always very subtle with the accents. And I just wonder when you're reading, is it a hard thing to shift from one accent to the other or have you rehearsed it or how does... Because you'll have dialogue where suddenly now this person's speaking with an accent, and I've just wondered about your process there.

Greg: Sure, it's not bad. There's only a couple of accents. The hardest thing sometimes is accents that have similar key points when they're put next to each other. So, in a book where I have South African characters, South African white characters, and Australian middle-class, those are accents that have some very similar marker points. Glasgow region, Scottish and East Coast Irish have some similar markers and they can... Sometimes I have to pause and shake my head out to go, "Okay, breathe, get the accent right. There you go. Okay," just because all of a sudden I'm going, "No, no, no, that character is not from Melbourne. That character is from Johannesburg. Stop."

But for the most part, I don't find that it's bad because I'm speaking as the character. And so, just the same as I have a sense of how their vocal patterns go, how their general timbre goes, whether they have a little bit of fry, whether they're a little bit raspy, whether they're a little breathy, or they're a little higher, or they're a little lower, or whatever they are, I hear their voice in my head. And I also hear their accent in my head. So, what I'm doing is mimicking the character in my head.

I don't quite know how I mimic the way that I do. And what's interesting, I've discovered, is that it also really benefits my post-production people, whether I'm hiring them or it's on a producer's side, because when they send back mistakes because we always make mistakes, so everything gets proofed after I'm done with it. I fix my mistakes as I go, but when I think it's done, the proofer listens to the whole thing with the script and marks everywhere that I didn't say what was on the page. And then they send that back with a 15-second or so clip of me saying it in the first place, so that I can record it again. And I appear to be extremely good at mimicking the way that I sounded when I recorded it the first time, because the editors keep sending back these notes going, "Man, that was great. We didn't have to do anything with you. We just dropped them right in, and they fit." So, there may be a parrot somewhere in my family tree.

Tara: And I don't know, Rachel, if you ever considered making your own audiobook or if this was always something that you wanted to send to a narrator. But I was curious of Greg's tips for anyone that did want to create their own audiobook.

Rachel: I definitely don't have the skill set for myself. I mean, Greg was an actor first, and I do know a few authors who... Well, I know one in particular who I know she was going to record her own books. I never followed up to see if she did, but she also had an acting background. And I think to have that be something that you're wanting to attempt, you need to have that background, because it's not reading "Goodnight Moon" to your child every night. It's very different.

So, I'm an audiobook listener. I am thrilled to have discovered audiobooks as a way to get reading time back in, because I no longer had reading-for-pleasure time in my life. Just everything was too busy. And so now I am listening to audiobooks as a reader, and I'm doing my chores and getting things done, and it's fabulous. But that also means that I have definitely heard... I hear what works and what doesn't and have my own favorite narrators. And it's a very different approach. So, all of that informs my like, yeah, no, I would never do it myself.

Greg: I think there are some books that you're going to be hard-pressed not to have the author read. Memoirs by living authors are extremely difficult not to have the author read. I certainly know authors who have done it successfully. I think that Rachel's absolutely right, that they are two different skill sets. Having one does not preclude having the other, but having one does not imply having the other as well.

I think if you're an author and you want to do your own audiobook, there's a couple things that you should ponder. If it's an audiobook that is, as I mentioned, it's a memoir, it's something that's a very personal anecdote, then that leans a little bit more to it being a good idea. If it's not, if it's a general fiction book, several questions: one, do you have the patience for it to take significantly longer than the 10 or 11 hours to one that I mentioned earlier? Because if it's your first book, it's going to be more like 20. There's a lot of errors. It's a long process. It's difficult. Do you have the patience? Do you have the fiscal ability to do that, or will it serve you better—if this is where you're making your living off of—to write another book while somebody else does that? You know, if that's really where your primary skill set lies, then there's nothing wrong with writing Books 2 and 3 while somebody else is recording Book 1.

If you do, if you feel that you've got that time, I think it is a really good idea to find someone not attached to you—very much like a proper beta reader would be—to record 10 minutes of it and send to them and have them give you a frank response as to whether they think that it worked for them, because there are absolutely brilliant extemporaneous speakers. Chris Hadfield, the Canadian Space Administration astronaut, absolute delight. I have the most enormous crush on him. He's an incredible extemporaneous speaker. His TED Talk was fantastic. His audiobook was so stilted. He cannot read from a page. It's not his natural ability.

