Rosalind Vane
Nature writing and memoir. Reads at walking pace and has never once been asked to speed up.
The voices
Narrators
Sixteen narrators have recorded for us since 2016 and eleven have come back more than once. Below are the six on our current front list, and what each of them is genuinely good at.
Currently reading for us
The front list
Douglas Ferrier
Eleven titles for us since 2018. Specialises in men who will not say what they mean.
Mairead Cusk
Narrative history and archive material. Will read you a wage book and make it grip.
Ayo Bankole
Crime and thrillers. Contained fury, no shouting, no accents that are anybody’s punchline.
Peter Ollerenshaw
Historical fiction, and the person we ring when a book has 200 proper nouns in four languages.
Sunniva Holt
Literary fiction. Distinguishes characters by register rather than by accent, which is much harder.
How we cast
Badly, for the first two years. We cast for accent and for a voice we liked, and we produced three recordings that are technically fine and that nobody finishes.
What we do now is cast for register. The question is not whether a narrator sounds like the protagonist — it is whether they can hold the distance the prose is written at. A novel narrated at one remove needs somebody who can be dry for eleven hours without becoming flat, and that is a different skill from doing voices.
Practically: we send three pages, not a page. Two of them are deliberately the least dramatic passages in the book, because anyone can read the good bit. And we pay for the audition.
What we pay
A session fee per finished hour, agreed before the first studio day and paid within thirty days of delivery rather than on publication. Plus a royalty on net receipts for the life of the title, which is not standard in this industry and should be.
Studio time, direction and editing are ours, not yours. If a recording overruns because the book was harder than we estimated, that is our estimate that was wrong.
Your voice is not training data. Every contract since March 2023 prohibits the use of your recordings to train or fine-tune a synthetic voice, applied retroactively to everything we have ever published. That clause is not negotiable in either direction — we will not remove it and we will not licence around it.
Want to read for us?
Send a link to two samples — ideally one narrative, one dialogue-heavy — and tell us what you have read recently that you wished you had been asked to record.