Narrating Audiobooks with Edoardo Ballerini

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Hi there, and welcome to Vox Talk, your weekly review from the world of voiceover. I'm your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices. Have you ever dreamed of becoming an audiobook narrator? On today's Show, award winning actor, narrator and writer Edoardo Ballerini shares his audiobook journey with us. He's a two-time winner of the Audiobook Publishers Association's Best Male Narrator Audie Award, with over 300 titles to his credit, many of which are classics. An academic and an artist, Edoardo holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature from Wesleyan University. Welcome to the show, Edoardo.

Edoardo Ballerini:

Thank you for having me.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Oh, well, it's our pleasure to have you here. So, Edoardo, obviously we've gone back a little ways, and I've watched your career over time, and especially as you've gotten into audiobooks, just what that journey has been like for you is very interesting. So for those of us who are not yet aware of how you got into audiobooks, can you please tell us, how did you become an audiobook narrator?

Edoardo Ballerini:

Sure. So I've been working for many years in film and television and still do. And right around 2008, I want to say the audiobook world was starting to take off. I think Audible had just launched, and so all of a sudden, there was this kind of, like, need for actors to record books. And so a lot of people were being auditioned. And I remember I went out to Newark to Audible and auditioned for them. I got a couple of titles, and then all of a sudden, I felt like, well, this is where I need to be working. And it felt very natural to me. I have a background in literature. My parents are scholars and academics and as a character actor especially, it felt like the right place. It was like, I could do all these characters. I could do this long form stuff. And so it was kind of like, you know, they say timing is everything? That's kind of what happened to me when it comes to audiobooks. It's like I was ready for something new. Audiobooks were taking off. I found a little in, and then all of a sudden, it just exploded. And all of a sudden, I was just working constantly. And I was really deep into this industry, and I've been so grateful for it ever since.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Wow. I totally remember that time frame as well. It was when audiobooks were becoming the billion dollar industry, and everyone was all about audiobooks. And every book, it seemed, that was in print would usually have an audiobook that would follow after just to see how the print edition did, right? But then they started releasing them concurrently, like, we think the audio is going to do well, so why wait? Why wait to release it? So a great time for an audiobook narrator to have come upon the stage. So thank you for sharing about that. So, Edoardo, when did you first discover your love for narrating audiobooks?

Edoardo Ballerini:

It happened very quickly for me. Like I said, as soon as I got into the booth, I felt very comfortable. I also felt very comfortable with the long form aspect of it. Now, I know a lot of people that work in voice don't like the idea of spending 6 hours, 7 hours, 8 hours in a booth doing something. They prefer the shorter stuff. But I actually felt very comfortable. And I think something actually pretty funny happened to me is right around the time that I got into audiobooks, I actually started meditating and I had this meditation practice and so the idea of like, sitting quietly in a quiet space for a long stretch kind of dovetailed beautifully with this work. And I really maintain that there's something very meditative about audiobooks because you're in this quiet space, you're really communing with the text and it's just kind of the two of you going back and forth and you have to have this ability to stay sort of quiet and in yourself and really paying attention to yourself while telling the story. So these two elements combined sort of made it like the right place for me to be. And the other thing that happened to me personally is that right around this time I also had a child. And so the audiobook lifestyle, let's call it, suited me very well, meaning I didn't have to be on location, I wasn't shooting long hours, I wasn't arriving home at three in the morning exhausted. I could really kind of set my hours. It was like a nine to five job, which was sort of perfect. So I could go into the studios at 9:30 or 10 and I could be done by 3 and I could spend time with my children. So all of these things just kind of came together beautifully for me. And I think it's a bit of a lesson in if you're open to things that the universe is going to provide for you, then you can really make something out of it. If you kind of say like, oh, I'm an actor, I don't do audiobooks. That's not for me. I'm not a recording person. I mean, if I had done that, my life would be so different today. So I was really open to what was being given to me.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

I think you prepared yourself well. You certainly engrossed yourself in not just the material that you would want to read, but just, I think, even the community of people. There's a lot of classically trained actors in audiobook narration and that comes as no surprise. So, you know, what is the biggest difference you find from voice over narration or just doing a voiceover?

