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- [00:00]
Andrew Morrison
Voiceover coffee shop episode 82.
- [00:04]
Scott Brick
Welcome to the Voiceover Coffee Shop where we give you a glimpse into the world of the biggest voice actors in the industry over a delicious cup of coffee. And now, here's your host, voice actor, Andrew Morrison.
- [00:21]
Andrew Morrison
Hi there, my name is Andrew Morrison and welcome to the Voiceover Coffee Shop where we start our day with some of the finest names in voiceover. If you'd like to get to know more about me, feel free to check out my website@AndrewDMorson.com in this episode we have the legendary audiobook narrator, producer, and honestly one of the most authentic people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting in this industry, Scott Brick. Scott is an award winning American voice actor, narrator and writer best known for his prolific work in audiobook narration. With a background in acting and writing, he's narrated over a thousand books covering a wide range of genres including science fiction, mystery and historical nonfiction. At this point, his voice has become synonymous with best selling authors like Frank Herbert, who you might know from the Dune series, Michael Crichton, and Orson Scott Card. Scott's engaging and nuanced delivery has earned him numerous industry accolades including Audie Awards and Earphones Awards. In addition to his narration work, he's also a writer and audiobook coach, which I have personally experienced and was far more amazed than I could have ever expected. In today's episode, we talk about what the audiobook industry actually looks like. Dancing with your reads as a narrator, understanding your author's intent and outsourcing production and research. Let's dive in.
- [01:39]
Scott Brick
This gets me, gets me where I need to go.
- [01:43]
Andrew Morrison
Well, how do you generally start your day then, since you're not a coffee drinker?
- [01:51]
Scott Brick
I begin my day hydrating as quickly as I can. I know you and I have talked.
- [01:56]
Andrew Morrison
About this on another electrolyte water and alkaline water.
- [02:00]
Scott Brick
Yeah, right, exactly. And. And I did research. When I was in treatment for an illness about a decade ago, I had to flush a lot of toxins. The only way you can do that is by hydrating. Yeah. And I started looking up the, the rates at which we can hydrate. It's typically one liter an hour, except for the two hours when you first wake up, you haven't had anything to drink. You're breaking your fast, essentially. And then you can, during those first two hours, you can, you can absorb two liters. So if I can, I want to get as close to 4 liters before I start as possible because I know that if so, and I have to go really late into the Afternoon, then I'll be okay.
- [02:57]
Andrew Morrison
That doesn't lead to, like, any bloating in the booth or anything like that?
- [03:01]
Scott Brick
No, as long as that you don't drink it too fast. Back when there was a time, I was drinking 12 liters a day, just, you know, for the medical reasons. And what I would do is my watch would beep every 15 minutes and I would pour a quarter of a liter into a glass and drink that. I wouldn't do it all at once. You know, that's when you start feeling bloated. I would just do it slow and steady throughout those first few hours. So that's typically what I do. And then, to be honest, I turn on an ESPN program. My favorite. It's get up. I just get caught up on the sports news. It's. It's just a nice kind of mindless way of getting settled into my day. And. And I'm an addict. I am a sports addict, so that gets my fix in and, you know, then I'm ready to. I feel the mental acuity to get going. I used to. I used to watch the Andy Griffith Show. I would go from, you know, the first season.
- [04:13]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah, yeah.
- [04:14]
Scott Brick
I would watch the. The eight black and white season. No, the five black and white seasons. And. And I would watch an episode a day because it helped center me. You know, life is always better with a little Mayberry in it. Yeah. But I don't know, maybe it's just the way I'm wired, having that relaxing, stimulating thing, you know, early in the day. I don't know. I don't drink coffee, so maybe that's my version of it.
- [04:43]
Andrew Morrison
No, I do. I do something similar, but it's almost like having a person in the booth with you, like while you're. Or a person there while you're getting ready. And so it almost brings. Because this is a very antisocial career, and so it almost kind of adds a background noise, social aspect, as if somebody else is there with you. That kind of like, wakes up the ability to be. I don't want to say faux social in a script, but. But the ability to engage with another person.
- [05:12]
Scott Brick
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I. My wife and I will be laughing about it because at the end of the day, we feel absolutely exhausted. And I'm like, come on, I wasn't digging a ditch today. Okay. I'm working indoors. It's going to be 105 degrees here in LA today. And, you know, I don't have to go outside, you know. And yet at the end of the day, I'M beat. And I think it's because of the. The intellectual connection that you have to make either to another person, you know, if they're directing you, if they're another performer that you're, you know, working off of or with the text, and you're thinking all day long you're thinking. You're constantly engaged, and there's no escape from it. You can't turn it off until you go upstairs and watch more sports. But, yeah, something about it just helps me center myself and, you know, helps me do my best work, I guess.
- [06:19]
Andrew Morrison
So what is your origin story into the audiobook world? Because I know before that you and I had talked about how you had done, like, a lot of writing and a lot of screen adaptions and stuff like that. So how did audiobooks become at least one? I know you do still do many, many things, but at least one of your primary career choices.
- [06:37]
Scott Brick
Well, I have a. A good friend that I went to college with to thank for it. His name is Bob, Bob Westall. And I tell you, that man never pays for a drink when I'm around. He got me my first audition. He and I would play baseball every Saturday. A bunch of guys getting together and just knocking the ball around and playing catch. And he had seen me in performances at UCLA over the years and knew I was an actor. And. And I don't know, maybe it was like telling him a joke one day or something or doing an impression. I don't know. But he said, you know, I really ought to get you a. An audition. He was working at Dove Audio at the time, which was, okay, 1999. And, boy, he said that for, like, six months. Gosh, I really need to get you on audition. And I learned something in college. There was a guy who. The professor couldn't remember his name. His name was Daniel. And he's like, I'm sorry. And, like, for the 10th time, tell me your name again. And Daniel screamed his name at him. Daniel. Oh, my God, the guy never forgot his name again. And I. And I was just screwing around. And when Bob said, I should get you an audition, I said, yeah, you should. And he must have thought I was serious, because I think this was a Saturday. He called me on Monday and got me an audition. I went in and I booked the audition. Came back a couple of weeks later, June 10, 1999. That was the day I didn't. I wrote it down for tax purposes, and the date stuck. Yeah. And then the. The crazy thing about. And anybody who's worked in audiobooks knows that, you know, if you put a lot of focus and attention on it, the industry is, I always say it's incestuous in a good way. Everybody knows one another and everybody is not poaching talent. You know, nobody's under contract, but they're like, oh my God, you know, you did that thing for Random House. Well, we've got a similar project over here at Penguin or at McMillan or, you know, wherever it was. And I think you would, you would work for that too. And people just started calling. And I think I was about three years in to my career when I started having to plan days off. And I was at my friend Dan's office. Dan Musselman, wonderful guy. I met him that first day that I went in to do the job at Dub Audio. And I was in his office and I think I was pointing at July on the calendar, the production calendar. And I said, hey, can I have these four days off? I, you know, I'm going to Comic Con. I typically go down Wednesday night and I stay through Sunday, you know, can I make sure to block these off? And he looks at me like I'm a slow witted child. He says, you're the boss. And that was kind of empowering for two reasons. I realized that's right, I am the boss. I need to make decisions, smart decisions, like a boss would. And the other thing was that, okay, yeah, this is a career now if I'm having to schedule days off rather than doing, you know, a book every month book, two books every month, you know, if I'm that booked, yeah, that's when I realized I was in it.
- [10:24]
Andrew Morrison
So what were you taking days off from? What was your, your job at that time? When, when you started transitioning?
