A guide for nonfiction authors, coaches, speakers, and entrepreneurs—featuring Narrator Todd Eflin.
Audiobooks are becoming wildly popular, particularly for readers of non-fiction. And while fiction audiobook listeners tend to prefer the dulcet tones of trained narrators, non-fiction readers love to hear the book spoken in the author’s own voice.
Fortunately, with today’s tools and technology, it’s easier than ever to narrate your own audiobook.
I sat down with narrator Todd Eflin to talk about:
- why it’s so important to have your books in audio (accessibility, says this one-eyed pirate!)
- what setup do you need to record audiobooks in your own home
- and why learning to tell our own stories is so important in the age of AI
Watch the full interview, or read the Q&A version below.
Todd Eflin is an audiobook narrator and the creator of DIYaudiobooks.substack.com, a Substack newsletter for authors who want to record their own books. His 3-Step guide covers time, terminology, technology, and storytelling for first-time narrators. Download it here.
Interview: How to Narrate Your Own Audiobook with Todd Eflin
Why Your Audiobook Should Sound Like You: A Q&A with Narrator Todd Eflin
Jessie: Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you get into audiobooks?
Todd: My background is radio. I started right out of college — people always said I had a radio voice. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I took a class or two my first semester, wound up working at the school radio station, and it just kind of grew from there. If you’re familiar with the theme song from WKRP — “up and down the dial” — that’s pretty much how it’s been. I’ve been from 89.1 to 107.9, bottom to top of the dial, always using my voice on air, doing commercials, interviews, all of that.
Almost ten years ago, a couple of buddies of mine in California started narrating audiobooks. They asked if I’d be interested in learning how. I’d heard of books on tape and CD — I’d listened to some — but narrating them was new to me. It’s long-form audio as opposed to commercials, which are short-form. It takes a different stamina, a different approach. The idea that I could have my own studio at home and do this on the side, in addition to radio — I started doing it and loved it. This November will be ten years.
Jessie: You do have a voice for radio.
Todd: It’s helped open some doors. It’s also gotten me in trouble a time or two — especially in school, when the teacher could always hear who was whispering.
A great voice is helpful, but it’s not imperative. There are many, many audiobook narrators that don’t have “that voice,” and that’s okay. How they use it is more important than what it sounds like.
Jessie: I think a lot of nonfiction readers want to hear the book narrated by the author themselves. It’s different than fiction. I don’t necessarily need Stephen King to read me his novel, but I do want to hear James Clear read me his book. So if people are watching this thinking, “Oh, I hate my voice” — that doesn’t matter as much, right?
Todd: Exactly right. It’s more natural for someone writing a how-to, a memoir, a professional book. They may also be doing podcasting, guest appearances, conference speaking. They’re a little more familiar with using their voice already. And it makes sense to say, “Hey, I wrote the book. I’d like to be the voice of the book, because it’s part of my brand.”
Even if you don’t have a radio voice, you probably have a voice a lot of people already like listening to. Think of the audience of a podcast. Think of the audience at a conference. They like your voice.
Jessie: Let’s back up: Why should an author even have an audiobook to begin with?
Todd: It’s growing so fast. Back in our early days, we could only get the paperback book, then along came this magical little thing called the ebook. And now audio — because it’s so easily accessible, and because the performances can be so compelling — more and more people are saying, “I get the audiobook first,” or “I get the audiobook with the print book,” so I can go back and forth.
So one reason is accessibility for a broader audience. If you’re a professional who’s written a book, and somebody else has written a similar book and turned theirs into an audiobook, and your reader likes audiobooks — they’re probably getting the sale, not you. You may be missing some of an audience.
But probably my favorite answer is this: it’s a chance for somebody to hear your real voice.
They can read your words, but when they hear you say your words, it comes across a lot differently. It makes a different impact, especially for people who are more auditory.
