Episode 17: The Duet Narration Disconnect (What Multicast Audiobooks Are Missing)

This week, I’m talking about the production problem behind duet narration, what audiobooks could learn from audio drama, and the small changes that could make these performances feel FAR more connected. I’m also asking what happens when the cheapest answer to the growing demand for multiple voices becomes AI.

Duet narration does not just need two voices. It needs two people who sound like they are actually having the same conversation.

Show Note Sources: 

• “He Said, She Said: Why Creators and Fans Love Dual and Duet Narration” — Audible
• Interview with romance author and audio producer Lauren Blakely — AudioFile Magazine
• Soundbooth Theater FAQ
• History of GraphicAudio
• “U.S. Audiobook Sales Grew 9% in 2025, to $2.43 Billion” — Publishers Weekly
• NAVA fAIr Voices resources
• SAG-AFTRA audiobook digital-replica guidance
• Julia Whelan on audiobook economics and Audiobrary — Associated Press

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Brendus Cunt Lazlow, and this is Good Arl, a podcast where we talk about what actually makes an audiobook work. Why some performances pull you in and others fall flat, and what it really takes to tell a story people feel. So I often get my inspiration for our weekly topics off of the audiobook interwibs. And this week we are talking about the huge influx in conversation about duet narration, specifically in romance, but also the general rise of multicast and multiple narrator audiobook popularity in general, in fiction, in thrillers, in fantasy, and even in lit RPG. And I have thoughts. My main thought, and this is a completely personal opinion, is that at the moment, I don't think most audiobooks, outside of like major high-budget publishing houses, are able to do duet narration particularly well. And that does not mean the narrators are bad or that their performances are bad. A lot of the time, both narrators are incredible on their own. My problem is that duet narration is being marketed as this intimate, collaborative performance, but the actual production process keeps the two performers completely isolated from each other, and you can tell. And I think that leaves a lot on the table, and I want to talk about it today. First, let's quickly talk about the difference between dual and duet narration because people sometimes use those terms interchangeably, and they're not quite the same thing. In dual narration, each narrator normally performs full chapters or sections based on the book's point of view. So if the heroine is narrating a chapter, she narrates everyone in that chapter, all the characters. Then when we switch to the hero's point of view, the other narrator performs everybody. Characters will be portrayed by two different people, and that irks some people, which is why the rise in duet narration is in conversation currently. And in duet narration, the roles are usually divided by characters. So one narrator performs one lead character and often all the other characters of that same gender throughout the entire book, no matter whose point of view we are currently following. Men are narrated by the presenting male, and the women are the presenting female. You get what sounds like an actual back and forth between two people when there's dialogue happening. But the key phrase there is what sounds like back and forth, because that is not necessarily how it was recorded. Normally, when you get cast in a duet, you receive a highlighted script and your lines are marked and your partner's lines are not, and then you record your entire part of the book without ever hearing your partner's performance. And you might be asked to leave a space for their dialogue or or get like a clicker or clap or something to make some kind of noise where your partner's line is supposed to go. And then later they edit everything together. And technically, it works. Every line is there, everybody is speaking in the correct order, the book is complete, right? But you can hear it. Let's say there is witty banter happening, or we have an enemies to lover's argument, or one character is trying to tease and intimidate and seduce or shut down the other person. And those scenes are not just a collection of lines. Each character has an objective. Each person is trying to do something to the other person, and every response is affected by what just happened. Someone suddenly becomes very quiet, so the other person has to lean in toward them. Someone speeds up, so the other person has to keep up. It's like that is acting. But if neither performer has heard what the other person is doing, you can end up with two completely different versions of the same scene. Maybe the author wrote that he said it uh intimidatingly. And I think my scene partner is yelling it at me. So I yell back, but maybe he has decided that the most intimidating choice he can do is to whisper. Now, when those two performances get put together, it sounds like I'm having a huge emotional breakdown to something the listener never heard. Or maybe I perform a flirtatious scene like a quick, rapid fire banter, you know, like Gilmore Girls or Dawson Creek style, and he leaves these long, slow, sexy pauses, like, you know, uh William Shatner style. Like both choices could work. They just, they don't necessarily work together. And that irks me because what the listener is supposed to hear is chemistry, is a relationship. But what the actors were actually asked to create were two separate monologues. Duet narration is not automatically a collaborative performance, but it should be. So now we ask, okay, thanks, Brenda. Now what do I do if I get cast in a duet? Well, I do get cast in duets, and this is how I try to close the gap as much as I can. I research my co-narrator. I listen to how they talk. I listen to a whole bunch of samples that they have on their Audible or on their website. I try to listen to their natural cadence and their tone and their pacing, because everybody has that. And I try to anticipate the kinds of choices that normally would make it in their performances. And I also request from them more than just a written character description. If I can, I ask them for a voice memo where they talk about their character and maybe perform a few lines. And, you know, that tiny bit of information can make a huge difference. Like when I'm listening to his samples, is his humor really big and obvious, or is it very dry? And does he use silence as a part of the performance, or does he plow through to the ends of sentences? And when he gets angry, does he get louder or does he get quieter? Like I am trying to anticipate what my character is going to be reacting to, so it can sound like we're at least in the same world, even if we're not in the same room. Truly, the best thing you can have in this situation is a duet partner whose performance you already know really well. There is a reason listeners develop favorite narrator pairings. When two performers work together repeatedly, they develop a shorthand. But we shouldn't have to rely on narrators, developing psychic powers to get through