Full-cast audiobooks: Nothing new under the sun

A couple of months ago, after hearing @Thomas Umstattd Jr. talk about how full-cast narration is the premium experience and the future of audiobooks, I was surprised to discover the same topic in a note at the end of a Louis L’Amour western. The more I hear about full-cast narration, the more this commentary comes to mind, so I thought I would share it here as the perspective of someone who worked with full-cast audiobooks in the 1990s when audio publishers were first experimenting with this format.

This supplementary note is from L’Amour’s Son of a Wanted Man and is written by his son Beau, who played a major role in the production of L’Amour adaptations for film and audio in the late 1980s. Below is a passage from the section of the note that pertains to audiobook production. It’s rather long, but I think it’s worth the read. (Note that the original productions referenced were of short stories rather than full-length novels.)

Beau L’Amour begins by describing how the first L’Amour stories produced in audio “became shows that featured a cast of actors playing the individual roles, a narrator, sound effects, and music” and how L’Amour quickly had reservations about the productions, with the primary concern that “the actors weren’t very good.” Brought onto the project to troubleshoot, Beau says,

It didn’t take long to realize there was nothing wrong with the actors. Everyone who came through the process was a professional. Many spent their days doing radio and TV ads or parts on soap operas and often wrapping up the evening by playing roles on Broadway.…Yet Dad still didn’t like the performances, and I agreed with him. They were acceptable at a certain level, but they could have been a good deal better. I was pretty sure I’d discovered what was wrong…

The lesson I had accidentally learned [in directing two earlier projects] was that literature is definitely not drama. The scripts for the early Louis L’Amour Audio Dramas were simply transcribed, word for word, from his short stories. All description was read by the narrator. The dialogue was read by the various actors. No other changes were made. If Dad expected the performances to improve, then the shows were going to have to be adapted, just like a movie, by people who knew how to write drama. At its fundamental level, the difference between literature and audio drama couldn’t be clearer. One is created to be seen, a visual medium, even if it is just letters on a page; the other is designed to be heard.

Dad was already very alert to the visual aspect of writing and reading, often lecturing young writers on the advantages of artfully breaking up their paragraphs so “the eye could rest,” and how it was often best to say less rather than more in the process of telling your story. To put it into modern terms, the words and letters in our language are code, like a vastly more complex version of computer code, and the reader’s brain is the processor. This turns the active imagination of the reader into the greatest asset of the writer. Reader and writer become partners in the creative experience: The writer’s job is to inspire the reader’s imagination to create a “personal best” version of the story.

However, as an increasing amount of that “processing” or imagination is handed over to the artists involved in an audio drama, TV show, film, stage play, or comic book, more careful and artful adaptation needs to be done to make it all acceptable to the audience. The bottom line is, if you want good actors to do a good job, you can’t give them just a few lines from a short story; you have to give them truly well-constructed scenes for them to sink their teeth into. Not many writers of literature attempt to construct complete scenes like a dramatist; the scenes may play well when listened to, but they don’t read well at all.

Beau L’Amour goes on to explain the process of adapting his father’s stories as audio plays rather than multicast narrations and how this adaptation process dramatically boosted the quality of the finished dramas, which were eventually syndicated for radio as well as audiobook sales. He then continues:

As time passed, however, the audio publishing industry became fully mature. The audience was more and more willing to pay for much longer, single-voice readings. The need to produce odd, attention-grabbing ideas, like dramatized short stories, became a thing of the past. In the early days, nearly every audio publisher experimented with creating dramas. But eventually, most of them had given up. We had been one of the first, and we ended up being one of the last.

A critical aspect to maintaining a relationship with any publisher is to be attentive to their need to make a profit. So finally I had to tell them it was time to start producing the L’Amour novels as unabridged readings, the same as everybody else in the business. It was a bittersweet decision because I knew it would, sooner or later, bring the production of the dramas to a close. The profit potential in the single-voice, unabridged readings was significantly greater.

In the late 1990s the New York productions of the drama began to wind down.…On the positive side, it turned out my instincts had been right: The single-voice readings sold exceptionally well[.]

As noted in last week’s Author Update, the financial barrier to full-cast narration is almost entirely gone due to ElevenLabs and other tools. But Thomas also mentioned how the examples he shared were an audio play rather than a standard audiobook, and I think that distinction is borne out very strongly in Beau L’Amour’s comments.

I’m not making an argument either for or against full-cast audio dramas, but it’s worth emphasizing that they’re in a different category from simple multivoice narration. And I also find it ironic that the format now being discussed as the future of audiobooks is the same thing that “in the early days, nearly every audio publisher experimented with.” There’s nothing new under the sun!