- [10:30]
Scott Brick
No, I, I was taking those days off from recording. I, I, when I, when I transitioned into narration, I had been a professional writer for about three years, wrote a lot of magazine articles. I think I did 300 in three years. And, and I just got burned out. I mean, writing at that level of output is. Stress is not your friend. And so I did that for like the first year or two until I started getting enough, I was probably getting enough audiobook work after about a year, year and a half to just survive on that.
- [11:16]
Andrew Morrison
So, so were you doing screen adaption work before that or after that? I mean, I know you continue to do screen adaption, but like, at what point did screen adaption kind of play into that picture?
- [11:26]
Scott Brick
About that same time, I think, I think I did. My first audiobook was in 99.
- [11:34]
Andrew Morrison
Okay.
- [11:35]
Scott Brick
And I believe it was 99 or 2000. I got hired by Morgan Freeman's. Oh, I could tell you exactly when it was. I remember. Well, I remember what project I was working on, and I think that one was recorded in late 99, early 2000. I was working on the Lions game by Nelson DeMille. And it was a crash title. It was going to be really long. I think it wound up being. You know, the Average book is 10 or 11 hours. This wound up being close to. I think it was 26, something like that. So, you know, twice the length, two and a half times the length of the ordinary book. And we had to get it done in two weeks. And I had been working as a consultant for Revelations Entertainment, which is Morgan Freeman's company. And I've been friends with his business partner, the head of revelations for, God, 30 years, I think. And she hired me as a consultant because a lot of the writing that I was doing was in science fiction. I know a lot about the genre, and she didn't. And she wanted to make sure they were doing as faithful an adaptation as possible. The project was Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, of course, wrote the novel. And at the time, David Fincher was attached to direct. He hadn't made a firm commitment, and I don't think he ever did, but that was pretty heady stuff. And, you know, there was an issue with the. The draft that they had. She was like, you know, the book, can you help? You know, did we get enough of the important stuff. The important stuff to, you know, to make sure that we keep it? And I said no. And, you know, you can't fix this. You really need to start over. And as we talked, I wound up asking her if I could do it because it had to be done in two weeks, basically in my same time frame for that Nelson DeMille book. And it had to be done by a certain time because Fincher was trying to decide which project he would work on. It was, I think, either gonna be that or Panic Room, I think, was the one he ultimately went with. But, yeah, she gave me the gig. It was my first screenwriting gig. And I got. I got brought back later to do a production draft that never happened. I was about five years later. Um, and we were developing a couple of things for a while. So I. You know, I kept doing that for several years. But the crazy thing was when I had to do both the audiobook and the script, I. Man, I was. I was waking up. I would wake up at, I think, 6 or 6:30, and I drove out to Woodland Hills to Dan's studio and we recorded until noon. Then I drove home, ate, ate lunch real quick. And from 1pm until about 2 in the morning I would write the script. And I couldn't let either one of them go. You know, they were both kind of an opportunity of a lifetime. The, the Nelson DeMille book, it was called the Lions Game and it's still one of the best reviewed books I've ever done. It was my first bestseller. And you know, then the script, you know, was opening new doors too. So I, I was like, look, I'll, I'll live a very uncomfortable two weeks.
- [15:12]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah.
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Scott Brick
But hopefully what I'm also doing is demonstrating to the two companies that I'm working for. Whatever it takes, I'll hit my deadlines. That's fine. I know how important both of these are to you and I don't want to leave anybody in the lurch. So off we go.
- [15:29]
Andrew Morrison
And just for self fulfilling purposes, because he is my favorite author, did one of those doors that opened up end up being working for these stage adaptions for Orson Scott Card? I love Orson Scott Card's work.
- [15:45]
Scott Brick
He's absolutely amazing. And yeah, he and I had been friends going back to my article writing days. I had to interview him for a magazine and he could only give me 20 minutes. We wound up spending 90 on the phone and by the end of it he, he told me that he was in LA to do a reader's theater version of Lord of the Rings. This would have been around 98 school, 1998, I want to say. And I wasn't in audio yet and he asked me to play Gandalf. I'm like, when? Oh, we're doing it tomorrow. Okay. So that afternoon he comes by and he drops off a script in my apartment. It's crazy meeting your heroes. Yes. We've known each other for a long time and he knew about my writing background. He'd read some of the stuff that, that I write and that I had written and he knew the work of his that I really loved, the stuff that really resonated with me. And at one point we were talking about doing a, one of his short stories as a film. Anyway, after Rama happened or didn't happen, but it happened for me.
- [17:06]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah.
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Scott Brick
He told me that he wanted to get more of an entree into Hollywood. Ender's Game I think was being developed at the time. I think it was still several years away from hitting the big screen, but he wanted to make sure that Hollywood knew about his other stories. Too. And he and his daughter Emily, she was living here in LA at the time, on a trip here to la. They took me to a lovely dinner in Venice, and Emily had seen me on stage doing something around that same time. And Scott said, you know, let's do an evening of theater. Let's get three writers. Three or four. You know, everybody will pick one of the stories. You can adapt it, and I'll direct it. It's like, wow, you're gonna let somebody else work on your stuff? And he said, yeah, sure.
- [18:04]
Andrew Morrison
That's some trust.
- [18:08]
Scott Brick
And I. I wound up. I. I smiled and I said, do I get to pick this story? And he goes, sure, why not? And I. And he said, do you know which one? And I started saying the name. The name of the story is Clap Hands and Sing. It's a time travel piece.
- [18:32]
Andrew Morrison
I love his time travel pieces.
- [18:34]
Scott Brick
Oh, my God. Interesting concept. In this version, you travel back into your own body. No, you travel back into somebody's body, and you essentially take over. So you don't go back physically, you go back mentally. And this guy decides he wants to go and redo something in his life, and he sends himself as an old man back into the young man. And it's a beautiful story, absolutely beautiful. And. And a very personal story for him because it was based on something that had happened in his life. And I said the title, and I hadn't even finished. I was like, clap hands. And he says, done, done. He knew exactly what I was aiming for. So I wrote that up. I played. I'm trying to remember. I think it was. Charlie was the name of the role. Anyway, he had a robot assistant as an old man. And then when he goes back into his younger body, the robot assistant. I went from playing the assistant to playing the younger version. And we got another narrator, Stefan Rudnicki. He's another. He's a golden voice narrator. And he hadn't done stage work in years, but he had been adapting Scott's books into audio for a long time. And I said, you want to play the older version of me? He said, let's do it. So, yeah, I think it's still out there. I know that. Well, the book is, you know, it was called Posing as People, and it was a collection of all three of the plays, as well as the short stories that they came from. CC the original version and then the adaptation. And I think we only printed up, like, a thousand of them. It was a kind of a vanity press kind of thing, but we signed every one of them, put them up for sale on Amazon, and we recorded the play on each play on audio. So those are available? Well, they were. Anyway. I don't know if they still are, but that's fantastic. It was a really fun experience. I. I found his trust was a very heady thing. I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe he's letting me do this. And he wound up asking me to do a short story. He was fleshing out the Ender's game universe, and he asked if I would do it. And frankly, I said yes. I told him what I wanted to do. We emailed a bunch of times about it, and I just got overwhelmed with another writing project that I had already been like a year late. And so I never. I never followed up on that. But I remember there was something. It was a creative decision. I was being very faithful to. To the. To the piece, to the source material. I was trying to use as much dialogue from the original story as possible. And. And there was a moment in there I said something like, for God's sake. And. And he cringed. And I said, what's wrong? And he goes, I just, you know, I wish we could say something else. I. That makes me feel a bit blasphemous when I hear that being said. And I said, it was in your story. You wrote it. And I know that he said, I wrote that story when I was young. If I was writing it now. But he told me, he said, use it. If that is important to you, use it. And I was like, no, it's not really. I said something else instead. And I'm like, the guy trusts me enough to do this. It's like, I want to do the version. I want to do his best version.