Tara: Yeah, he came to Kobo once here and talked, and everyone was just on the edge of their seat. He talked for, like, an hour and we were just like, "Keep going."

Greg: Yeah. Oh, my God. I'm just like, "Yes, everything that you said, say it again." But every time he hits the end of a line in his book, he has to pause where he's going over to the next line. He just doesn't have a sense of how to create flow from text. I don't know how else you would have handled that book, right? It's a memoir. It's his story. I don't know.

You can try working with a good director if that is the kind of book that you need to do. If one of the Big Seven comes to you about your book and they want you to read it, I would tell them really upfront—if you're the author and they're going to have you do it—that you want their input on making it good and really listen to them. They may be hesitant to provide much input sometimes because they just want to get it done. They don't want the author to be upset. They want the thing done and out the door. But you can talk to your engineers and your directors if you're going into, like, Hachette or HarperCollins and doing your book and just be like, "Dude, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm an author. Tell me when I'm not doing it right," and see what you can do. There are some coaches you could work with as well. But I've certainly heard authors that did a great job. I mean, Douglas Adams reading The Hitchhiker's Guide was fantastic. It was different.

I would classify audiobook performances into two categories. There's an eloquent read and a dramatic read. The eloquent read is simply my reading of the story. I'm not really going to do voices. I'm not going to do accents. I'm just going to read you the story with a good sense of pacing and an appropriate delivery so that you can connect with the book. Dramatic read is what I do. I get into characters. I get into emotions. I get into accents. Neither one is correct. They're both totally valid. People have different preferences. I prefer to listen to a dramatic read. I know people who are like, "Stop. This is not a play. Stop acting the book. Just read the thing to me." Cool. Totally. Don't hire me, which is fine. I can give you several names, but that's not what I'm going to do. So, Doug did an eloquent read of his books. Stephen Fry did a dramatic read of his books. So, they're just different interpretations of the work. Valid. Awesome.

Tara: I think Stephen Fry has a hard time talking in an undramatic way.

Greg: That is true. That is definitely Stephen's nature. The most undramatic he ever was was in "Jeeves and Wooster." Just that, "Yes. No. Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho."

Tara: So, you get to hear some of those accents there. Those are good.

Stephanie: Do you have specific jobs you like to work on that you specifically pick to do, basically, is what I'm trying to say?

Rachel: Specific books?

Stephanie: Yeah, like specific books, like certain kinds of books that you like working on the most that you always say yes to doing? How do you pick your projects?

Greg: To a certain degree at the moment—not to be mercenary—but my projects are picked largely in the, "Do I have space? Great, I'd like to make money." But that's not entirely the case. I am lucky enough that I am very rarely getting offered books that I'm just going, "Oh, really?" And I have the freedom to turn down ones that I just kind of go, "Eh, I don't think so." And sometimes just legitimate ones where I go, "This is a good book, but I just don't think I'm the right voice for it. I don't think I click with this correctly."

Tara: It must be nice to get a series like Rachel's where you, kind of, have done one book so you already know the vibe.

Greg: Okay. I'm going to pause a little bit. Rachel's books are so freaking good. First of all, in the romance world—which I do a lot of and I love—I do both straight and gay romance quite a bit. And there are a lot of great books. There's a lot of great stories. It's rare that I come across a book that doesn't have some aspect in it that I'm like, "Ugh," or, "Okay, whatever," that I just click with all the way down and through. I certainly get some all over the place, but I hit Rachel's and was just recommending them to friends while I'm still doing the first one, going, "No, no, no, they're so clever." There's this great snark that's not mean snark between the characters. It's playful. The women are written strong and intelligent and not in defiance of somebody's expectations or strong even though... They're actually fully realized human beings. And the characters just never wander into the caricature realm.

The plots are snappy. The action moves very well. And the balance of dialogue to action, to sex, to exposition is really nicely mixed. It doesn't feel too heavy in one spot or the other, because anytime that you're going to have a food scene, a fight scene, or a love scene, it needs to move the plot forward. There has to be a purpose behind that scene being there. I don't want to read 43 pages of screwing any more than I want to read 43 pages of fistfight. If it doesn't do anything, it doesn't move the story.