Jessie: I had an eye injury a few years ago and couldn’t read books while I was recovering. Reading is the thing I do for fun. So I just dove into audiobooks. That accessibility piece is just so important — it was wonderful to have that option to immerse in some of my favorite authors and get comfort in a really hard time.
Next, I want to ask you about your setup. You’re clearly in your studio.
If an author was going to narrate their own audiobook, what do they need?
Todd: I’ve been in professional studios for many years, so when I started my own at home, I asked all the questions: “Do I really want to build my own? What would it take? How much would it cost?” What I learned through friends and trial and error is that to be a narrator at home, you don’t have to buy a high-dollar professional studio. That’s one of the big mistakes people make — either doing that, or believing they have to.
I don’t have a professional built studio, but I’ve been successful using this. If I’m going to coach somebody, I want to show them my setup so they can do something similar without that high-dollar cost.
What I’m using now used to be a guest bathroom that we don’t use. It’s the perfect size. I’m not using all the professional gear, at least not the stuff you’d see — the foam, the cones, the dramatic black soundproofing.
I’ve got that strategically placed in the most reflective points, but I’ve covered them up with things I like to see. I have a blanket of my favorite football team in front of me. Behind me is a quilt that my wife, my mom, and my mother-in-law all collaborated on — it’s a Colorado design with a mountain, the sun, and snow. They made it just for me, and I use it as sound-absorbing material.
People at home can do the same kind of thing using blankets, pillows, quilts, blackout curtains. Things that deaden the sound of your voice — because your voice is energy, and it bounces off the wall and comes back. If it bounces off my screen, then the wall in front of me, then the wall beside me, then behind me, and comes back to the microphone, there are milliseconds of delay. That’s where you get that tinny echo effect.
Want to test this at home? Go into your bathroom and talk out loud. Then go into your walk-in closet and talk out loud. Two totally different rooms. The bathroom has nothing but hard surfaces — counter, tile, walls — sound reverberates everywhere. In the walk-in closet, you’ve got hanging clothes, folded clothes, probably carpet or a nice rug, because who wants to walk on cold tile first thing in the morning? Soft surfaces deflect and absorb.
So if you’re going to start recording, use your walk-in closet. Or build a space that has some absorbent material. You don’t have to cover your walls entirely like I did, but you can strategically place things to minimize that echo. You can also get closer to your microphone — that makes a difference too. A lot of people on videos, their microphone is two and a half feet away because it’s on the screen. All that separation creates ambient noise. That’s fine for a podcast or a Zoom call — but not for an audiobook.
Jessie: My fiction narrator for my sci-fi books had his studio in his walk-in closet, draped in blankets. At one point — I’m in Portland, Oregon — it was pretty warm one summer, and he posted a photo of himself recording, drenched in sweat, because he couldn’t have the AC on. He was like, “But I finished the book.” And I was like, JS, that was my book you were working on. Don’t kill yourself! I’m not in that much of a rush.
Todd: Yeah, airflow is a problem. Professional studios build that in. I have the same issue. I don’t have airflow when I’m working — I still have the bathroom fan, so I turn that on between sessions to draw air in and exhaust warm air out. But while I’m recording, I don’t, because the fan alone makes room noise. Nobody wants to hear, “Oh, that’s the bathroom fan.”
This space is about six by four internally. Just a nice size. Gives enough room for the sound waves to bounce around a little and die before they get back to the microphone. But you can use a walk-in closet, or a corner of a room. I’ve seen people build something in a corner used as a normal office desk, then hang curtains from a clothesline or fishing line from the ceiling. When you want to record, draw those behind you so it makes a little rectangle. When you’re done, push them back. The space is usable for other things.
You’re not going to record your audiobook in one day.
You might need several sessions over a number of days, and you want to come back to the same space and have it sound the same. Sometimes when I listen to audiobooks, I can tell when they started a new day — their energy is higher, or something’s different. You don’t want a dramatic difference between one chapter and the next.
Jessie: Any advice on equipment? Do you need a super fancy microphone, or will a decent $100 one get you by?