- [22:38]
Andrew Morrison
Which one was it? You said it's in the Ender Games universe verse. Was it a xenocide or speaker for the Dead, or do you remember which one it was?
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Scott Brick
Wait, which. Which short story I was going to write or what?
- [22:51]
Andrew Morrison
Oh, I thought you said you were working on an adaptation from the Ender's game universe. Oh, okay. Okay.
- [22:57]
Scott Brick
There's a short story called Clap Hands and Sing the.
- [23:00]
Andrew Morrison
Okay, gotcha, guys. Gotcha.
- [23:01]
Scott Brick
Okay. And, yeah, and that's basically how, like, the creative decisions got made. It was just, you know, it was very comfortable. He'd been a. Has been a wonderful friend over the years, an advocate and fiercely loyal to his. To his friends. And he even helped guide me a bit when my career took off in audiobooks because, you know, he just helped me navigate that a little bit. It's just bizarre when people know your name all of a sudden. So, you know, who better to mentor me through that part of the process than Orson Scott Card, right?
- [23:44]
Andrew Morrison
So as you were developing as a narrator, just from coaching with you and listening to your early work, you're very, very intuitive. But how did you build the skill set in both the physical and in understanding the author's intent, doing the. The adaptations and stuff like that? How. How were you developing those skills past your intuition?
- [24:10]
Scott Brick
A lot of it was reading voraciously. I got to the point where I was an expert. I took classes in story construction, in breaking down stories to their basic elements and looking for the agenda in. In pieces. You know, I did a. I did a piece recently that it was about wildlife, but it was about wildlife at the border, the U.S. mexico border. And it talked about how the wall had disrupted so many things. And so there was just this brief little bit saying, you know, to make humans more, you know, feel more secure, at least, you know, wildlife was disrupted. And we have to acknowledge that and adapt. And the way they've adapted is by going into people's pools along the border and, you know, swimming in their pool, like bears and bobcats swimming in their pools at night. And I remember thinking, you know what? The whole piece was entirely about just the science of nature. But there was that one little bit, the wall. One little bit. And I thought, okay, it's not a bad word agenda. It's just, you know, you know, why the author put it in, and that helps you kind of grab their authorial voice. And, you know, I had that happen multiple times where once I understood what they wanted to say, it made it easier. Like, for instance, I did two books by Ron Chernow. He began these two, pardon me, by doing a biography of Alexander Hamilton. That's the book that Lin Manuel Miranda read on his honeymoon and turned it into the Broadway sensation that it is. The second book that he wrote, like six, seven years later was Washington. And those two lives, those two men's lives, those two men's lives were inextricably intertwined. He was Hamilton, was Washington's aide de camp in the army. He was his secretary of the Treasury, a member of his cabinet in the presidency. And in many ways, it was like I likened it to the Gospels. It's the same story from two different perspectives. And I don't know this for sure. I spoke with him once when we were working on a Hamilton, but we didn't talk about this. When I spoke to Mr. Chernow, I got the impression while I was reading it, that first book. The. Chernow knew Alexander Hamilton was a great man. He understood that he was a great American, a great patriot, but a very flawed man. And he held him up for the admiration that he so richly deserves. But he also pointed out the many times when, you know, he hurt those closest to him. When we got to Washington, by contrast, I thought, oh, no, Chernow just loves this guy. And again, this is just my supposition. My take on it was, Chernow admires Washington as a patriot and as a man. And that's different. That's a different flavor to the read for the two different books. It's very subtle. I don't think anybody's gonna come up with that just by listening to them, but, you know, it's little things like that. Also, I did a lot of training in addition to the, you know, the writing courses that I took when I was in college. I have read almost every how to book that a writer has published, from Stephen King's memoir to Ray Bradbury's. Janet Ivanovich wrote one. I found one recently. I'm trying to remember who it was. I've got it bookmarked. But when you know why an author is doing what they're doing, it just. That's kind of the key that gets you through the locked door. Why you know, they're doing it like, okay, this. It's a murder mystery, and this character is the. The red herring, the one that the author wants you to think is the bad guy. Yeah, but that's. So. It'll be all the more thrilling and surprising when it's, like, what it was, the mother. You know, it's. It's that kind of thing. It helps you, I don't know, pinpoint the. The important bits of the story and. Yeah, I guess I'm rambling here. I'm a writer. I need an editor.
- [29:22]
Andrew Morrison
What is your preparatory process for. For taking on an audiobook, as far as, like, research goes and, like, how has that evolved throughout your career? Has it become more adept or have you simplified it, or.
- [29:33]
Scott Brick
I had. I've had to streamline it. God bless her. Dear friend Katie Kellgren passed away. I want to say it was six years ago now. So hard to believe. And she was the best of us. She would do so much research and prep. It would take her a week to prep a book that was going to take her a week to record. And so she was doing, you know, two books a month, essentially. And she asked me one time, how can I make it go faster? Because people Want me to work more, and I need to work more. And I said, well, I'm doing four books a month. I can't imagine taking a week off and prepping it. Yeah, I said, but I can't imagine hiring somebody to do that, to do that for me. And I told her about my researchers and the producers that I work with. If I'm going to be working in isolation, it's one thing if I'm working at Penguin Random House, there's always a director, and that director is the one looking up the phrases, oh, no, it's not Houston street, it's Houston street because it's in Manhattan. Stuff like that. The pitfalls that we would fall into. A friend of mine, a colleague of mine did that, and it was named about 100 and some odd times in the book. That was a really bad day for him. He shall go nameless.
- [30:56]
Andrew Morrison
But I've done that. Yeah, that was a big revision session.
- [31:03]
Scott Brick
But they, you know, they handle all that. But if I'm working alone, like, for instance, I'm working on a book right now called Brethren, and it was with an independent author, and it's set in the year 77, essentially, in, you know, in Wales, England. And there's a lot of Old English. I'm not going to look that shit up. Pardon my French. But I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? No, not a chance in the world.
- [31:33]
Andrew Morrison
That's a. That's a whole degree, man.
