The Many Voices of Adara Astin

(Originally published November 12, 2021)

If you’re interested in hiring an audiobook narrator, at the end of this article, there’s a brief section on audition etiquette and advice on writing with an audiobook in mind.

When you choose to read a book, what format do you prefer: print, ebook, or audiobook? If you’re a reader, chances are you’re reading print, but a growing part of the market is dedicated to ebooks and audiobooks. In the first half of 2019, consumer print book sales rose 2.5%, ebooks fell by 4%. And while audiobooks still have a smaller share of the market, their sales increased 34% during the same period. The trend continued in 2020 and it shows no sign of stopping.

It’s easy to see why. Audiobooks are convenient. You can listen to them while completing mundane tasks. Before the pandemic, almost three-quarters of listeners enjoyed audiobooks while in their cars. Audiobooks are also great for accessibility. They provide options for people with visual impairments and certain learning disabilities.

There’s no way to produce consistent, high-quality audio for high-frequency publications like periodicals, journals, and newspapers. Those are perfect places for text-to-speech (TTS) and AI narration. These tools can fill the gaps for books that haven’t been narrated yet, but nothing is as good as an actual person who understands the nuances of human speech.

The shortcomings of things like TTS can become VERY obvious when reading a sex scene. For example, let’s take this excerpt from Firefighter Love by Kelsie Calloway.

James closes the gap between us, cupping my ass with one hand and letting the other roam free across my body. His lips find my throat and he leaves a trail of kisses from my collarbone up to my earlobe. When his teeth graze the lobe of my ear, I shudder with delight.

I recorded two tracks of this being read by TTS. The first is the default voice, and the second is what I call my robotic Irish lass. While everyone has their own thing, I don’t find Siri reading a sex scene particularly enjoyable. My robotic Irish lass is only marginally better. The final recording is what it sounds like when read by a flesh and blood person. I don’t know about you, but I much prefer the sound of the final option. Compare them for yourself:

• Default TTS reading erotica
• Robotic Irish Lass TTS reading erotica
• Real human being reading erotica

That last voice you hear is audiobook narrator Adara Astin. You may know her by some different names as well: Astin uses several pseudonyms to help separate the genres she records to make it easier for her audience to find what they want. Adara Astin is her “pen name” for erotica, and she uses Eden Cavell for romance.

She has a few additional names for the other genres she narrates. But she keeps those separate from sexual stories “out of branding consideration for my authors.” Some writers don’t want their names within six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon of books featuring cunnilingus and cream pies.

What draws someone into making a career out of reading sweet and steamy stories? It may be because some of her relationships could easily be the plot of a romance novel. In no particular order she:

• Has been met at stage doors by admirers with arms full of roses and amorous intentions.
• Was pursued by an embassy employee in a situation that had diplomatic ramifications.
• Was proposed to by a millionaire, multiple times.
• Was caught in a love triangle between real-life rivals.
• Has been the recipient of glorious declarations and romantic gestures.

“Best of all, I’ve been in incredible slow-burn romances and impossible star-crossed grand passions.”

But it’s not her love life that makes her an ideal narrator for romance and erotica — that would be her varied work history. Not only has she had audiobook experience, but she also has a background in acting, voice-over, improvisation, comedy, directing, and technical work. She’s fluent in several languages. “Thanks to my singing background, I have basic proficiency in several others. I am thrilled when a book text includes dialogue in multiple languages.”

Picking Up the Mic

She returned to audiobook narration after the pandemic hit. “I needed to retool several areas of my life and wanted a safe way to work from home.” So, she set up her own sound booth and started recording. But making audiobooks is more than just reading in front of a microphone.

I’m not “reading the book out loud,” as a friend once commented, which made me laugh; I’m performing the book, and there’s a difference. Audiobook narration is similar to translation: I take the source material and transform it into a new creation.

As with most performers, she has to audition for the part — though less and less as she establishes herself. Astin now has repeat clients and a growing number of authors who are reaching out to her for collaborations. Astin says it “is a wonderful way to start a professional relationship and extremely validating.”

Once she’s secured a project, she prepares the manuscript for recording. She starts by reading the whole text to herself “both to get a sense of it and to look for performer challenges.”

And some of those challenges are more difficult than others. Her fiction catalog primarily features fully characterized solo narration. That means she not only takes on the voice of the narrator — who may or may not be a character in the story — but a separate voice for every character who makes an appearance. This includes those who only have a few lines of dialogue. “The largest cast I’ve narrated so far was about 26 characters, all with different voices, for a romance novel, Backstage by Abbey Foxx, which I narrated under the name Alana Thicke.”

Backstage’s challenges didn’t end with the number of voices. Like any actor, staying in character is essential, but it can be difficult on occasion. In an early chapter, the lead characters — Ryan and Sophie — are rehearsing for a stage play, and the director thinks they lack on-stage passion. So, he has them repeatedly say to each other, “I want to fuck you.”

I spent a shift in the sound booth saying “I want to fuck you” out loud, to myself, in three different character voices, two of them male, while locked alone in the house in the pandemic! There’s some great comedy in Abbey Foxx’s writing in the first place, and the situation was so utterly absurd that I was almost crying laughing by the end.

Beyond the fun of just saying “I want to fuck you” to herself in different voices, Astin finds particular pleasure in narrating male characters. “It’s a fun glimpse of the world from a male point of view. It turns out it raises my spirits to be a cocky, swaggering romantic hero a few hours at a time in the sound booth.”