Todd: One of the mistakes that’s easy to make is thinking you have to buy the $1,000 or $1,500 microphone, because that’s what everybody recommends. They’re very good. I wish I had one. But if you take a really good microphone and put it in a not-so-good room, it picks up every flaw. You’ll have to tweak everything in post-production because it’ll pick up things you didn’t even hear until you played it back. A really good microphone can make you sound really good — or really not so good — unless you have a really good room.
So what I learned was to use a pretty decent condenser microphone. I’m not auditioning for a national Ford commercial or Disney. I’m not competing in that. If I were, I’d need the professional studio and the $1,500 Neumann. But as an audiobook narrator, especially doing one or two or three books of your own, you don’t need all that. The one I typically recommend is in the $150 to $175 range, depending on when and where you buy it. You can spend two or three hundred and get something that works beautifully.
I wouldn’t get a Blue Yeti or a gaming microphone — especially the headsets. They record audio, but they don’t have a clean sound. Every microphone produces its own internal electronic noise, and cheap ones use inexpensive parts. They’re fine for podcasts, gaming, Zoom calls. But it’s much harder to get the sound quality that places like Audible require to put your book at retail.
I get calls from authors whose audio has been rejected for sound quality, asking if I can help fix it. Most of the time, no. There are only so many magical things you can do. Usually I recommend: get a decent room, get a decent mic, and re-record. Honestly, your second recording will be better anyway, because you’ve gone through the whole process. You’re more relaxed, more comfortable, you’ll read it better the second time. They don’t believe me until they do it.
Jessie: I’ve definitely found that. I recorded a 30-minute video for a course once — got to the end, “Oh, thank God, I’m finally done!” — and I had not hit record. Had to do the whole thing again. And you know what? It was much better the second time. I hit all my lines better.
Todd: What you did was rehearse it. Now you were familiar and comfortable with it. The same words come out of your mouth differently the second time because of that familiarity. That’s exactly what happens.
I usually recommend testing your audio. Record fifteen minutes and make it exactly like it’s supposed to be. Don’t record three hours and then find out you can’t use any of it.
Jessie: Once the audio is recorded, what’s the next step?
Todd: You can go both ways. Some folks record the audio and send it to someone else for the mastering, editing, and post-production — taking out little hiccups, minimizing sounds you don’t want, boosting the ones you do, doing the equalization. Sound engineers are perfect for that.
You can also do some things yourself. Very simple things. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds and start experimenting — and I say go for it if you’re curious — but do that before you record your book. Test, play with it, find something you like. Then in the program I use, you can make macros: “I want to do these five steps in this order.” Run that macro on every file before you upload, and they all process the same way.
You do want to proof-listen for missed words, missed paragraphs, doubled paragraphs, clicks, pops, weird sounds. Since we don’t have soundproof studios, you’ll hear the neighbor’s dog sometimes. You didn’t hear it while recording, but you hear it on playback. Fix those areas as best you can.
Make it as good as you possibly can. Like with book editing — you don’t turn out slop for somebody to read. That’s disrespectful, in my opinion. Don’t do the same thing with audio. They’re paying money to hear your work. Make it worth what they’re paying for.
Jessie: You sent me the 3-Step Guide to Create Your Own Audiobook — a checklist for authors about the studio setup, the type of mic, the tech, etc. People can get it here.
Where else can people find more about you and your work?
Todd: I do a newsletter called DIY Audiobooks on Substack where I talk about where I think everybody needs to start: the time it takes to record audio, the terminology you need to know (instead of the hundred things you don’t), the technology — including the microphone and the studio space — and then the storytelling, the actual narrating of it.
A lot of people like to DIY. I do. But I’ve learned to say: you don’t have to L-I-Y. You can DIY, but don’t learn it yourself.
Get some help from other great consultants and coaches. You’re a writing coach — you understand. Somebody comes to you and says, “I need help with this.” Same idea. You help people get their words on paper. I help them take those words and turn them into audio.