- [31:36]
Scott Brick
Years ago, there was a company, and I'm fudging the numbers here because I honestly don't remember what they were. I want to say at the time, this one publisher, I was working there that day when they announced. They said, okay, we pay $200 per finished hour. And again, it was more than that. I just don't remember what it was. 200 per finished hour. But if you do your own research and you record, you know, in isolation, you know, at your home studio, whatever, we'll give you 250 per finished hour. And I tell you what, man, everybody in that lunchroom was giddy. They were like, oh, my God, I just got a $50 raise. And I said, are you kidding? No, you did not. You just took a $50 hit. Now you're making. You'd be lucky to be making 150 per finished hour because you're going to have to do all that freaking research. I said, man, they said, you're not going to take the deal? I said, no, I'll take the deal. I'll make an extra $50 per hour. But I'll, I'll use it to pay my researcher. And you know that. George, George Weisberg. Seriously, Anybody in the audience listening? You need a researcher. George dot Weisberg, two S's@gmail.com. he's got an entire staff. I throw people, I throw people his direction all the time. He's amazing and he gets that stuff done. And he sent me a seven page report, all old English. Oh, dear God. But that's, but that's what I do. I get a manuscript. First thing I do is I work with a production manager. She's been working for me for many years, Gina Smith. And she keeps track of, okay, we got the manuscript. And okay, they've been sent off to George, and then later on, okay, George has sent them back, keeps copies of all of them and says, you know, then we lock in a date to record it and then off I go. If I need more help, if I'm really strapped for time, there's been a couple of times where I've had to hire somebody to read the book for me and give me like a really detailed book report. And the only people that I have ever hired for that are audiobook producers who maybe don't have a project that week. But whether it's because it's an author that I haven't worked with before and I'm not familiar with their style, or if it's just that, you know, look, I got, I got handed a Michael Crichton title. This was about three months ago. Now. I got handed it really last minute. They were like, okay, the approval's been done, you've been approved. We need this in three weeks. I was like, oh my God, I am not. I couldn't read the book ahead of time, but I worked with somebody who had, and she told me every single chapter. I was able to skim it, don't get me wrong. But yeah, you know, it's a lot easier to, to read an eight page detailed report than it is to read a 400 page book, right? So there have been times and I don't do it very often, but if I'm absolutely pressed for time and I tell them, I let them know, they're like, yeah, that's fine, that's fine. You know, we trust you. And there's that word again. It's a, it's a wonderful thing. But yeah, that's, that's basically what I do. I also, I work with a guy named Jonathan. It's a great guy. And he works remotely when I'm working alone. If it's not, if it's for a publisher, they're going to handle all the editing and the post production and all that, and I don't need to worry about it. But if I'm working in isolation, I'm working with an independent author, then I hire Jonathan and he, and I get on a zoom call and he's. And I give him control of my screen so he's actually running Pro tools for me. I don't have to worry about anything. I can concentrate on what I do, what I do best. I know how to tell a story. I don't know how to turn off, you know, the, the latency, you know, echo, you know. Yeah. So that's, that's basically what. Then I send it off to my production, that post production house, they're great Spoken Realms Audio and they do the, the editing, the proofing, the mastering soup to nuts.
- [36:23]
Andrew Morrison
Are there any other, just out of curiosity, are there any other parts of your business that you delegate that you or that you've more and more needed to delegate over time? Because you've just given me a staff list, basically?
- [36:39]
Scott Brick
Well, yeah, frankly, it was my need to delegate that led me to hire Gina in the first place. And at the time I just, I didn't have time to go to my, to my dry cleaners and pick up my shirts that, you know, I've got a book event this weekend and I don't have time to go get them. And so at first she was like, you know, like an assistant running around doing shit. And then we found out, boy, suddenly when we would have meetings, it was like, well, you know, I could update the website and I could get that store running for you and you generate the content and, you know, I can make it work. It got to the point where for a while there, I mean, I was. My website was paying her salary, which is great. And so ever since then, I've looked for ways that I can delegate. I mean, look, I, my mom, I always call her the anti. Lucy Ricardo, because if you remember in I Love Lucy, Lucy was always like, ricky, can't we get a maid? No. No wife of mine is going to have a maid. My mom hates the idea of. Or at first I think she's come around to it, that I would hire a cleaning lady and she's like, scott, Brick, everybody should be able to clean their own house. And I said, yes, but I am highly in demand and if I can pay somebody to do the job that I don't really know how to do very well and Pay her to do it. And it's done in six weeks. And she comes back and does the same thing the next six weeks. And, you know, and I'm not gonna have to worry about the dishes of the laundry or whatever. I said, you know, Mom, I can be making a lot more money if I'm just focusing on what I know how to do. I not rich, but I have more spare money than spare time. So from that point on, I was like, okay. You know, when I bought the house, I hired a gardener. You know, I don't. I haven't done my own taxes in over 20 years. I hire somebody who knows what the hell they're doing, you know, and for my business, for the audiobooks that I do, occasionally I will license the audio rights to a certain title and I will produce it myself, which means I have to come up with the COVID art sometimes. So I'm hiring artists to do this work. I hired Kevin J. Anderson, one of the Dune authors. I was doing a book that's kind of peripheral to the Dune universe. It's called Dreamer of Dune. And Brian Herbert, his writing partner on the Dune series, Brian wrote a book about his father. It was a biography of Frank Herbert. And I wanted to make sure it got out there, and I knew it was a passion project for him. So I wanted to use the same font, the Dune font. They had done it on the print version, but they no longer had the rights to the COVID art of the print version. When I got the audio rights, Kevin put me in touch with his assistant. A couple hundred bucks. She had done it. Here you go. And it's in the exact same font because they had bought it years ago. And I'm like, I. I just love this. I just absolutely love it. Sometimes, you know, I'll tell you, without a somebody to work with you, sometimes, you know, it can feel like you're herding cats, getting a bunch of freelancers, you know, to get their stuff in on time. But it's. It's marvelous when it turns out. And, you know, it's. It's an overused cliche, but it does take a village. Yeah, I'm not doing all the work myself. I got you that. Go ahead. Go ahead.
- [40:52]
Andrew Morrison
No, you go ahead. You go ahead.
- [40:54]
Scott Brick
I mentioned the. The Sherry Crichton. I mentioned the Michael Crichton book. His wife, his widow, Sherry. I met her a number of times over the years. I've done, I think, five, maybe six Crichton titles. I'd done Jurassic park and the Lost World, and then there was Another book about dinosaurs, but it was from the paleontology side. I did that one that was at Dragon Teeth. And anyway, she found the notes that Michael was working with when he died. He was plotting his next novel, which would be called Eruption, and take place in Hawaii. And it just came out a couple of months ago, and she was saving it for the day when she found the right author to finish the book for him. And she was introduced to James Patterson, and, man, he took the baton and ran with it. It was so freaking good. And anyway, about a week ago, I package on my doorstep, my name on it, and I'm like, I didn't order anything. I thought maybe my wife had ordered it for me. And I opened it. It said perishable. So I open it up and it's a pineapple from Hawaii with a note from Sherry saying, thank you again for working on this. Thank you for getting Michael back on the bestseller list. I think that's your superpower. Here's a little Taste of Hawaii for you. And I was like, oh, my God, that's amazing. But it's not all mine, right? It's not just me. So what I did is I shaved it up and crushed it down and I baked it into a crumble and I was fantastic. Gave it to the. To the director of the book because, you know, it's not a one man show, but yeah. Anyway.
- [42:57]
Andrew Morrison
Well, now I'm curious. So you said you bite the buy the rights to book, and so are you buying the rights to books and then are you publishing them both as an audiobook and as a secondary book? Are you like, rewriting the books you're buying the rights to? What is that process? I'm just really curious.
- [43:14]
Scott Brick
I appreciate you asking. Yeah, it started in 2006 or 7. There were sequels being written to my favorite series of all time, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. It's by Stephen R. Donaldson. And there were new versions coming out, but, like, you know, book seven is coming out. And I'm like, well, what about books one through six? I got hired to do book seven. But I'm like, nobody's going to listen if they haven't heard the first six.
- [43:43]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah.
- [43:44]
Scott Brick
And they were like, well, we'll see how seven sells. And I said, they're not going to. I said, look, please. I spoke to two different publishers.
- [43:56]
Andrew Morrison
Huh.
