Audio First

The setting for my new novel had been brooding in my imagination for a while: Black Mountain, a pile of granite boulders in northern Queensland, Australia, with an eerie reputation. There have been several unexplained disappearances at Black Mountain, dating from the late 1800s.

I set the novel in 1919, with a British protagonist, Eva Willoughby. Eva escapes a violent marriage in Oxford, England, and arrives in far northern Queensland to stay with a childhood friend on a cattle station. She takes a secretarial job at a constabulary near Black Mountain, and becomes a kind of accidental detective when someone she knows disappears.

The finished novel, UNDER THE BLACK MOUNTAIN, was picked up by the large audio publisher Bolinda. It was a new experience for me, being published in audio before print. At the time I knew very little about audio publishing. I love to read with my ears, as Red Szell, host of the audiobooks podcast My Life in Books calls it, and I usually have two or three audio books on the go. I switch between them depending on what I feel like listening to; while I’m cooking and doing other non-digital things.  I listen to non-fiction on audio as well as novels, and I take as much pleasure in reading with my ears as I do in holding and reading a physical book.

Before working with Bolinda, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to the production of audiobooks, other than being curious about the technicalities. I hadn’t realised how an audio narrator becomes a storyteller, translating the tone of the writing. The manuscript for UNDER THE BLACK MOUNTAIN went through the usual editorial stages of copy-edit and proof-read, with an additional read by an Australian First Nation editor who advised me on sensitivity to indigenous themes. Black Mountain is a sacred site to more than one Aboriginal nation in Queensland. 

Bolinda are a brilliant team of publishers, and it was so much fun being involved in discussions about choosing a narrator, and the cover art. The novel is narrated by Australian actor Rebecca McCauley, and until I listened to the finished recording I hadn’t done a tally of how many voices she would need to adopt! In 1919, Northern Queensland had a multi-racial population: along with the Traditional Owners, Aboriginal Australians (there were more than thirty different language groups in Queensland alone in the early nineteen-hundreds) were Chinese, Russians and eastern Europeans, Italians, Irish and British. And others. Several of my characters had recently arrived in Queensland for the itinerant work: mining, cane-cutting and cattle farming, all requiring physical labour for not much pay. There was a strong socialist undercurrent in Australia at this time, and Queensland was the spiritual home of the Worker’s Party. There was fear of Communism, and the Australian soldiers who served on the Western and Eastern fronts were returning home after WWI, many shell-shocked, and suspicious and resentful of foreigners. There was trouble brewing.

When I first heard Rebecca McCauley’s audio recording, it occurred to me that I should have been writing for audio even when I was writing for print. My ‘internal ear’ hears the rhythm of dialogue more easily than it does the connective storytelling sometimes called narration. I work as a professional editor alongside my writing career, and I’ve often suggested to writers that they read aloud as a fail-safe, self-editing process. Then we can literally hear how certain words either sing together, or clash; when a sentence is too long or too short; when a word with three syllables can be replaced by a short word. When our sentences are spoken, writers can hear them more clearly than when we’re writing. During my first listen to Rebecca McCauley’s narration of UNDER THE BLACK MOUNTAIN I was editing it in my head, hearing where I might have done something differently, how the writing might still be more natural and more fluid. It was fascinating.

Another unexpected pleasure in a novel coming to life through an actor-narrator, is that now, as I work on the second book in the series, I am hearing Eva Willoughby’s voice as beautifully imagined by McCauley. She got it just right. I can’t hear the book in the same way as someone who is listening to it with an unbiased ear, but I’m excited about the way books can be produced in a new way for audio. Audio publishing is gaining ground as a parallel industry to print publishing, and perhaps part of the appeal for readers like me is that we can read more. There’s a deep pleasure, a comfort, in being read a story, like some of us were as small children. It was also how our ancestors first experienced storytelling. Like traditional storytellers, an actor narrating a novel must imagine themselves into the hearts and minds of many different characters. It’s the ultimate one-person show!

Listen to an extract from UNDER THE BLACK MOUNTAIN by K.T. Fitzpatrick

UNDER THE BLACK MOUNTAIN, by K.T. Fitzpatrick, was published by Bolinda on 1st May, 2024. It’s available where good audiobooks are sold, including Audible, Spotify, Apple Books, Google Play and Kobo. It was chosen as a ‘must listen’ by Apple Australia in May, and is currently trending on Spotify.