Jessie: That has been one of the biggest lessons of my life — that you don’t have to figure everything out on your own. Whether that’s going on YouTube to learn how to build a cabinet, or — the last couple of years, I hired a fitness coach. I was like, “I can figure out how to work out.” But since I started working with her, I have not injured myself working out, which I was constantly doing. I was lifting weights wrong, running incorrectly, hurting myself. I was like, oh, I did need to learn this. I did need someone to teach me.
Todd: All teaching, all instructing and coaching, is about showing somebody, “Let’s do it this way. Here’s what you’re struggling with. I’ve got an idea. Give this a try.” So many people come to you ready to pull their hair out, overwhelmed, ready to quit. And finding peace in the middle of that — it’s like being on the ocean for weeks and then seeing land.
Jessie: My favorite calls are the ones where the coaching client starts off saying, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know how I’ll ever do this — what am I even doing on a call with you?” And by the end, they’re like, “Okay, I’ll get you that chapter next week.” And I’m like, yeah, you will. I know you will.
How Storytelling Makes us Human
Todd: I wanted to ask you about something I read on your website. You call it selling story. Can you share what you mean by that? (Article: Stories vs. Selling Stories)
Jessie: The stories we tell for entertainment — you can also tell for sales and marketing. A good story has all the same elements. But a good selling story is one you’re telling to make a specific point and have your listener take a specific action — sign up for my newsletter, buy my product, hire me, whatever. So it also needs a really good call to action at the end. But to get to where that call to action makes sense, the story has to resonate with the audience in the right way first.
Todd: So storytelling in and of itself may not necessarily sell something — it may just entertain. You can sell without storytelling, and you can storytell without selling. Selling story combines them with a specific end result in mind. You gear the story along a narrative arc to reach a particular point so they make a decision.
Most people who don’t know story tell events in chronological order. “And then he said, and I was like, and then she says…” It can get a little dry and drawn out and boring. You need to know the craft.
I’m pretty good at narrating other people’s writing. I’m fascinated by talking to writers, because I learn so much about the craft — the frameworks, the outlines, the backstories, not telling everything chronologically. Sometimes you start at a midpoint. There’s this B-A-B-C kind of structure — you start out with part B, then transition to the background, then bring it back to now and finally to what comes next.
Jessie: Yeah. I haven’t heard it expressed as B-A-B-C exactly, but that makes total sense. A lot of books are written that way — start in the middle of a scene, then “you may be wondering how we got here.” Or the TV shows that flash “three weeks earlier.”
Todd: Same kind of thing. You also wrote about writing 2,000 words per hour. I narrate about 9,300 words for an hour of finished audio. That’s the industry average. I came out of radio, where we talked way too fast — getting as many words as we could into 15 seconds over a song intro, or fitting a 32-second commercial into 29 and a half. When I went into audiobooks, it was slam on the brakes. I’d highlight 155 words on the page, which is the average per minute, and practice reading it over and over until I got the feel and the rhythm.
But 2,000 words per hour, writing — to me, since I type about 40 words a minute, sounds like a lot. How do you do that?
Jessie: Dictation.
Todd: Oh, I was wondering if you were going to say that.
Jessie: I started training myself to dictate years ago because I wanted to get away from the computer. We’re always staring at screens too much as writers. I wanted to be able to go for a walk and tell a story. So I trained myself. This came in very handy when I couldn’t stare at a screen during the peak of my eye injury. But at this point I’ve kind of retrained my brain — it’s my preferred mode for writing first drafts now. I’ll go for a walk and tell myself the story. Or, if it’s a blog post, I’ll jot down five points I want to make and then go for a walk, or use a dictation tool on my computer called Wispr Flow. I dictate almost everything now.