- [43:57]
Scott Brick
And I said, if you want to do them, I'll narrate them. They're my favorites of all time. And again, it was, you know, let's see how book Seven sells and it sold in the audio sold so poorly that they never bothered to make book eight. And I thought, no, that can't happen. And I contacted the publisher again and I said, you're not going to be doing this. They said, no. I said, will it upset anybody if I buy the rights from you just for the audio, not the print? And obviously. And they said, no, do whatever you want. And I then went back and I bought the rights for books one through six and I filled them in and, you know, all I do is, you know, I'm responsible for everything. You know, I had to record it here in the booth, I had to hire somebody to proof it for me, to edit it for me, to do the mastering for me. But then they went up for sale and, and the author was so grateful. He's a lovely man, Stephen R. Donaldson, that when I came to him for later books, he was like, yes, please, I would love it if you would do them. So I, you know, again, I had to get cover art for all, all seven of those books. And then, you know, I send them to my distributor and they handle the rest. So, yeah, so these are books that.
- [45:37]
Andrew Morrison
Are printed, but they don't have cover art.
- [45:41]
Scott Brick
The Donaldson books, for example, those were originally published in the late 70s, early 80s.
- [45:49]
Andrew Morrison
Okay.
- [45:49]
Scott Brick
And the publisher couldn't assign me the, the COVID art, the rights to the COVID art, only the audio. And they put me in touch with the, the artists and I reached out and it was crazy expensive, about 10 times more than I had paid for the audio rights. I would have had to pay for the artwork. And I was like, can't do it. So I hired a buddy of mine and we came up with a central image. And then he altered it just little by little over the first six books so each one would be unique. And yeah, it was wonderful. Other times, like when I did Dreamer of Dune, the central image on the book is a portrait that was done, a painting of Frank Herbert later in life. And it's wonderful, it's, it's expressive. I encourage anyone to go, you know, look it up online. And then they surrounded that with a photograph of sand dunes and then at the top, that, that iconic Dune font, Dreamer of Doom. Well, there was a number of problems. They no longer had the rights to that portrait and they hadn't, they had only paid for a 10 year contract on the sand dune image and that had expired and they didn't have the font anymore and they never had the rights to that apparently. I guess, you know, maybe Brian had supplied it. In the first place. So I had to go to three different places. My production manager found a sand dune that we bought the rights to the image. Not very expensive, as I mentioned earlier. I got Kevin Anderson to get his assistant. She was wonderful. And she did the logo. And I contacted the artist who did the portrait, Brian. And his agent put me in touch with him, and turns out he's a big audio fan. And he was so charmed that the family loved his portrait so much that he said, I tell you what, I've done a book, a coffee table book of paintings, like a comic book story, essentially a graphic novel. Basically one image per page, and each of the images is a portrait that they did. But he also wrote up a story that he said, I haven't figured out what I want to do with it yet. It would be about an hour long if you did it on audio. How about you do that for me and I give you the rights to the portrait for free? And I said, well, I teach the business of audiobooks. I do a business seminar every year for narrators to just be better business people. And I thought, this is good business. I think it wound up costing me $200.
- [49:05]
Andrew Morrison
The Insider Workshop, right? Is that what you said? Insider workshops?
- [49:08]
Scott Brick
Yeah, yeah, the insider workshop. We do it, I guess it's coming up in March of this year. And I am all about voice actors being entrepreneurial. There is more an opportunity for that, at least in my experience, because I've worked in most areas of voiceover, but not as extensively, obviously, as my audiobook work. But I'll tell you, there are so many opportunities to be entrepreneurial in audiobooks. That's just what I'm all about when I see a colleague succeeding at stuff like that. And I'll tell you this, it is a risk when you buy the rights, There is no guarantee you're going to make your money back. No guarantee. However, sometimes if you bet on yourself and the. The property itself, especially if you're paying.
- [50:07]
Andrew Morrison
Five different people just to get cover art. Jesus.
- [50:09]
Scott Brick
Yeah, right, exactly. But I knew that the Covenant books, for instance, I knew that they had been fan favorites for years, and there was still a sizable fan base. And I know because I've gone to conventions and specifically about Stephen R. Donaldson. Everybody there is a Donaldson fan. And I've gone, and I think that's the first time I actually met him. So I knew how rabid the fan base was. I just didn't know how much I could count on. And I wasn't doing this for money. I was Doing it because they were my favorite books and nobody was going to be able to experience them on audio. And I thought just what a shame that would be. So I also knew that if I made my money back, it would be over the length of the 10 year contract. I think I made my money back within four. But that's, that's a big thing.
- [51:07]
Andrew Morrison
Months or years?
- [51:09]
Scott Brick
Years.
- [51:09]
Andrew Morrison
Okay.
- [51:11]
Scott Brick
And all the production costs, you know.
- [51:14]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah. That's why I was like, whoa.
- [51:17]
Scott Brick
It's not just the production costs, but I always factor in, okay, this book is 20 hours long. I think the first one in the series was either 15 or 20. So I wrote down specifically to the appropriate decimal point, how much at my current rate would I have been paid this if the publisher had hired me to do it? So that's the first thing I put in. And then I add all the production costs and within three or four years I had broke even. And that's a hard thing to do when you know you have to deliver. I think the month that I was working on this, I had to deliver 60 hours of audio that month, which is a lot. It's essentially 15 hours a week, three finished hours a day. I had to do that to make my monthly nut to make my house payment. But I stayed in the booth for hours afterward every night. And I recorded the Covenant books knowing full well that I wouldn't see that paycheck for years. But I did it. And I mentioned earlier being sick 10, 12 years ago because of the illness, I took about 25% hit in income that year. And the only thing that kept me going because I could have easily been another, yet another medical bankruptcy in this country. The only thing that kept me going was the residual income, the royalty income I was making off the Covenant books that covered that 25%. So sometimes it pays off. But yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of factors that go into it.
- [53:00]
Andrew Morrison
What is your opinion? Like, do you ever do solely royalty share books that you don't own, like where you're just half rights to. How do you gauge that? How do you analyze what's one we're taking on? Because I've looked at royalty share books as a great way to make passive income, but it's also difficult to project your income based on somebody else's marketing of their book. So that's kind of been the hesitancy factor.
- [53:29]
Scott Brick
The model I work with most with independent authors like the one I'm working on now, Brethren, rather than asking for royalties because we don't know how they're going to sell. I typically say, just pay me up front and whatever comes in is yours. But a number of times if people come to me and they say, I beg your pardon, dealing with a stomach issue. If they say I would like to do a royalty share, first thing I do is I say, what are your sales figures? And they'll say, well, last month we moved a thousand copies. I said, no, what, what did you sell? How many of those were promos? How many of those were discounted? How many of those were gifts to family and friends? How many are you selling? And I tell people that and they're like, what if they don't want to tell me? I'm like, well then you don't want to be in business with them. Why would you be? You're going to be partnering in business with somebody. Do you really want to work with a partner who doesn't show you the books? So I have no problem saying no. Just to me, no is a complete sentence.
- [54:40]
Andrew Morrison
Oh yeah.
- [54:42]
Scott Brick
And anyway, but other times, which I gotta be honest, I dearly love it. Some of my favorite books of all time are either in the public domain recently or about to become so. And they're books with legs, you know, they, they continue to sell. And I will invest the time and the money, you know, for the post production and all that and the COVID art, I will, I will invest that, that time and money knowing that I'm going to have that in perpetuity. I'm not signing a contract with anybody. Audiobooks are typically either a 7 year or a 10 year contract. Some. Right, I've heard of others that were three or four. Um, but typically you have a nice long time to make back, you know, the vig as it were. And there isn't that with, with the public domain, there's no 10 year expiration date. I'm just signing, I'm signing a distribution deal with, you know, my personal distributor is Blackstone Audio and they've been wonderful to me. So you know, like every however many years we had a written end of the contract. If at the end of those years I want to take them elsewhere, I can. Or we just re up. That's the only thing I have to worry about. I can, I can keep making money in my sleep for decades. Yeah, Lord willing. And if the crick don't rise.
