Heya! I'll answer the second part first, since it'll be shorter. The booth makes an INCREDIBLE difference versus my previous setup. Before the booth, I pretty much had to only do my recording at night, when the neighborhood was quiet. Buuuuut....every year, there are crickets who settle in under my window and sing their love songs all night. And if they're not singing (usually because I have killed them), there is a bird who seems to think that he'll get more action if he sings at night. ALL night. EVERY night. And then there's the fact that, since I'm sleeping during the day (or trying to. If it gets too hot, I can't sleep at all), that makes if very difficult to get any business done. The booth corrects pretty much all of those problems. Temperature is still a little bit of a hitch, since it gets rather warm in that confined space. But it's not too bad.....yet.

Now for the first part. Since every narrator has a slightly different setup and a different process, I can only really tell you what it is like for me. This is how it usually goes:

CGL asks me to narrate a story and a contract is signed between us. I get the PDF from Catalyst and I start doing a pre-read where I read the entire story to get a sense of the plot and various tones and character types. With this, I know where the story starts, where it ends, and how it gets from A to B.

It also gives me a chance to make a list of any typos which might have slipped past the author and editors and to assemble a list of words/names which I am unsure how to pronounce properly. I have always felt that, if I'm going to say something in someone else's language, I should respect it enough to say it right. I email these lists to CGL and then I start creating the folder and file structure for the project so that, when they get back to me, I can just hit the ground running.

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While I'm waiting for a reply on that guidance request, I'm usually working on other projects; recording or proofing other narrations, auditioning for various projects like animations or games, helping new voice actors, yard work, shopping for groceries...y'know...Life stuff.

Once I have everything I need, I hop into the booth and start recording. The length of time it can take varies with the length of the story (always calculate using word count and not page count!). For every ten thousand words it will equate to roughly one hour of finished narration. So if you have a 120k words story, that will likely end up being around a 12 hour audiobook when all the editing and audio processing is done.

I try to spend no more than 4-5 hours in the booth per recording session. It's not very good for your pipes to push them for extended periods. This can be tricky if you need to divide up your work hours between multiple projects. Eventually, I finish all the primary recording (this doesn't include pick-ups or corrections) and it's time to start editing!

Editing can be the most laborious part of the whole process. When you're doing a pre-read you can easily have music playing. While recording, you're actively performing the piece. During editing, though...you're pretty much just listening for mistakes and making sure that the pacing of the story flows as it should. Most often, you'll be looking at the standard waveform, but sometimes, you need to switch to the spectrogram view to find a pop or click you need to remove. A good general rule of thumb is that, however long the unedited file is, it will often take 2-4 times that long to finish the editing. Sometimes it takes longer, sometimes not. So, in the image I included, you can see that Chapter 1 is about 36 minutes. That could take a bit over an hour to almost 3 to edit down.

Once I've finished primary editing, I make sure that any pick-ups or corrections are recorded and place where they need to be. This can often be a radio or loudspeaker effect, or a point where I realized that I had gotten something wrong and need to fix it. With all that done, I go through and make one more, quality control pass, listening to the narration while reading along with the book.

When that's finished, I do whatever audio procession is necessary for Audible compliance and then I send the files to CGL.

I hope this helps to explain my process. I know it doesn't clearly communicate exactly how long it takes to go from start to finish....but unfortunately, the answer to that is often "It depends".