Fiction has more of a learning curve — there’s a lot more about evoking a scene and being in another character’s voice. But for nonfiction, I’m so much faster in my own voice, and it doesn’t come out as stilted. I had a client recently who was getting really frustrated trying to write her stories down. I said, “Just tell them. Speak it into a recorder.” I gave her some apps. She came back, the first chapter she sent me — you could tell she’d dictated a lot of it, but it was in her voice. And it was great.
Todd: You probably find yourself editing less as you’re speaking. I’ve talked to people who write and then immediately go back and review what they just wrote, wanting to change it all. They lose the flow. By telling the story aloud, you don’t edit yourself as you go. You edit later.
Jessie: There are a couple of ways I do it. Wispr Flow (affiliate link) types things out as you’re speaking — voice-to-text on your laptop. I also use transcription apps where I just go for a walk, record a long audio file, come back, upload it, and it transcribes. Audio quality matters less because nobody else has to listen to it.
Though — I’ve definitely had moments where I’m like, “Oh, why is that section messed up? Oh, I was walking over the highway.”
Todd: A walk in the woods might be preferable.
Jessie: Though somewhere with no other hikers, especially if you’re writing a thriller. “And then she picked up the gun and he slashed at her with a knife. Oh — hi! Hi!”
Todd: I’m going to look into that. I do a little newsletter writing, and I am so cumbersome with my fingers on a keyboard. I keep going back to edit as I go — I want to bold this, I want to indent that — instead of just getting the words down. But when I talk, I get the words there.
Jessie: Dictation would be so perfect for you. Wispr Flow.
Todd: I’m glad we talked. So when you say 2,000 words, is that a complete draft or first draft?
Jessie: First draft. For a thriller novel, that’s about a chapter. My thrillers tend to have chapters around 2,000 to 2,500 words. I can dictate a chapter in an hour and then go back and revise.
Todd: Five of those in a five-hour day — you’ve got an entire hour of finished audio.
Do you start with an idea or know where you want to go? An outline in your head, on scrap paper? Or do you just walk and see where it goes?
Jessie: Both. I normally outline my books pretty heavily, so I know what I want to happen. Same with a blog post — here’s the topic, here’s three things, I’ll jot it down. The more I’ve done it, the more I’m able to just say, “Okay, I want to talk about this today,” and brain-dump a pretty decent draft. Even with fiction — I can be like, Alright, we’re in this scenario, she needs to do this, what’s going to happen? — and just tell myself the story. That took a long time to build up.
Todd: You’re a ghostwriter as well as a coach and an author. When you’re ghostwriting, do you do all the interviews and then turn that material into a book? Or do you encourage clients to do their own dictation and send you a rough draft?
Jessie: I’ve done it both ways. My preference is very much interviews. That way, if they say something I don’t understand, I can go deeper. I can get clarification.
One thing about being a ghostwriter — I’m normally not a subject-matter expert in whatever the topic is. So I’m kind of a stand-in for the reader, who also isn’t an expert. That’s why they’re reading the book. I can be like, “Alright, slow down on that. I don’t get it.” And they’re like, “Okay.” Because as the expert, they don’t often see the gaps. When people have dictated chapters to me instead, there’s a lot more back-and-forth afterward — “I need more information here, more here.”
Todd: That makes sense. If they just dictate, you’d have to follow up with the same questions anyway. What’s your interview process like when you’re shaping the book?
Jessie: There’s an upfront process where we’re figuring the book out together. Some authors come to me with a book proposal and an outline — they just need the book written. But if someone comes with just an idea, we talk about who their audience is, what their goal is, what they want people to do afterward. Is it join their program? Hire them as a consultant? Just change their life and live better?
We figure out the whole book, come up with a fairly detailed outline, and then when we get to the actual writing, we talk through it. “Chapter one, we wanted to write about this. Tell me about it. Okay, I have some questions. Now tell me about the next part.”
Todd: So you’re gleaning information from their expertise. And going back to selling story — you’re drawing stories out of them, with a particular angle in mind.
