AUDIO HAS CHANGED EVERYTHING

I enjoy each of these formats and I love having the choices. But as a writer,

I’ve learned an interesting lesson when it comes to the audio variety.

Words and names in print almost fall into a “choose your own adventure”

mode: If you’re unfamiliar with a name, you essentially create your own

pronunciation and then hear it in your head that way every time your eyes

happen across it.

With audiobooks, the narrator has been told how to pronounce it, so the

opposite can be true: You hear the name, but you have no idea how it’s

spelled. I’ve seen a name in print after listening to the audiobook and

wondered, “Who’s that?”

But my favorite example of this happened just this week, while I was

writing an exchange between two characters in my Eric Swan thriller series.

I’d named a woman Katrina Yu, and although she’s not a major character,

she plays a relatively important role.

As I was reading back over the page—and probably reading it aloud,

because often I’ll do that—it dawned on me what I was doing to fans of the

series who might pick up the audio version. Because sometimes characters

are referred to only by their last name, it could easily sound like the narrator was
saying “you.”

So now I found myself in a dilemma. Should I just laugh it off and move on

to the next thrilling paragraph? Or should I do a global find-and-replace

with the manuscript and actually, rename my character?

On one hand, I didn’t mind changing it. I’m not persnickety about character

names, certainly not to the extent some authors are. I know one writer who

drove herself mad trying to come up with the “perfect” name for a

character. I, on the other hand, will never believe that readers give a rat’s

you-know-what about names; they just want characters to be interesting.

The name could be Johnny Potsticker and the reader will just shrug.

But I found myself being a little stubborn about Katrina Yu. Since she’d

had that name for 35,000 words so far, it somehow felt wrong to strip away

her identity. It would be like renaming your child when they turned seven.

Ultimately . . . I haven’t decided. I’m keenly aware, however, that

audiobooks have now officially impacted the way we write. We have to take

pronunciations into account, especially those that could breed confusion.

I might throw it out to readers of the series and say, “Please decide for me.

I’m leaving this up to Yu.”