- [56:24]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah.
- [56:25]
Scott Brick
But you know, I looked at my royalty income last year because I'm doing my taxes at the moment. I'm not doing my taxes as I mentioned earlier, but because I filed an extension and I typically file around this time in September every year. I looked at my royalty income and realized it paid for my house, paid my mortgage this entire year.
- [56:57]
Andrew Morrison
Was there ever a royalty book that you did, just for the giggles, and then it ended up being just something really, really profitable later?
- [57:08]
Scott Brick
Yeah, there was a book, Cold Moon Over Babylon.
- [57:12]
Andrew Morrison
Okay.
- [57:13]
Scott Brick
And it was written by. And I never remember his name. And that's tragic because, sadly, he died young. He was 49. He died of AIDS. He had written Beetlejuice, and he was working on Beetlejuice 2 when he passed. And he had written a number of Southern Gothic novels that Stephen King fell in love with. And as a matter of fact, the unfinished novel that he left behind was finished by Tabitha King, Stephen's wife. I mean, that's how big a fan the King family is. And anyway, I was approached by an old friend, a friend that I had met through a woman I dated years and years ago. And he always called me. He said, you know, oh, you're the audiobook guy. I mean, yeah, okay. Yeah, I'm gonna have that printed up on T shirts.
- [58:06]
Andrew Morrison
I'm the since 2012. When ACX said, you are the audiobook guy.
- [58:10]
Scott Brick
Exactly.
- [58:11]
Andrew Morrison
It's kind of stamped on you now.
- [58:13]
Scott Brick
Well, he was making a movie, okay. Of that book. He had bought the rights, and Griff first is his name, and he's a lovely guy. And he said, when I looked at the contract, it turned out we had also bought, unbeknownst to me, the audiobook rights. Do you want to do anything with it? And he's an actor as well as a producer, a writer, director. I said, do you want to do it? I can help you get it done. And he goes, you know, I've already sunk so much money into the movie. I would rather just, you know, if I don't have to pay to get it done. It would be great if you want to do it, and we'll split the revenue. I said a couple things. Stephen and Tabitha King's, you know, one of their top three favorite writers. Okay. I got that. Southern Gothic is the genre built in fan base. Right. And there's a map. My God, that thing hit. It really hit. Trying to remember how many it sold so far. I think I've made four or five times what I would have made had somebody hired me to do it.
- [59:31]
Andrew Morrison
That's fantastic.
- [59:33]
Scott Brick
And. And the contract is still ongoing, so, yeah, I'm really grateful, you know, but others I've done, and they sold 18 copies. It's a crapshoot. I look at it like, if you're in the stock market, you're building a portfolio, and not all stocks in a portfolio hit. But best case scenario, the best stocks in that portfolio make up for the ones that, you know, the worst ones, the ones that don't hit. Yeah. So I know a lot of people who pay their monthly mortgage on royalty income. And I finally got there myself. And. And the first thing I said to Suzanne, I'm like, yeah, we got to do more of this.
- [60:18]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah. No, like, five years ago, I literally, like, there was a book that I was offered for 50% royalty, and it was for living with IBS. And so I told myself, I'm literally going to do this for shits and giggles because I don't think it's going to go anywhere. And I still. It's a mortgage payment, but I still receive a decent monthly payment every single month just from that. But you never know.
- [60:43]
Scott Brick
You never do.
- [60:44]
Andrew Morrison
It's wild.
- [60:45]
Scott Brick
Yeah. Remember at the time, thinking, okay, it's an educated guess, but it's pretty well educated. I did my research. Yeah. But my God, 10 years later, when you're still getting income, it's like, what? Yeah, okay. You know, it's like getting those royalty checks that keep dwindling and dwindling until they're finally like, you know, 10 cents. Suzanne and I have a game I'm sure most performers do. It's like, okay, what's the over or under? Above $5? Below $5. And I always go under because 35 cents. But not hers. Hers are usually over. Yeah, but look, it all spends.
- [61:29]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah.
- [61:29]
Scott Brick
You want to pay me 30 cents at a time? Great. Send it my way. I, you know, I. I have always, since I got into this industry, I always knew. And I never really thought. When I got into it, I never really thought about becoming an audio publisher myself. It's the last thing on my mind. But I knew from a business standpoint of, you know, how do I want to. How do I want my career to look? What kind of work do I want to be doing? I always knew, play the long game. Play the long game. And you know when in my more cynical moments, I'd tell people, I'm playing the long con. Yeah. But look, I. I knew when I got into this industry, I was like, well, what are my favorite genres? Science fiction, mysteries and thrillers. So when I got in, you know, it was doing nonfiction. But once I was in, I asked, would you consider me for stuff like this? And I always. Hillary Huber, marvelous narrator, one of our dearest friends she. Well, yeah, I know you met her in Atlanta, nowhere else. And she and her husband Stephen, they were at our wedding about six months ago. And she has always said that the audiobook industry lays out the welcome mat in a different place for everybody, you know, meaning different companies, different genres. Maybe you're gonna be asked to do a nonfiction book, you know, maybe you're going to be asked to do a 30 hour biography of, you know, an obscure historical figure. Avoid those. Yeah, you don't want to do a 32 hour book as your first audiobook. God knows, aim for five or six. But, but that's the welcome mat. That's you getting in. But once you're in, go where you want to go. And I went to Dan Musselman, a guy I had asked for time off and who had said, well, you're the boss.
- [63:58]
Andrew Morrison
Full circle.
- [63:58]
Scott Brick
Once, once I got in and was doing a lot of disjointed stuff, you know, you know, a 1930s novel here, Clive Cussler thriller there. I made sure to tell him I really love science fiction. And I'll tell you what, within a year of telling him that, within a week of telling him that, he offered me Dune, which began my work on that franchise. I've done 25 volumes now because I told that publisher that I really liked it, that that material resonates with me. And then a year later, he offered me that book seven in that Thomas Covenant series. And I, oh my God. I was like, I cannot believe this just happened. I'm a big fan of knowing what you want and aiming toward that.
- [64:59]
Andrew Morrison
And with, with science fiction work, there are a lot of different characters in science fiction, but I never hear you do character voices. So like, mentally, how do you, how do you differentiate your characters to, to the audience?
- [65:17]
Scott Brick
What I try to do, I mean, some on. I had a conversation with an author on Labor Day a couple of days ago and, and he asked, you know, how are you going to voice the characters? And he'd heard me do audiobooks before, so we knew my style. I always say the main character is me. This is the median. This is me and every other character, whether they're supporting characters or bit part cameos like way out here. It's just degrees of difference. And I will use nationality as a guide.
- [66:03]
Andrew Morrison
I've heard you use a slight accent sometimes.