this. Now, on the other side of this, I think audio dramas often do this really well. And I don't necessarily mean just like music and the effects and stuff. Like I can take or leave the sound effects and the music. The difference in that audio drama is to me how it is approached as drama. It's treated like an audio play. We are listening to people interact with each other. The characters feel like they are in the same emotional space. They are talking to each other. They are listening to each other. Even when their actors are recording remotely or at different times, there is usually some kind of production structure designed to make the interaction feel real. And a shout out to companies like Graphic Audio and Sound Booth Theater, who are really interesting examples of this. And these companies are not necessarily putting every actor in the same Zoom call for every scene. Maybe the bigger missing piece isn't having everybody in the room all the time, because I know that would be expensive. And this is where we get stuck, right? Because it always comes down to money. It can cost an exorbitant amount of money to keep multiple performers on the clock for as long as it takes to record a full-length, unabridged audiobook. There are scheduling issues, there are studio costs, there are engineering costs, and obviously everybody involved needs to be paid for their time. And audio dramas have a little bit of a structural advantage because they're normally created as dramatic productions from the beginning, and the original text might be adapted into a script so dialogue tags and sections of prose that are no longer needed can be removed, making the whole thing just shorter. The unabridged audiobook still has to give you the entire book. So I understand why the stopgap is to have us record our wild lines independently into the void and let somebody assemble everything afterward. I really earnestly want us to start exploring ideas and ways that we can make this work, because right now the idea is that it is in high demand, but the product is subpar. So how are we gonna make the product better? I don't have the answer. But I do have some options that I would love for us as a community to talk about. Lauren Blakely is a really interesting person to look at here because she is both a romance author and an audio producer. She has talked about considering duet narration for books that fall into what she calls the high banter category. And that makes complete sense to me. Not every scene needs two people recording live. A big descriptive passage probably does not require both actors to be there, but banter, major fights, comedy, confessions, those moments depend on timing. They depend on reaction. So maybe the answer is some kind of middle ground. Maybe 80 or 90% of the book is still recorded independently, but the performers record the most interaction-heavy scenes together. That could mean letting the first narrator's performance become the reference track for the second narrator and just staggering the recording dates. Maybe the narrators get a 30 to 60 minute chemistry read before they start recording and they talk about the characters. My favorite, have a director or a dialogue editor whose job is not just to make sure all the lines appear in the correct order, but to make sure both characters seem to be having the same conversation. None of that requires renting a studio and keeping two actors there for the entire length of a 12-hour audiobook. I am happy I am not the producer. I do not pretend to know the perfect financial model for fixing this, but maybe part of the answer is a hybrid payment structure. Like narrators could still be paid per finished hour for the independent recording, then they could receive a studio hour rate for live scenes and rehearsals and chemistry reads or directed sessions. Because if you are selling the audiobook based on the relationship between two performers, they have to build that relationship. So the question I keep coming back after all that is this. If listeners are paying for chemistry, why is the production model only paying for lines? And that question becomes even more important because the popularity of duet and multicast narration is growing. Audible is described, duet is especially hot in romance. Listeners are actively asking for this, and that makes me nervous. Because if the demand for multiple voices keeps growing and we keep under-delivering, the cheapest way to provide multiple voices is going to be AI. And they won't be able to tell the difference because they are used to a subpar performance anyway. An AI system does not have scheduling complex. It does not need two studio sessions, it does not need rehearsal pay. You can assign a different synthetic voice to every character and create what is technically a multicast audiobook, a whole bunch of lines said by different people put together. But there is a problem. AI might be able to give you the correct number of voices, but it cannot give you the reason listeners wanted duet narration in the first place. The appeal is not just that one character sounds different from another character. It is hearing two people listen and be affected by each other. And if the publishers use synthetic voices to solve the logistical problem of human interaction, they might preserve the format while removing the entire point of it. But I also don't want the AI part of this conversation to pull us away from the immediate problem with human production. If we want listeners to value human performance, then we have to give human performers the conditions they need to make something that is unmistakably human. It means asking who is actually responsible for the emotional continuity of a duet. Is it the narrators? Is it a director? Is it the producer? Is it the editor? Right now, I don't know if that is one clear answer. I think the ambiguous responsibility belongs to everybody in theory and nobody in practice, but we need to develop a production standard that matches the way these audiobooks are being marketed. I am not against duet narration. It's the opposite. I think duet narration can be awesome. I completely understand why listeners love it. So as duet narration continues to grow, we need to start asking better questions about its production. At what point does narration become acting, and who is responsible for making sure both performers are in the same emotional scene? Which moments actually need live interaction? And what is the least expensive thing a production could change that would make the chemistry noticeably better? And if AI can give us an unlimited number of different voices recording different lines, what makes a human duet worth protecting? For me, the answer is interaction. It's two people listening to each other and reacting to each other and acting off each other. That is the promise of duet narration. Now we need production models that actually let performers deliver it. I am so glad you're here. I cannot believe we have 500 downloads. I feel honored. I cannot wait to celebrate the 750th, the 1000th, the 2000th. I'm free. Hang in there, and I will talk to you.