And Rachel's books are so tight. They're crafted really nicely. Their arc is beautiful without being formulaic. And she was one of the authors where I had to send her an email at one point on—what was that, Book 3—of going, "Oh, oh, my God. Oh, the bad guy is... Oh, that is horrible. What is wrong with you?" Like, "That is the most horrifically evil thing I... Oh, God. I'm not done prepping this, and I really hope he gets his comeuppance later. Oh, oh, Jiminy Christmas."

Rachel: Thank you. This just made my day.

Greg: But the succinct answer, I think, to the question that you were asking is I really enjoy getting to swap around genres. You know, I do sci-fi and fantasy, YA, romance, narrative, educational, nonfiction, and some kid stuff. And I really like just being able to change it up and do something else for a little while. You know, I'll get into a phase where I've done 12 romance titles in a row, and I'm going, "Okay, can something blow up now? Possibly a spaceship. Maybe there'll be an alien." And then, after a certain point, you're kind of doing the, "Okay, that's enough. That's enough space battles. How about something random about, I don't know, the history of rubber?" And, you know, I get to do that a little bit.

Tara: I really like to hear you bring to life the history of rubber.

Greg: Yeah. If anybody's out there, you've got a history of rubber book, lay it on me. Narrative nonfiction is so much fun to me. It's where somebody's like, "I am such a geek about this, and I'm going to share it with you. Look." And they go into that whole rabbit hole of going down an investigation line and finding things.

I did one just recently about Tesla, Edison, and Westinghouse, and the fight over the electrical system that became the U.S. standard, and that was fascinating. I did one about the evolution of the modern weather system, which was so cool. And the first time I've ever actually had to call Oslo, Norway, could not find a reference for the word varslingsapparat, værsentral, and said, "Okay, I guess I'm calling the weather bureau," because that's what it turned into. And I had a lovely conversation with the woman who, of course, answered me in Bokmål? And I said, "Hi, do you speak English by any chance?" And she said, "Yeah, English is no problem." I'm trying to figure out if I'm pronouncing this word right, "varslingsapparat, værsentral." And she said, "Yeah." "Well, how do you say it?" "I think you said it just fine." "Okay, I guess I guessed well." "Yeah, I guess you guessed well. Okay, bye."

Rachel: That's a good research that you go to to different lengths.

Stephanie: So, I guess my next question is, do you guys do marketing for an audiobook together? Because Rachel had sent you a review of your title. And I just wonder if you let readers or people who love your books know that you have this book out or how you approach marketing individually and then as together.

Rachel: We follow each other on Facebook and Twitter. And so I'll tag him when I'm particularly promoting the audiobook or doing promo and he'll share and that kind of thing.

Greg: Yeah, pass it on. I'm also a member of a romance writers' cooperative group, and they will push out tweets and notifications of our new releases when those come up. I basically don't do marketing per se of the books that I've worked on. I am usually busy enough doing the next books. But what I do like to do is engage with authors, engage with readers anytime that that comes up. So, I love doing conference talks and chatting with people online. And I do a number of dropping in on people's blogs if they let me know that they wanted to do a little Q&A or have people do an AMA about the book process. We do a lot of that. But I don't really do advertising pieces or marketing stuff for the books that I work on, as much as just continuing to generally promote the books that I've worked on.

Rachel: I could see that would be a huge nightmare given how many books you've narrated. Do you have a number right now?

Greg: 230 or something. I don't know. It's over 200, but I don't know where it is.

Rachel: The first time... Well, the only time Greg and I have met in person was at RT, which was really, really fun. And that was actually when I met Tara the first time.

Greg: Reno, right?

Tara: It was.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah. So, now, Greg, were you there to meet with... I know you were there with other narrators. Was it for the promotion part and reaching out to readers or was it more for the audiobook narrators that you were working with then?

Greg: I was there as part of the RomanceNarrators.com consortium. We were doing a general promotion and boosting. We did a couple of sessions for readers to come and ask questions and to even come up and try things out and try reading and talk about the process.