Edoardo Ballerini:

Voice acting and audiobook narration, I'll say one of the biggest things, honestly, is the stamina factor. And it's really no joke. I know some wonderful, wonderful actors from screen and stage who have tried to do audiobooks and they just said I can't do it. I just can't do 6 hours, three days in a row, four days in a row, five days in a row, whatever it is. And it's a very real thing and it's something that really people need to consider. The joke that we always say is like when people say, oh, I want to get into audiobooks, we say, ‘Okay, here's a book, go into a closet, wait for 8 hours, come back out and tell me if you're still interested,’ because without making it sound like it's this torture chamber, it is really a big part of it. The other thing I think is that with audiobooks you're everything in the world. You're telling the story, you're playing every character and you also have to have this ability to kind of subsume and make yourself a little bit a servant to the author. It's really about the author's intent and I think that's different than other forms of voice work. I think in other forms of voice work, often the production is kind of looking for the actor to possibly provide something that they didn't even know themselves. They wanted to kind of bring something new, fresh, dynamic that they weren't expecting. I don't think that's really the case with audiobooks. I think you really have to pay attention to what's written and what's in front of you and you have to be able to feel the writer and you kind of I think of it really as a performance art in that you are playing the author and you are the author's voice and bringing their words as honestly as you think that they meant them to be heard. Unlike theater where it's like, well, I could say this a thousand ways, we can do Shakespeare and set it wherever we want. It's not about what Shakespeare intended necessarily. And so I think that's something that also people have to consider when thinking about audiobooks is like, are you willing to really lend yourself to this thing in the sort of honest, most honest and purest way possible?

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

That is really interesting because you're going to want to read books that you yourself would want to read. Like you're going to not want to narrate a book that you would never pick up at the store for instance, because then that believability aspect, the whole I feel connected to the text or I'm representing the author narrating as author, that is a very interesting way to look at it because oftentimes you're thinking oh, deliver on the author's intent and that sort of thing, but it's like actually not just their intent, but what if the author were narrating? How would they go about doing it or saying it not just what is the essence or what do they want you to get across in the main reading? So I know, Edoardo, that you're also not just a talented actor and voiceover professional, but you happen to be a writer, too. So this must influence how you come to a text. Would you say that it does?

Edoardo Ballerini:

It does. Absolutely. And I think of myself as I've always been a writer, and I'm also just becoming a writer, and by that I mean that I grew up in a literary household. My father's a poet. My mother is also a writer. I grew up with writers coming in and out of the house. Everything was a discussion of literature. I studied classics, I studied languages, and that was my background. And I, in college, very much wanted to be a writer. That was my intention. Then somehow I got into this whole acting thing, and that's a whole other show that we'd have to do on a different day. But now I'm actually coming back to writing in a way that is very exciting to me. I've been collaborating with other writers to create audio projects, and it's incredibly insightful to me to see the writer's process, to understand the audiobook narrator's process. There really is this symbiotic relationship between the two, and so the more you can see it from either side, the stronger I think you become. And so I really want to do more writing. I intend to do more writing, and I'm going to be carving out a little more of my time to do more writing, which means I'll probably be recording a little bit less. But I think that's okay. I've been doing this for about ten years now, so I can afford to take a little bit of time off.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Well, I'm glad to hear that you're still working your writing muscle. Like a lot of talent. You have multiple talents. It isn't just the acting, or maybe for some it's writing or it's composing music. There could be any number of ways that you might be creatively gifted and can use that to your advantage. Just thinking back to it, I think there was a little Twitter thread we were both involved in lately, and just like, how studying anything that is complementary to your creative skillset will actually help to strengthen your core talent.

Edoardo Ballerini:

Absolutely. I mean, I know audiobook narrators who are musicians, I know audiobook narrators who are painters, and I think any time you can give yourself the gift of seeing the world in a different way makes you a richer human being, quite frankly, but then specifically applied to audiobook narration. Because, as we said earlier, your job is really to be a whole world. You have to encompass everything. You're not just delivering one character, you're not just delivering a few lines of copy. You're really having to create a whole world. So the more of a sense of the world at large that you have and other perspectives and other angles and studying languages and studying art and studying music and traveling, and all of this all goes into making you a better narrator because you'll create and develop a richness that you wouldn't have otherwise.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Absolutely. And so while we're on the topic of learning and creating a richness that you wouldn't have otherwise, it begs the question what do you wish you could have known before you started narrating audiobooks?

Edoardo Ballerini:

That's a very interesting question. You know, I've had a such a wonderful journey in narration that I don't really see any sort of major missteps that I made. I think if there's one thing possibly and this kind of goes to the bigger question of being an actor and a performer is that you don't have to do everything that comes your way. That you can be a little more selective with things and that I think you can sort of create your voice and brand. You talked earlier about sort of the casting aspect of being the right person for the right book. And so early on in those early years, as we were discussing the 2008, 2009, 2010 the industry was kind of throwing the kitchen sink at everybody and it's like, ‘oh, put this in audio, put this in audio and let's see what works.’ And so a lot of us, myself included, were just sort of like taking everything that came along and I don't know that that was necessary. I mean, I couldn't have predicted, of course, that the industry was going to explode and that I was going to be offered a lot of books. And so early on I was like, ‘oh, I better do this, I better do this, I better do this.’ And I don't think that was necessary. I do think especially when you're starting out in something and this is something I tell young actors all the time is don't be afraid to be selective and be who you are because in the long run it will serve you better. You can easily get derailed in this industry, whether it's on camera, on stage or in front of a microphone and the business will say like, ‘we need this done here, you do it,’ and if you just say ‘yes, yes,’ it can get tricky. And so I think very early on when you get into something, you have to say, well, this is who I am. This is what I want to do. These are the kind of books I want to do. This isn't it. I'm going to wait for the next one. And I've learned to do that over time and I think at this point I have sort of crafted the career that I want in this industry. But early on I was just sort of grabbing anything and everything and you know, it makes sense, right? There's a new industry, you have bills to pay, you want to make some money. But I think I could have been a little more selective early on.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

True. Because any time you take on an audiobook project, you're taking on weeks if not months of work, right? Depending?

