Audiobooks Are Rising

And as an author, I love doing them

I've been spending a few days at Penguin’s very smart headquarters in London on the south bank of the Thames, recording the audio version of my new book, Tank.

They've got several studios and they've made quite an investment, because in this day and age for a major publisher like Penguin, audiobooks are an important part of what they're doing, and increasingly so.

Audiobook sales are estimated to have been worth £1bn last year in the UK, and there are some territories, for example, in Scandinavia, where more people are consuming works via audiobook than through the physical variety.

It's still a little more limited than that in the UK, and particularly so in the area of non-fiction. People love a good novel on their audiobook player or their iPhone or whatever they're using to play it. Non-fiction, it's a bit more of an open question, and for many authors, it only amounts to more than, say, 5 to 10% of our income on that type of title.

But I've decided to commit to audiobooks, particularly since I left the BBC and my life became a bit more predictable and I’m able to schedule the necessary recordings. They make the work accessible to those who might not be able to read - or simply prefer to listen on their commute. It’s definitely financially worthwhile too. There's a publisher of audiobooks called Twelve Point and they've gone into my backlist.

So last autumn I recorded some of my older books for them, ones about the SAS and covert operations, Big Boys Rules and Task Force Black. Now I'm doing Tank, the new book that's coming out in June with Penguin, about the history of that fighting vehicle.

And then once I've done that, I'm very happy to say that Twelve Point, based on the early sales of the ones they've already done, are getting me to record Rifles, which is about the 95th Rifles in the Peninsular War and the Tank War, which follows one British armoured regiment through the Second World War.

So by the time I've done those, seven of my books will be available in audiobook format, and I'm really pleased about that. It's something I've had to commit fair bit of time to, but I think it's really worth it.

Each book takes three to four days in the studio, and these are long hours sitting at the microphone. At the end of it, you emerge physically rather stiff and achy, all talked out and rather knackered.

Once at the mic, you realize that the way one writes a book is quite different from the way you write a script for broadcast. And that's constantly whirring away in my head as I'm sitting there doing these recordings.

So, a typical TV or radio script will have shorter sentences and fewer sub clauses. And as I'm sitting there reading, I think about those differences.

When you see a text that you haven't read for many years, like Big Boys Rules, it’s like greeting a long-lost friend. The act of reading aloud what was only ever in your head is not always a positive feeling. At times there's a little voice inside my head saying, ‘oh, why did I write this this way?’ Or even ‘this is tortuous repetitive shite!’ Rest assured I am my own harshest critic.

But often, I'm pleased to say the little voice in my head is speaking with great enthusiasm, and I'm saying things to myself like, ‘wow, this is good, this is like galloping through fields of billowing wheat’.

Of course, I think it's fair to say that novels are best suited to the audiobook treatment and to being read by great actors, and that's why that segment of the of the audiobook market is dominant currently. But factual books are an important part of it too.

And the reason I feel that it's been the right thing to do, to make a commitment to recording these books from my backlist, is that I think that as an author of nonfiction books, if I'm writing about special forces in Iraq in 2006, or tanks moving across the plains of Russia in 1943 or whatever I'm writing about, as the author, I have the best sense of where the emphasis should be on particular words or phrases in the sentences.

And so I'm really happy to do the reading myself. In fact, I think it's really important that I read them.

And I regard it in a way, and this is a little bit curious and perhaps part of the vanity of the author, an important part of having some sort of legacy. I really like the idea that in years to come, people will be able to listen to these as well as read them and that they’ll hear them in my voice.

There are some questions of taste and approach when you're doing an audiobook.So, for example, you quickly think, when you're reading a passage about the Second World War, should I be doing German accents in that sort of slightly ‘Allo Allo’ way? Or should I do it more subtly? Or should I just read the quotes in my conventional speaking voice?

I tend to opt for a sort of mild form of foreign or regional accent as a way of differentiating the different speakers and trying to get across the sort of people quite subtly that I think they were. The next one I've got to do once I finish the Tank book is Rifles. That'll take me back to the early 1800s in Portugal and Spain. It’s a book I wrote 20+ years ago about an evocative period of history. Can’t wait!