Re: putting book on audio tape

["William J. Hartzer" <William -dot- Hartzer -at- EMC2-TAO -dot- FISC -dot- COM>]

On Thu, 5 Jan 1995, Naomi (N.) Bulka wrote:

>Does anyone know of a company that will put books on tape?

Having recently made a career move from the Radio and Television broadcasting
field to a career in technical writing, I know a lot about the subject.

The first question you need to be concerned with is the audio rights.  If you
have the audio rights to the book, then you might consider doing it yourself.
I'm sure readers might be interested in an audio version of the book, read by
the AUTHOR.  You could contact privately-owned audio production companies in
your area.  They'd charge by the hour to do the recording, and you could get
it done professionally at a reduced cost (because you're going directly to the
source, and not through a middle-man, so to speak).  Besides, since you're the
author, you probably won't need much practice reading the book, thus not
wasting valuable studio time.

It's also possible to do professional quality recordings at home with
"borrowed" or rented (professional) audio equipment.

If either of these suggestions aren't feasible, you might contact an audio
production company anyway.  They might do the distribution themselves, or at
least might be able to stear you in the right direction--they probably have
done the type of audio recordings (books on tape) before.

In fact, I have experience with this type of thing--even though my case was a
little different.  I worked for a television production company who puts
children's books on videotape.  In one case, we had a children's story about a
tropical paradise...we hired Jimmy Buffett to do the narration for the book,
and we had a professional television animator/graphic artist do the animation.
Jimmy Buffett arrived at our television studio and we recorded him reading the
story (it took him 1/2 hour).  We then layed the audio track down on video
tape and added the animation.  All of this was done in-house.

Hope this helps,
Bill Hartzer, Technical Writer, Fischer International Systems Corporation
Naples, Florida

(William -dot- Hartzer -at- emc2-tao -dot- fisc -dot- com)
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