Originally published at: From Experience to Audiobook - Ackerly Green
One of the coolest parts about turning The Monarch Papers into audiobooks was the fact that we already had a decent amount of audio content from the original experience.
Remember when Martin Rank secretly recorded the Cagliostro’s final performance? Or his sinister interview with Teddy Fallon at Kemetic Solutions? These were huge, key moments in the adventure, which made it all the more important that we get their adaptations right for the audiobooks.
Initially, we struggled with the idea of re-narrating those experiences because we were afraid we would be sacrificing a lot of the excitement and immersion of the original recordings. The book adaptations broke up these scenes with things like dialogue tags, inner monologues, and sensory descriptions, which were unnecessary when you could hear everything on the originals like a fly on the wall. It was going to require finding the right balance between traditional narration and full-on performance.
Luckily, our voice actor, J.R. Moorland, is insanely talented, and the ability to reference original audio material became more of a boon than a burden. He used the original recordings as a model for his own portrayals of Cags and Teddy Fallon until the two versions were almost indistinguishable, seamlessly switching between the performances and Marty’s grounding narrative to provide a fully immersive audio experience. You can listen to the two versions below and see for yourself just how well the original experiences from The Monarch Papers translated (pun completely intended) into the audiobooks.
The Complete Translation:
An excerpt from the original recording of The Cagliostro’s final performance.
An excerpt from the audiobook performance of the final performance.
The Kemetic Solutions Heist:
An excerpt from the original recording of the Kemetic Solutions Heist.
An excerpt from the audiobook performance of the Kemetic Solutions Heist
The countdown is on for the official TMP audiobook release, just one week from today! You can still place a pre-order for the books through our Author’s Direct storefront, and we’ll let you know next Tuesday, August 4th, as soon as the books are live everywhere else. We hope you’ve enjoyed these previews and we can’t wait to share the audiobooks with you in full!