- [66:05]
Scott Brick
Yeah, sure. Or socioeconomic background. You know, there's plenty of characters in thrillers who are basically just dumb hired muscle. And, you know, I'm not going to make him sound like an erudite professor you know, but occasionally. And so, okay. In science fiction, Stephen R. Donaldson, that author, I keep coming back to one of his science fiction series that he did got picked up by Audible and they hired me to do it because of my work on his other series. And there was an alien race in there that when they had to learn to communicate with other races, they had to learn to speak aloud. And Donaldson, God bless him, but it was not a good day. When I read this, he said that their voice sounded like the accretion of rust. Okay, well I ain't gonna sound like that. First thing I do, I make my peace with it. I'm not gonna sound like that. So instead what I do is I lean in really close to the mic and I was obviously worn the editors that I'm going to do this and you know, I got a, I got a pop screen but sometimes I need to get closer than the, you know, the pop filter. I get it as close as possible. And I said, I'll just lower my voice as much as humanly possible. And I, and I'll say, you will come with me now. And I try to do it without inflection because they're aliens, they don't understand human emotion. You know, I just, I try to do something. Okay, the author has already said it sounded like rust accumulating. Okay, I get it. If I, I know enough to just lower my voice so that they can fill in the rest. There's a character in a thriller series that I'm going to be working on in a couple of months. I just got the manuscript for the tenth volume in the series. It's. It's called Orphan X. It's by Greg Hurwitz. And there's a character in it, he's in all the books. He's a. He's a secondary. He's a, He's a, he's not a cameo. He's a, like a distant supporting character. And he's a guy, he's an armorer on, off the books black ops armor. And he's described as having, you know, he's stepping off the porch from middle aged to elderly. I think he had been described that way. His joints are really loose, probably from about 50 parachute jumps too many, which is probably more like a thousand. Yeah. And he's constantly chewing tobacco, smoking a cigarette at the same time, drinking whiskey and chasing it down with a belt of coffee and all at the same time. And he is been described as an outlier. Right. He. And he says the craziest things. At one point he Sees the main character, Evan. Evan shows up, and they become friends over the years. And Evan shows up, and he said, the shit kicked out of him. He's just bandaged six ways from Sunday. And Tommy looks at him and goes. His first words in the book were, you look like a bag of smashed assholes. But I did that voice that I just did now, and it's like one of the few real character voices that I do, because he's not in the book very much. Yeah, he was the lead character. I couldn't get away with that. But typically, Tommy is in one chapter, two chapters, maybe three or four, depending on, you know, how prominent he is. And he's an outlier. So I gave him. I just gave him the voice that the actor who played Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs used. He was so nasally. He's, like, locked. He's, like, occluded. You know, he's just, like, really up back in his throat and up kind of in a nasal cavity. And he's just. He's so contracted, constricted. So, you know, we talking about that great big old fat girl, you know? Yeah, you look like a bag of smashed assholes. So I don't use voices very often, but when I do, it's. It's for the outliers, you know, the rust aliens or the Tommy parachute armorer.
- [71:09]
Andrew Morrison
So when. When I was coaching with you, one of the things. One of the metaphors that you use that really, really stuck with me with me, was dancing with the text. And. And whether you're the lead or whether the script is a lead is based on how well the text is written. And so I was just wondering if you could kind of go over that again, but also if there are any other metaphors that you use when navigating scripts. Because I love the idea of consolidating a concept so that way you can focus on the creative.
- [71:48]
Scott Brick
Oh, thank you. Yes. I. To me, audiobook narration is a dance, and the partners, one of the dancers is us, and the other is the text. And typically, you know, my approach is always let the text lead. But as any woman out there who's done ballroom dancing or frankly, dancing of any sort, they know that they'll be able to tell you that if you're. If you're working with a strong partner, you can relax into it and let them lead you. If you're working with a weaker partner. And, you know, I'm not here to insult anybody, but not every book I work on is art. In. In those circumstances, the Woman would have to do a lot more of the work.
- [72:48]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah.
- [72:48]
Scott Brick
And guide and lead the leader. And, you know, doesn't happen very often, thankfully. But I find myself doing far less work when I'm with a really strong partner. I think when we worked together, I was talking about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Yep. Ginger Rogers trusted Fred Astaire implicitly. And she always relaxed into him. When he had his arm at the base of her back and he would spin her, the centrifugal force just created this amazing image of them, you know. Oh, my God. It was like. It was like a figure skater, you know, doing. Doing the spins. But she leaned into it so much that her back almost looked like a U on its side. But she was an untrained dancer, and every other. He worked with her 10 times, 10 different films, and every other partner. He said this later in life. Every other partner he worked with was a trained dancer. She was instinctive. The trained dancers are taught, keep a rigid spine, never relax it. That's where your strength comes from. Ginger didn't know that. She just relaxed into the moment. And I think there is a reason why those 10 films are the best musicals that, you know, that era had to offer. So I try to keep that in mind. Just relax into it. Just let them guide me and try to stay out of the way. I mentioned that one time, I spoke about this metaphor to a student who said that he was extensively trained as a ballroom dancer. And he said, for them, there are three people involved, each dancer. So, okay, the narrator, the text, but then there's the floor. And to me, the floor could be, you know, the genre. It could be, you know, is it comedy? Is it pathos? You know, whatever it is. But I. Yeah, I really loved that metaphor when I latched onto it. I don't even remember where it came from. But there's another metaphor I use for the experience between the narrator and the listener, and that is a handshake. It creates trust. It establishes a relationship. I go up, I meet somebody for the first time. I am as equally turned off by the guy who crushes my knuckles, who's trying to prove something infuriates me, and I tell them to their face that they're assholes for doing that. I'm like, what, am I a threat to you? Fuck off. You know, pardon my French. I'm as equally turned off by somebody just giving me the dead fish handshake. You know, it's like it's contact and nothing else. It's just limp. You know, what Take my hand. Not overbearing, but confidently. Take my hand. If you, as the listener, put your hand in mine, I promise you I'm not going to go too far. Go overboard with, you know, the voices of the intensity, or, you know, I won't go too soft. Just take my hand and I will guide you where you need to go. If you will trust me, I will prove myself trustworthy. And I think that's what a firm, but not too firm handshake does. Because a lot of times, look, you're meeting people for the first time, they're listening to it. Maybe they're listening to an audiobook for the first time. And I try to never forget that, that this is going to be somebody's first audiobook. I want to make sure they come back, not necessarily to me, but to any other audiobook out there.
- [77:12]
Andrew Morrison
That's fantastic. So, I mean, I know at this point it was a couple of years ago, but it was still a large shift in the overall audio marketplace. How did the pandemic change the way you operated your voiceover business? How did the audiobook market change as a. As a whole? Yeah.
- [77:36]
Scott Brick
It made me really grateful that I had put in a home studio when I did, because there was a ton of people who were desperate for booths like this one. Originally, my booth was under my stairs. I called it the Harry Potter booth. And it wasn't a room, it wasn't a closet. I had to bring in a contractor to wall it off. Was this an open space? It was storage space. The original owner, I found out, used it as a wet bar, which kind of made me happy. Here I am narrating books, where a bunch of cocktails were poured before.
- [78:15]
Andrew Morrison
That's cool.
