402: What It’s Like to Be an Award-Winning Audiobook Narrator w/ Elisabeth Rodgers, actress [Main T4C episode]

Elisabeth Rodgers is an actress and award-winning audiobook narrator, and longtime resident of New York City. She has worked both on stage and behind a mic as a narrator in her prolific career. Her work has been featured on multiple end-of-year lists for audiobook narration. Elisabeth has also picked up many more skills, including stage fighting, period dancing, singing, and mastery of various accents. After graduating from Princeton, where she majored in English and theatre, Elisabeth moved to the Big Apple, where she has lived for most of her professional life. Listen to this episode of T4C to learn more about how Elisabeth broke into narrating audiobooks and what it’s really like to be a narrator!  WHAT YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT IN THIS EPISODE: How Elisabeth prepares to narrate audiobooks (5:30) What this type of work pays and is it equivalent to the amount of work involved (11:47) How Elisabeth approaches the problem of accents in her narration (15:00) How Elisabeth treats reviews of her work (16:31) Why strong female protagonists are Elisabeth’s favorite characters to voice (18:11) Why she doesn’t get the “light fluffy stuff” (18:56) Why Elisabeth sometimes eats an apple before she starts recording (24:00) How you can get involved in the field of audiobook narration (29:46) What a “journeyman” actor is (30:52) Why the length of the book matters in terms of compensation (34:00) Why you have to join a union to get involved in acting (35:17) What an estimated hourly rate is for audiobook narration (35:28) How important it is to pick up extra acting skills (40:41) Why watching movies can help with mastering accents (42:15) Why Elisabeth has an “intimate relationship with fear and uncertainty” (44:40) Elisabeth’s narration coaches if you’re interested in taking classes or getting some coaching: Robyn Miles, Jayme Mattler, Johnny Heller, and Paul Alan Ruben