And it has to be a few hours at a time. “I can record at top quality vocal production for two hours a day, after which my voice quality degrades significantly.” To meet tight deadlines, she can sometimes split her day into two shifts with a break in between. But she risks straining her voice, and then she must take several days off to recover. “It’s a balancing act. The recording work is intensely physical and tiring.”

She does what she calls “punch and roll edits” as she’s performing. If she catches an error while recording, she backs up and fixes it then. (Such as removing hysterical laughter during ridiculous situations.) It saves her editing time later but slows down the recording process. “I average 15 minutes of usable raw recording from a one-hour recording session, although sometimes more, depending on the complexity of the text.”

But her workday is far from over when she turns off the microphone. Even though her recording process saves her some editing time later, she still has work to do. “After I record, I manually edit the files to remove breathing sounds, mouse click noises, and pacing issues, like large gaps when I’m turning a page.” She listens for errors and will sometimes go back to her booth for spot fixes. Once she has that done, she sends the project off to a professional sound engineer.

Altogether, it takes about six to eight hours of labor to produce one finished hour of audiobook. And that’s not counting the initial audition process, communication with authors, audiobook promotions, or administrative work.

It’s a lot to do, but she enjoys it and, “I look for ways to improve my performance with every project.” Each one has its own charms and challenges. “I love doing robot voices! It’s great fun when a book calls for voices that are out of the ordinary.” She had a lot of fun “creating differently-pitched voices for characters as they’re shrinking to different sizes in macrophilia stories by Amber Collins.”

And after the huge character roster for Backstage, she says one of the other audiobooks that most tested her skills was The Trouble With Angels by Maggie Adams. The story is about an MFM ménage à trois, which meant she had two male voices to do in almost every scene, “who needed very different voices, low in my vocal range.” And for an added hurdle, “in the epilogue, Maggie has one character put on a fake accent, which the other character copies to make fun of him — that’s layer-on-layer of actor challenge!” She also enjoyed recording The Trouble With Angels because, “It’s a sweet romantic comedy, and it’s always fun to get to flex my comedy skills.”

Sometimes she gets to be utterly shameless in her performance. “The most outrageous erotic audiobook I’ve recorded so far was Bitch Like Me: An Erotic FemDomme Tale by Crystal Wylde.” The story is written from the point of view of a dominatrix who runs an elite gentlemen’s club. “I worked up a really fun, sultry, sexy voice that’s absolutely over the top and was tremendous fun to record.”

Labors of Love

For all her talent, Astin is still plagued by the common problem of many adult content creators. She understands that some people, for whatever reason, can’t rave about their favorite erotica and romance books publicly. There’s not an easy way to review books on Amazon without tying back to your main profile, which may have your day job name attached. Some people can’t have their name above a review praising an audiobook with dicksucking and double penetration.

But that means that when listeners do feel comfortable to actively support my work — writing reviews, recommending it to friends, talking it up on social media, engaging with my social media content — their support makes a big impact.

She earns royalties for some of her work. Even if she doesn’t, the exposure ups her profile, opening up more job opportunities. So “when listeners take a moment to leave a kind word on Audible, they are helping more than they can possibly imagine — and not just helping me, but the authors I work with as well.”

And Astin loves the writers she collaborates with. “I work with extremely talented authors, and I learn about the craft and business of writing from them every day.” It has inspired some ideas of her own. She says that “Being a narrator feels like getting paid to do an MFA. It would be a shame to let everything I’m learning go to waste, and I don’t rule out doing some writing myself in the future.”

But for now, audiobook narration “scratches the creative itch for me.” She sees performing other people’s stories to be an “absolute privilege.” Astin says, “I recognize that authors are trusting me with their professional brand. I feel a sense of responsibility to the writer to capture their intent and deliver a performance they are happy with. Ultimately, I hope listeners enjoy the books I narrate and can lose themselves in the stories.”

For her Adara Astin erotica catalog, you can go here.

If you’re interested in steamy romance, the books she narrates as Eden Cavell are found here.

And sign up to receive her newsletter here.

She’s set up an Amazon Wish List if you’d like another way to show you appreciate her work. (A good way to say thank you when you can’t leave reviews.)

How To Make Better Audiobooks

If you are looking to hire Astin or any audiobook narrator, you can make their job easier. (And receive a superior product faster.) “Please keep auditions brief — you’ll know very quickly if you like a narrator’s style or not.”

To help, write a breakdown of your cast: number of leading and supporting characters, their age, gender, and any accents they have. Narrators want to make the best possible audiobook they can, but they can’t read your mind.

Text-to-speech isn’t the best way to present your story to a broad audience. Still, it’s a good step to go through before you publish, especially if you might have an audiobook made. It’s where you can notice things such as the overuse of dialogue tags. He said, she said, he said, she said, sounds monotonous. (I use text-to-speech to catch errors because I’m dyslexic, and I’ve caught this repetitiveness in my early drafts. I endorse this step in your editing process — and so does Adara.)

When an author makes it clear who is speaking in a scene and still manages to use speech tags sparingly, the audiobook production process is smoother, and the end product is often more enjoyable for listeners.

Writers who want to produce audiobooks of their work have several platforms to choose from for production and distribution — with their own respective pros and cons — including ACX, AudiobooksUnleashed, FindawayVoices, and SpokenRealms. I might have to consider that myself.

[Update Dec 9, 2021: Not only did I consider it, but I’ve also now released my first audiobook, narrated by none other than Adara Astin. You can now buy the audiobook version of my debut erotica story LOCKDOWN AND DIRTY from Audible and Amazon. Check it out!”]

As an Amazon Associate Adara earns from qualifying purchases.