- [78:16]
Scott Brick
But, you know, it wasn't great, soundproofing wise. Nevertheless, I had it. And I was really high risk during COVID because I have diabetes and I had cancer years ago. And, you know, Suzanne came over and she was living in apartment building in west la, and she was afraid of going home and being exposed by somebody else in her building, then bringing it back to me. And so we just locked down here for like a year. And she brought over her microphone and her computer, and, you know, she recorded five hours in the booth. And then, like, she'd go from, like seven till noon. And then from that point onward, I would take over and finish up around dinner time. And thankfully, we were prepared. A friend and colleague, Travis Baldry, upgraded his booth and he sold his old one. That's the one I'm sitting in now. During COVID but, you know, it wasn't. I mean, God, those first couple of weeks, everybody was scrambling for booths. Nobody, you know, studio bricks, you know, whisper room, whatever, nobody could keep up with, with the orders. I got this one in time. It was able to. Suzanne and I were able to split booths again. I didn't skip a beat, frankly. I found myself. I mean, I don't want this to sound like, oh, I'm so in demand, but I have been throughout my career, and I found myself overwhelmingly in demand because I was prepared, I was ready. I had my booth already. And the industry has adapted. There were a number of publishers that wanted you to record in person, especially if you were new, if you were at the newer end of the spectrum, if you were a new narrator, they wanted to make sure that you had guidance. And, you know, let's say you go into Penguin Random House in Woodland Hills about 20, 25 minutes from where I live. They have 10 studios there. And you got a bunch of newcomers, you got a bunch of veterans maybe who don't have home studios. Great. Well, you know, Dan, he retired a couple years ago. About halfway through Covid. Covid made him realize, oh, I like being at home a lot. But he was able to duck his head into every booth, the outer booth, you know, and just listen to what was going on and judge, you know, okay, we're good, we're good. Covet hits, and that's out the window. And companies that were reluctant to work with home based narrators overwhelmingly just. They turned out 180 degrees. It was like, well, we have to do this now. So, you know, that was great in some ways and not great in others. I know of a lot of studios that folded because the rental income went away. I will never, never forget. I don't want to say his name. He's a lovely man. I've known him for 20 years. And he asked me how I was doing. And this was. This was before COVID I just bumped into him in the store one day. I said, good. A big construction project. I just put a booth in at home. And he looked so disappointed, so disappointed that I felt like I, you know, insulted his mama or something. It was sad. It was very sad. But, you know, the industry has changed and it has shifted. I mean, look, the. The major publishers are still going to have studios, and if you don't have a studio, odds are they'll probably provide one for you. But I think a lot of people, in as much as I was able to keep working, I think there are others who weren't quite that fortunate on the, on the production end. And I hate that. But yeah, you know.
- [82:59]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah.
- [82:59]
Scott Brick
I get the same feel when I think about it. I get the same feeling as when I drive by my favorite restaurant and it folded. I couldn't make it through Covid. They had to fire all their staff within a week. Friend of mine is the major D at one of the most expensive restaurants in Beverly Hills. Very tony establishment. He got fired a week into Covid. He had been working, managing two different establishments in a 10 year period. For them, they're gone. So, you know, the industry is different. It's. But it is still thriving.
- [83:44]
Andrew Morrison
Fantastic. If you could write a letter back to yourself from when you were. From that point in time where you were still waiting on that first audition from your body, from where you sit now, what would you tell your past self?
- [84:02]
Scott Brick
I would tell myself to become a businessman sooner. Just on the production side of it. Don't wait so long. I mean, I was in it for seven, eight years before I thought, oh, there's other income I can be making. Okay. But from a performance side, I would have told myself, I would tell myself to focus on subtlety. And Suzanne, every time the subject comes up when she's around, she's like, are you going to talk about silent movies again? I'm like, yes, dear, I am. Because one thing I've noticed, look, I'm a buff. I am a Hollywood history nut. And I noticed that the silent era had such from the beginning to the end of it. You look at Stylo's beginning films and everything is so presentational. Oh, woe is me. Get onto that. You know, the railroad track. So I shall tie you up. And then you look at the end. I mean, my God, Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. The last moment of that film. It was my profile picture on a number of social media platforms for years. It's so subtle, beautifully done. They had such subtle, exquisite works of art done at the end of silent film. And what I started realizing is every time there was a new storytelling medium, they hired people from the previous storytelling medium. So, okay, yeah, silent film goes into sound. They hired silent actors. Well, as Singing in the Rain so eloquently pointed out, that was based on the transition when a lot of those actors had accents that were too thick for people to understand. They couldn't sing, they couldn't dance, you know, whatever it is. They didn't make the transition. They worked a few years and then they stopped. Same thing happened when, you know, film transition, you know, then there was Radio. Okay, great. On. On radio. They're hiring stage actors, they're hiring film actors, silent film actors. But they had never done radio before. They didn't know it was a new medium. But, boy, by the end of the radio age, the work was sublime. This keeps going, you know, even going back to silent film. The reason that all of those early signed films were, like, so presentational. Oh, woe was me. Because they were hiring vaudevillians who were playing to the back of the house. But you don't have to play to the back of the house. You just have to play six feet away to the camera. So to me, that was always the. The paradigm. I'm acting six feet away, or I'm acting 60ft away or 600, if, you know, I performed at the Hollywood Bowl a couple of times. And that's a deep. That's a deep crowd. Yeah, but it's those two things. There's near and then far. And when they. When audiobooks became a thing, they were hiring stage actors and screen actors who, at best, were acting six feet away. I don't need to act six feet away. I'm. At times, I'm even closer than six inches. There's just. There's the story, there's my mouth, and then there's the listener's ear. I'm cutting out a lot of people, obviously, in the production process, but.
- [87:53]
Andrew Morrison
Yeah, but still, for simplicity, I'm.
- [87:56]
Scott Brick
Yeah, I am speaking directly at times with earbuds, directly to somebody's, you know, eardrum. And so I can afford to be subtler. It took me a number of years to figure that out, and I wish I had known sooner, because there are times you can get away with whispering in an audiobook. I mean, if, you know, depending on your settings and you let the editor know, maybe they have to jack the volume a little bit. But it's, you know, the proximity effect. It's like, you know, whenever I switch from internal monologue to external monologue, you know, the external monologue may be, I hate you and I never want to see you again. But inside, you know what they're thinking, and it's, God, I love you, please don't leave. And it's just that proximity, that feeling of being. Well, Charles Dickens said, I am standing in the spirit at your elbow. And that's what I think of when I get in really close on the mic. And I never even noticed that for, I don't know, maybe the first half of my career.
- [89:10]
Andrew Morrison
Once again, intuitive nature. Yeah. And where can people find you? And your work and hire you for coaching.
- [89:19]
Scott Brick
Oh, thank you for asking. I appreciate it. Of course.
- [89:25]
Andrew Morrison
Scottbrick.com it's wonderful. Loved coaching with you.
- [89:30]
Scott Brick
I appreciate that. That's kind of you. Thank you. Scottbrick.com is kind of the umbrella site. It has publicity stuff, blogs that all write giveaways that we'll do with indie authors. But in the upper left hand corner, that little drop down menu, one of them, I think it says is it events or is it coaching? I'd have to, I'd have to look. But yeah, most people, when they want to coach with me, they go to the website. Gina gets it, she sends it to me, makes sure that like the, you know, I put a calendar on there for when I'm available and, and she'll check in with me and say, just FYI, you know, nobody's booked you on this date yet, have they? And you know, yes or no, we continue on from there.
- [90:21]
Andrew Morrison
Beautiful. Thanks for sharing this time with me, Scott. This has been.
- [90:24]
Scott Brick
Oh absolutely. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah.
- [90:30]
Andrew Morrison
Scott has brought more stories to life than I can possibly fathom and I hope you gained as much of an emotional connection to the art of narration itself as I did during this. If you'd like to see his audiobook work or book Scott for coaching, you can visit scottbrick.com thanks for stopping by and I'll catch you in the next one.
- [90:48]
Scott Brick
Thank you for listening to the voiceover coffee shop. For more information on guests, new episodes and more, be sure to visit vocoffeeshop.com and our YouTube channel or your favorite podcast streaming platform. You know you want to.