 Beth and Niamh standing together in an RNIB recording studio, smiling at the camera. I am an avid (a more acceptable word than obsessive…) audiobook listener, and I have been since I was a child. So when I found out that a date and venue had been chosen for the recording of my debut novel, Wolf Siren, I screwed up my courage and sent a very tentative email asking if I could tag along… Luckily, the very kind people at HarperCollins Children’s Books and the RNIB were very happy to humour my nosiness! I was equally excited to meet Niamh Longford who would be narrating Red’s story, as I was to go behind the scenes of audiobook recording. Niamh had already been working hard all morning, recording the prologue and first four chapters of Wolf Siren. Then I rocked up and she took a break from reading to record a Q & A with me, in which I got to ply her with questions about how it was going. Both Niamh and I are visually impaired, as is Red (the main character in Wolf Siren), so during our discussion we chatted about not so much what we are able to see, but how we go about navigating the world, the amount of guesswork it involves and inevitably, the times we guess wrong! We chatted about Wolf Siren, from the very first words I wrote, to my hopes for what readers will take away from the finished book. Niamh was super kind which made me embarrassed, awkward and grateful all at once, but we laughed plenty and she was so easy to talk to I forgot that we were being recorded!  Niamh viewed through a glass window. She is sitting at a desk in a dark recording studio reading Wolf Siren from an iPad. I then had a chance to sit the other side of the glass panel and listen to Niamh reading and recording. Niamh had repeatedly said she thought that she stopped a lot, but when I was sat there, I felt like I was already listening to the edited audio and I am so excited for listeners to hear her! Before I went home, I had a go at recording the author’s note and the acknowledgments. And I truly hope this made Niamh feel better about her own abilities because it was NOT easy! Firstly, I realised Niamh was reading from a PDF of Wolf Siren on an iPad, so even if you zoomed in as far as the margins would allow, the text was not very big (by my standards, anyway!). What was more, when zoomed in, scrolling passed the white space at the bottom of one page and the top of the next seemed to take forever, and it was very tricky to read a run-on sentence smoothly. Secondly, when Niamh was recording and she made a mistake, the sound engineer, Jim, would play back the last bit she’d got right and then she’d carry on reading from there, like her past self was curing her present self! However, when it was my turn, I simply could not see fast enough to find the place on the page that was being played aloud. I’d hear my own voice from the speaker (which is never fun anyway) and then there would be a long deathly silence as I frantically (and fruitlessly) scanned the page for the right bit… In the end, Jim said I could just read, make a mistake, stop, pause, then do it again. I got through it, but I did not read it well and it was not easy! In hindsight, I should have found the PDF of the final manuscript in my emails and read it on my phone. If I’d done that, I could have opened it in an app that converts PDFs into plain text and adjusted the font and size. I could have also put it in continuous scroll mode so there would be no gaps between pages. But in the moment, I was just trying to crack on. Niamh and I had just been talking about the importance of accessibility, so I wish I had taken the time to make it a bit more comfortable rather than just muddling through. But at least I'll know this if there’s ever a next time. I am very glad I was able to give it a try, and was delighted to chat with Niamh, hear her reading and my admiration for her (which was already high) skyrocketed even higher! If you want to hear the full conversation between me and Niamh, it’ll be at the end of the audiobook which, along with the paperback and e-book will be out on March 27th 2025!  Landscape artwork banner above with illustrations of the character of Red, three black and grey wolves and the title text 'Wolf Siren' and author name text 'Beth O'Brien'.
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