Edoardo Ballerini:

Yeah, you have to prep the book, you have to record the book, you get corrections, all of that. It is a big chunk of your life that happens. But also I do think the audiobook industry, first of all, it is one of the most wonderful industries in all of entertainment. Everybody I've met in it is just a fantastic person. It's very supportive, we all kind of know each other. It's not that big of an industry even though it's growing. And so you really want to take some time to consider who you want to be within that industry. And there's no right or wrong, right? You can be like ‘I'm the romance person or I'm the thriller person or I'm the nonfiction person’ or whatever it is. And so I just think it's important early on to define yourself and to make sure that because there is so much out there right now that there's an opportunity for people getting into this industry to really say this is the kind of narrator I want to be, these are the books I want to do and so let's take advantage of that.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, I remember being at Book Expo America a number of times and there's always a little section of the floor, I think it was at the Javits Center, that's where they held where I went. But essentially there's a whole hub of just all these audiobook publishers, audio publishers I suppose is the label that we're going to use. But they're like reams upon reams of these booths and you can walk in and see all the awards and obviously some of them are audio, some of them are golden earphones and whatnot. And obviously there's quite a community as you've mentioned there. So just when we kicked off the show, in fact we mentioned the Audio Publishers Association and so you want to get involved with them if you're a new narrator, you're kind of exploring how to do they've got lots of resources but they also have that award show, the Audies, and of course you're a winner of those awards as well. I've been to an Audies or two in the past and lovely affairs in New York get all dressed up and there's a lot that goes into this art and it really does transcend, I would say even echelons within the industry because you could have new aspiring people who break out and do an audiobook or a part of a cast and some of these from formats of audiobooks. But then you've got celebrities narrating too. Or presidents of the United States or what have you. Right? I know you were up there mentioned as I don't even know what the quote was, it's on your website, but essentially you were compared among so many of these people and you're probably like ‘this is crazy,’ but it's like you can have dignitaries and various others who are narrating or they themselves are authors as well and they're reading their own words. But something I've also noticed is that in audiobooks, then you might if you get together with an author that you really like, and they really like you, then you can essentially have a career reading their books, in effect, like, this has happened. Does it happen for you?

Edoardo Ballerini:

It has, yes, very much. I've developed some wonderful friendships with authors. Jess Walter, who, his book kind of launched my career. I was very fortunate to get it early in my career. I think it was only like the 10th or 12th book that I did, and it became a big hit. It won me an award, and it became a bestseller. And since then, Jess and I have become friends, and we collaborated on a project, and I've done, I think, all of his books since, and some others, to André Aciman, who's a wonderful author. He and I have become friends. We go out to dinner and we just talk about literature, and I do his books. And so it's a bit like they're these famous pairings of, like, actors and directors out there. You think of, like, you know, De Niro and Scorsese who have done all these books, all these movies together. And so to a degree, that happens also in the audio book world. You can have an author and you become their voice. And I think it's great for them, too, because they know exactly who's going to be doing their books, and they feel comfortable with it, and they know they trust that you're going to deliver it in the way that they want the public to hear it. And that happens a lot. There are a lot of narrators who are the voice of a certain author. But I want to just backtrack one thing. You mentioned the Audies and the audiobook conference, and these are wonderful places for people to get started. The other thing about this community is that a lot of us, myself included, are very available, and I've had a lot of young actors and narrators say, like, can you give me some advice? And I'm more than happy to do that. And I think all of my colleagues are as well. And it speaks to the nature of this community. It really does. I don't know that I have the best advice in the world, and I don't know that I can magically snap my fingers and make a career happen for somebody, but I am willing and always delighted to talk to people about this industry. And that doesn't always happen. There are a lot of industries where if you write a big theater store, you may never hear back. And in part because we are a smaller community, but also in part because it's just the way this community has built up. It's a very supportive community, and I really feel grateful every day to work in it. I really do.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Lots of wonderful people in audiobooks, and I just want to dispel a myth. Maybe you can help me here, but is everyone narrating audiobooks like? Not everyone, but for the most part, are they all theatrically trained classical actors? Or is there a way for someone else with maybe a different approach to acting to get involved in and be successful in audiobooks?