Most of us in my narration-colleague-friends group are very much of the sense that there is no useless promotion of audiobooks, that if we boost the industry, if we encourage and fertilize that, then it's helping all of us in some way. It's helping readers get better books. It's helping narrators get more work. It's helping authors find new ways to generate revenue streams, and to get followings, and to come up with new ideas.

So, I very much follow that "a rising tide lifts all boats" concept. And I really just enjoy promoting audiobooks when I go out. I actually was a little bit disappointed that Audible has changed their promotional code system where they're now unique to the book that you're giving out, because I really enjoyed just giving out promotional codes to people with a suggestion for a book that may or may not be one of mine and just saying, "Oh, my gosh, yes. Have you listened to Trevor Noah's 'Born a Crime'? Well, great. Here, go take a copy of it on me. Go listen. It's amazing."

Rachel: That book is amazing. In audio, there's no other way to read it. You got to hear it.

Greg: Oh, no. You got to hear Trevor do it. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's...

Tara: We'll have to hook you up with some sort of Kobo codes that you can be giving out for our audiobooks.

Stephanie: Absolutely.

Greg: I am an easy ambassador to get going. I just basically need some tools and the opportunity. And I tend to be out there going, "Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Have you read...?"

Tara: I wanted to ask you, Rachel, just about the marketing again. Do you approach it differently between audio and eBook or do you just sort of, "I'm promoting this book and here's all of the formats"?

Rachel: I tend to promote them together unless they're releasing at different times. And then when the audiobook releases, then do an audio push. I am not as great at the marketing end of the audiobooks as I'd like to be. I'm actually trying to work on getting some promos together where I can... I've been learning Photoshop, and my plan is... And partly it's just not having the time or the ability to make decent-looking graphics and everything. And my plan is to actually put together a series of graphics and do specific promotions where I'm promoting one backlist title per week. Maybe it'll be the eBook version. Maybe it'll be the audiobook version. But to do more individual highlighting of my work, but there's not enough time in the day is where I've been.

But now that I'm learning Photoshop, it's a lot easier, because trying to convey to somebody else... It's just that much easier if I can do it myself, because I know what works for me. But sometimes other people don't have the same graphic kind of vision. When I was using different graphics programs that didn't have a lot of abilities and things weren't going well, I would spend six hours creating a graphic and still have nothing to show for it. And graphics are what you need for promotion. You have to have a clicky image. It has to work on a level of the font and everything and so...

Greg: You have to slow the consumer down long enough to catch their interest.

Rachel: Yes, exactly.

Greg: The graphics has to be able to do that.

Rachel: Yes, exactly. And so...

Greg: I mean, it's the same in audiobooks. They won't play the sample if the graphic doesn't cause them to go home. You need that long just to stop the scroll for a second.

Rachel: And I've tried farming out graphic work, and the back and forth between getting it right, it takes so much of my time anyways that it was like, "Well, I just need to learn this myself." So, when I get that piece in place, I will be doing more focused promotion And here's a little secret. Because I've been learning Photoshop, I recently redid all of my Evidence series covers, and I did them myself. I didn't tell my readers that I did. So, if you're listening to this and you're a reader, I actually designed all those Evidence series covers myself, and they're all up on Kobo. You can check them out. And that was pretty exciting to be able to handle it all myself and be in control of the entire concept from beginning to end. And so that's why I'm excited, because moving forward, I can do more focused ad and marketing campaigns.

Tara: Nice.

Rachel: Because as Greg said, you've got to be clicky. You got to catch people's attention.

Greg: Are those the ones with the mirror? The first one's got the...

Rachel: The reflection, the concrete evidence.

Greg: The reflection of the...

Rachel: Yeah, yeah.

Greg: Those are yours?

Rachel: They are. In fact, all eight covers have... One of the themes that I have on all eight covers, if you look at them, you'll see they all have reflective water. And then they all have an overlay. There were a couple of themes I was looking at, and they all have an image of the scenery from the book. There's a setting.

Greg: Nice. Oh, those are sharp.

Rachel: Thank you.

Greg: Those are sharp. Well done.

Tara: What was the response to those covers, but then also a more general, kind of, like, what are the readers/listeners' response to the audiobooks and to Greg's narration? And what does it feel like when you're, kind of, getting those reviews coming in?

