«I went to bed with the voice of Germán Gijón». Germán Gijón himself almost gave a soponcio when he read the phrase in a magazine. "Luckily my wife has not seen ...", recalls smiling between the puff and drag of a sweet-smelling electronic cigarette. And yet, more and more readers are lying down, effectively, with his low voice and his slow speech. With her in the ear, it is understood.
Germán Gijón is one of the privileged few who already knows how the Millennium saga ends. Not surprisingly, everything has been in the Nordic noir since David Lagercrantz took over: from the quirky Salander to the always restrained Blomkvist, passing by the writer himself. For some time, Gijón combines the intensive dubbing of Turkish soap operas with the reading of books aloud . As a storyteller of the modern era, Gijón can be heard unraveling Steve Jobs' less known profile as putting voice to Tolstoy in a reflection on ambition.
The audiobook arrived in Spain through Valencia on board a studio that looks at the Palau de la Música from the other side of an avenue that today is scorched by the heat wave. And he did it driven by the survival instinct of a profession drowned by the closure of Channel 9. It was 2014 and that was to renew or die; And it was renewed.
It all started with a brainstorm. Benjamín Figueres and Milton Font , two men from the movies and dubbing, looked out over the abyss of having to close their studio and say goodbye to 25 years of career. They looked at the other side of the puddle and saw a table of salvation: beyond the seas, an unexplored industry in Spain emerged; Moreover, it grew to a hopeful 20% per year. The giant Amazon showed there its own audiobook platform, Audible - which will certainly bring our country next winter - and Figueres and Font started their own application here, an incipient audio library of classics whose rights negotiated with translators behind the door .
That was less than five years ago and a little over half a thousand audiobooks, in a study that overflows activity despite the summer stillness. Kilohercios and Decibelios started an industry that has only grown in a country where, instead, 32.8% of the population recognizes that they do not read "never or almost never," according to the Barometer of reading habits and Purchase of books of 2018 prepared by the Federation of Publishers Guilds of Spain.
48% of audio readers are under 35 years old and 52% of listeners are done 'in itinere'
"We don't read because we don't have time, or because we've gone to other forms of entertainment," says Maribel Riza, Storytel's publishing manager , something like the Swedish Netflix of audiobooks. Riza says that 50% of its users had not read any books in the last 12 months, "they were readers that we had already lost." So the audiobook is presented not only as an alternative to the print, but as a complement to the hectic modern life, in which focusing attention on a single activity without attending to the mundane noise is an almost inconceivable luxury, especially for new generations raised in the constant multitasking. This is confirmed by the data: 48% of the audio readers are under 35 years old and 52% of the listeners are made on the road, on public transport or in the car on the way to work.
Riza is the link that unites the platform with publishers, so he has seen firsthand how the interest of a sector in full bleeding grew. Penguin Random House, the first label that opted for narrated literature, did not count 60 titles in Spanish in 2016; The year will end with around 1,000. In addition to serving as a showcase, Storytel also acts as a producer: "The return of the audiobook is estimated at about five years right now," says his publishing manager , "it is a medium-term investment that the medium or small can not assume."
Storytel landed in the Spanish market in October 2017 with its subscription system with monthly flat rate and its combination of releases and classics of yesterday and today. But long before that, long before an increasing number of Spaniards (they do not give regional figures, but have just exceeded one million subscribers worldwide) they will throw a book in their ears when they go down the subway, Benja and Milton sweat Chinese ink to prove yes, it could. In the early 2000s they had made their first steps with self-help works that were published on cassette or CD and, remember, they were not very successful. But now he played something else, and with his app still in diapers they aimed high, louder impossible, and wrote an email to Audible. "And hey, well the bell rang."
There they were, two Valencians in love with the voice, sitting in front of an Amazon boss who went from a suspicious «eye, that this is not to get in front of the microphone and read» to a «let's talk about numbers» with a slight look at the material They had recorded. «Do you want work? Well, take it, remember now. «He asked us for 16 books in a month». Translation: 160 hours of recording only, with its preproduction and postproduction, 24-hour days in which it was recorded during the day and edited at night . «With Easter and the Fallas in the middle, but we did it». They still get a nervous laugh. Today that whole process, already more studied and with somewhat more human deadlines, represents 60% of its turnover.
Each book is a world and each story implies different challenges. There are authors like Fernando Aramburu or Almudena Grandes who choose their narrators, and others who entrust themselves to editorial designs without paying much attention. There are languages and accents and songs and you have to learn to speak as you speak in that town, it is not worth the next one. There are subordinates and parentheses and half-minute phrases. There are mathematical and graphic formulas and even recipes. Indeed, to produce an audiobook was not, as said Amazon boss, put in front of a microphone and read.