Jessie: Yeah. As we go through the outline, they’ll say, “Here’s a piece of my framework I like to teach.” And I’m like, “Okay, tell me a story about somebody you taught that to and how it affected them.” A lot of my clients are coaches, so I’ll be like, “Tell me about one of your clients and how this process worked.” Or stories from their past — “How did you come up with this framework? What was the impetus?”
Some of my clients are natural storytellers. They love it. But I had one client recently who doesn’t do a lot of personal storytelling. He’s been writing blog posts for years, but you go back through them, and he rarely talks about himself. I was like, “Dude, we need a little bit more here.” And he knew it — we were both very aware of the issue. He’d say, “Alright, I have to come up with a story now, don’t I?” And I’m like, “Yep. I’ll help you. I’ll poke at your past. We’ll find something.”
Todd: Most of us have gotten where we are by way of a story, but sometimes it needs to be drawn out. People may not be natural storytellers, or they think their stories aren’t anything anybody wants to listen to. “What’s interesting about me? Who’d want to listen to my fishing trip with my dad when I was nine?” Well — maybe a lot of people.
Jessie: I’m ghostwriting a memoir right now, and this guy is very much a natural storyteller. It just feels like you’re sitting across the table from him. “Oh, and then this other time, and then this time, and oh my gosh, this!” I have the opposite problem — we can’t put everything in, we have to pick and choose which is the best story.
Todd: Gives you a lot of material to work with, though.
Storytelling — whether on paper or in audio — differentiates us from the synthetic. It makes us really who we are. I guess you can mimic that, but —
Jessie: It feels like mimicry.
Todd: It feels synthetic. It feels fake. I’m not trying to disparage the use of AI — there’s probably a lot of powerful things we can do faster. But the stories ought to be real. The voice ought to be real. Because that real is what connects our humanity together. We’re real people connecting in this particular time and space, and you can’t fake that.
I love science fiction. The book I was telling you about, where I had to start the whole hour over because of a studio problem — it’s a six-part science fiction series. Feels like an old west set in space. I loved it. So much fun, because I could do anything with the character voices. All of it is fantasy, made up. But the connections between the characters felt real. Their interactions, their relationships, how they grew closer or further apart over the course of the stories — all of that was based on real things. That’s what people want to connect with.
So you draw stories out of these people who say I don’t have any stories — or I have too many — and find that golden nugget. The ones that connect with their audience. Not just a bunch of facts in chronological order. Do this, then do this, then do this, like a recipe.
Jessie: Right. That’s not as interesting. I write nonfiction, I coach nonfiction, but I still write thrillers — fast-paced science fiction. I want to write a page-turner. That’s what I want to read. Even if it’s a self-help book, I want it to grip me. I want there to be stories. I want to want to turn the page. That’s why I’m so big on storytelling — to keep people interested.
Todd: My fascination with story goes back to fifth grade, and Mrs. Shockey. Every day after lunch, she’d have us sit on the floor, and she’d read to us out loud. This is why I like story out loud — I first heard The Hobbit, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and The Phantom Tollbooth. I was fascinated. I’d go home and read them on my own.
I didn’t go that route for years because I did radio. But when the idea of narrating was presented to me, it was like — well, that just seems natural. Telling story out loud, whether it’s a selling story, a personal story, or some anecdote that can make an impact on somebody else’s life — even if it’s in outer space.
The stories of our own lives are very often identified in the stories that we read or see or hear. We identify with a particular character, that particular storyline. When I had kids, I read those same stories to them, so they could turn around and read them as well.
As a ski instructor, one of my goals is to pass along the same passion for the sport that I have, so someone else can enjoy it as much as I do for the rest of their life. I bring that same idea into narrating — that I can pass along some ability for someone to share their story out loud with the rest of the world, and enjoy it as much as I do.
Jessie: That’s definitely why I’ve gotten into ghostwriting and coaching. It’s a process I love to do for myself, and I just love seeing more of us telling our own stories.
Todd: Passing that along. That’s the why. That’s why we do what we do.