Rachel: Oh, it's been very fun to share the covers. But like I said, I didn't tell all the readers that I did them myself. It's targeting a different audience. All of the previous covers had a couple on the cover because I wanted to signal that it was a romance. And this time, I wanted to bring it in line with the Flashpoint series and feature more of the thriller element of the story.

And in a few months, I'm actually going to change all the Flashpoint covers to put either a couple or a man in front to signal romance. I'm just trying to target different audiences and everything. But it'll be a few months because Inferno only came out in June, so I want the series as a whole...

The hard part is I love the current covers. For marketing, it's important to switch it up. And as far as listener and reader response to the audiobooks, it's fabulous. I love reaching a different kind of reader that way. And Nicol Zanzarella has narrated the Evidence books, and Greg has done the Flashpoint books, and they're both amazing. And it's always really fun to read reviews where readers listen to the audio version, because I know that Greg and Nicol are bringing something else to the work. And usually, they get a better grade than I do. I've noticed that your narrators tend to get the higher score. But you know, that's because they're bringing the story to life. And total respect for that. It's fabulous.

Greg: The reality of narration, too, is that our real power lies in killing a story. When we do a good job, we will often get better reviews simply because we're getting out of the story's way enough that people can actually focus on the story. And so they tend to start sort of picking the story apart a little bit more. When we've done a terrible job, we just drag everything down because they didn't get into the story. They didn't like the performance. So, everything goes down. But it's fun.

So, Nicol and I are good friends and were before we started working on Rachel's books, which was kind of delightful because now we have an author in common. It's a little bit like having a new in-law. I'm like, "You did Rachel's books."

Rachel: We're family.

Greg: "Oh, that's so great." She's out on the West Coast, I'm on the East Coast, but we catch up.

Rachel: We almost got her to come to Reno.

Greg: We did, yeah. She's doing a whole sort of self-reinvention of a bunch of stuff right now and just doing some really great things. I'm totally happy for her, and she's still an actor.

Stephanie: Anjd I guess my last question is, what are you guys working on next?

Rachel: I'm working on an Evidence book. So, it'll be the ninth book in the series. And that's all I'm going to say about it because I haven't told readers who the hero is going to be.

Tara: You've already given us one secret today. I think that's enough.

Rachel: Yeah, exactly.

Greg: I guess I can't tell you one thing I'm working on next because...

Tara: Can we not get in with like a …

Greg: I wish. I have asked if I may tell people that I'm recording it and I expect to hear a positive on that one. So, especially people who enjoy YA, keep your eyes on my Twitter feed in the next 48 hours hopefully. But the next but one book that I'll be recording is called "Azimuth." It is science fiction with some romance back notes for Arshad Ahsanuddin. It is the second book in his Interscission Project series, which is really some really tight, crunchy sci-fi time travel space opera kind of all blended together.

Rachel: I love science fiction romance, so I'm going to be writing this down.

Greg: I think "Zenith" is out or "Zenith" is about to be out.

Rachel: Okay, I'll check that out. Is it available at Kobo?

Greg: I don't think so but I don't... Okay, Zenith...

Tara: All right, we'll edit this out.

Stephanie: We'll see, we'll see.

Rachel: Okay, sorry.

Stephanie: No, no, that's fine.

Greg: Yeah, The Interscission Project Book 1 "Zenith" is out. I don't know if it's on Kobo or not. I know we did it through ACX, but it's not an Audible-exclusive, so I don't know.

Stephanie: We may have it.

Tara: It probably is.

Stephanie: All right. Thank you guys so much. This has been...

Greg: Thanks for having us on.

Rachel: Thank you. Thank you. This was great.

Tara: This was really fun. Thanks, guys.

Thank you for listening to the "Kobo ReWriting Life Podcast." If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe, and be sure to follow us on socials. We are @KoboWritingLife on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Twitter.

This episode was hosted by Stephanie McGrath and Tara Cremin with production by Terrence Abrahams. Editing is provided by Kelly Robotham and our theme music as always was composed by Tear Jerker. If you're ready to start your publishing journey, sign up today at kobo.com/writinglife. Until next time, happy writing.