The idea is a translation of the text to the audio in a pleasant way, as if someone were reading it to your ear at night
"Nothing fits," says Milton Font, "the idea is a translation of the text to the audio in a pleasant way, as if someone were reading it in your ear at night . A little the concept of having a reader lover ». A reader lover like Germán Gijón, remember ?, with which we slept at the beginning of this article. The one who narrated audiobooks between Turkish soap opera and Turkish soap opera. Of his literary facet, what he likes most are the characters, of course, "because you can print character". Of course, without exaggeration: «Sometimes they say to you:" Be still, champion, that we have gone over ". Calling him a narrator doesn't convince Gijón. He doesn't talk, he doesn't tell, he counts. "If when you listen to me in the subway I don't get you to get into the story ..." , he twists the gesture. Although he cannot expand as an actor's body asks as much as he would like, the Valencian likes audiobooks. "It's only up to you," he explains. «In the dubbing you are part of a gear, but here it is you translating the book to the listener. It is much more personal, more direct, and the end user is much more dependent on you, on how you do it, on how you transmit, on what you can do with the text ».
Audiobook producers say that nothing about format warfare, that the important thing here is to consume literature, that what counts is the stories. Two news brings this summer that seem determined to confirm it. One, the simultaneous publication of the end of Millennium , oral and written, next Wednesday; the other, the appearance of the first book written first for audio.
Renato Cisneros is called in his native Peru the Vargas Llosa 2.0. Michelle Obama, just launched Someday I will show you the desert , where she tells in a loud voice that being a father is not just joy. He had to stop from time to time because what he said was so personal that he was excited, and that has printed in his text something that will never have the written word: «He who listens to a story does not stress, does not smell the book, does not take notes , but read with your ear, and that reveals things in history that other senses cannot. Audio writer word.
This is how an audiobook is recorded
«If it were a race, the dubbing would be one of 400 meters and the audiobook a marathon. You read, you read, you read, you stop; you read, you read, you read, you stop ». And so, in four-hour shifts, which in a recording booth give a lot of anecdote. «False shots are very dangerous, I know that there are files out there that I would not like my daughter to listen to ...», acknowledges Germán Gijón. Dozens of audiobooks have left his throat, but he is one more link in a long chain. Everything starts with a PDF and a first recognition reading. "Everything that presents difficulties is noted: names, images, mathematical formulas ... And a solution is proposed," explains Bejamín Figueres. It is only the first obstacle course, there are days that he enters the studio and he is not able to reach his table: boss, and how do we do this?
In Kilohercios and Decibelios the use of space has been taken very seriously. One finds speech booths everywhere, even down the hall. Occasionally someone looks out: "Can you lower your voice, please?" They have passed the casting of voices and record books piece by piece: 45 pages per session, 140 words per minute if the human factor allows it. Of the four hours of cabin daily, hopefully one and a half will be profitable.
From the cabin, the file is distributed among publishers for a first cleaning. "In the end it is a craft work, for many digital tools you have," says Milton Font, the other half of the study. The editor has the mission of fine cutting, he has to eliminate any noise, breathing, saliva, because in the end what is heard is the voice of the narrator ... and nothing more. A perfect but human voice, powerful enough to overcome the noise of the subway, the engine or, also, the waves on the beach .
After years of adjustments, Valencians have found a chain protocol that works for them. And the crucial step is the next step: the review. The reviewer listens absolutely to the entire book and is reading at the same pace and taking note: this is not well understood; here there is a changed intonation; Oh, this 'erre', how bad it sounds ... "You need people with a very high level of general culture because they have to know a little about everything," says Font. Their teams tend to be intergenerational: "Some know the classics, others know what is that of Tinder."
We go to the 'retakes' and return to the narrator. Touch to rewrite everything that did not work, but without noticing: same room, voice placed in the same place, practically the same time of day. "If not, it sounds like a goop." And so far the chain work sessions, which in the end are books and books are divided into chapters, right?
The last link is governed by the listening experience and a meticulousness that borders on the obsessive compulsive: Between the beginning and the voice input, half a second; between the title and the beginning of the chapter, two and a half seconds; from the last word of the chapter until next, three and a half seconds . They are moments of silence that create a whole and of which the end user is not aware, but that hooks him or makes him abandon.
"Sometimes we are proud to say that the publisher has not sent us any rectification, it is the case of 'Millennium'", says Figueres, "20 or 21 hours of narration without a single pronunciation error, or a badly placed comma. It's a party". And later? «Then, go for the next one. We recorded up to 15 books at a time, figure yourself ».
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