Edoardo Ballerini:

Yeah, a lot of people do come from film and theater backgrounds. A lot of people are trained. They went to Julliard, they went to Yale, they went to NYU. They have multiple film and television credits. But the great thing about audiobooks is that it is very much a mirror of the publishing industry. And so just the way that the publishing industry doesn't say, ‘well, if you didn't go to Oxford, we can't publish your book,’ it's the same in the audiobook industry. It's like you can just be the right person for the right author, and you have to make yourself available to the industry so that they can find you, of course. But no, I think there's room for every kind of voice and every kind of person. And now, thankfully, we live in a time where more and more voices are being published, which is great. It's a lot wider than it was even ten years ago or 20 years ago. And so there's all this room for all kinds of voices to come in. And I think there's an amazing amount of opportunity for all kinds of actors and all kinds of performers. I'll just go back to my earlier point that you do have to be able to kind of do the marathon that is required. So that is the one point that I keep hammering home with people.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Right. And I know preparation is key for anything, really. And just to kind of turn and pivot a little here, we're going to pivot to your studio and, oh, my goodness, there's like, an amazing way that you are keeping your studio temperature cool. So I think we're going to just ask you a bit about that. So, Edoardo, can you please explain what is going on behind you and how that is helping you to keep your studio at a really good temperature for narrating audiobooks?

Edoardo Ballerini:

I'll give you a brief history of my studio. So I moved into this house and I knew I had to have a home studio at that point. I had moved out of the city, and down in the basement, which is where I am now, was a wine cellar. And the wine cellar, it's not that big, as you can see, but it was this perfectly framed little space. And I thought, well, that's where I'm going to put my studio. So I had a contractor come in and frame it out and I put in the sound stuff. There's a window over here, but it just looks onto the basement, so it's not that exciting. But the one thing I did not have is oxygen, which is actually kind of key. And so I was like, ‘Well, I could just keep the door open, but no, that makes there's too much noise coming from outside and all that.’ So I put a heavy glass door in and all that. So a very simple trick is this flex tube, which you can see behind me, is it runs through, I don't know if you can really see it, but it runs out. Yes. You can see it's sort of going off to the side. It goes out and out through the wall. We bored a little hole through it and then the tube goes about 30ft, I would say, on the other side. And it's connected to a little fan. And these fans are actually made specifically for studios. And so I connected it. It's about a little ring fan, about the size, and there's a fan that goes onto it. And so the fan is just blowing the air from the outside and snaking its way around so that by the time it gets here, you can't hear it. The sound is completely deadened, but the air is coming in. If I were to put my ear right up to the end of the tube, you would hear a little, little whisper, but the microphone is never going to pick it up. And so I have one coming in and then I don't see I think you can see that and then one going out. So it's pulling some air out and blowing some air in, so you get this circulation. And so what I'm really getting is the air from the rest of the house. And so whatever temperature the house is, is the temperature in here. And yes, there's a little, sometimes it gets a little warmer, sometimes it gets a little cooler, but it makes it so that I can breathe and not pass out and my family doesn't have to find me here in the morning on the floor. And it's vitally important. I know a lot of people are like, in closets and trying to figure out how to work. And honestly, if you're able to cut a little hole into the wall and run a flex tube through it, it will change your life.

Edoardo Ballerini:

Yes. And if you're not handy, get a contractor. Get someone in there to help you because, goodness gracious, I know I could never do something like that. But that's just like it's perfect because we always talk to people about just this very thing. And either it's the temperature because it's summertime or whatever it might be, or people are turning off, like, furnaces and they're just a little crazy, right? If it's winter, you're going to freeze in the studio, you're not going to be too hot. Well, I mean, we know that sound creates heat, but that's a whole other story we've explored many times now on the show. It's just like just because voice actors do work alone in a booth and it gets hot in there or if you're in a closet or whatever, and people often wonder, why is it so hot in here? But it's because the sound actually, Geoff explains this much better in the past episode of Vox Talk. But it literally becomes heat.

Edoardo Ballerini:

Yeah, well, also your body is giving off heat, and if you're in a small room, it's just going to become a little oven. Look, this work is physically strenuous enough. You're taxing your voice, you're taxing your eyes, you're taxing your brain. So to make it as physically comfortable as possible is definitely worth the effort. And if you can't do it, find somebody who's handy, who can come over and help you, because it's actually not that complicated to do. And so once I did a little research online of all these sort of homemade studios, and it works beautifully. I mean, the sound in here is incredible. I'm lucky because I have thick walls and a good microphone and all that, and running that out doesn't affect the sound at all. So it's kind of the perfect solution.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

You have answered the million dollar question, Edoardo. You should have, like, some kind of a patented process for this. This is a big problem.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, well, this is I mean, look, there are many websites and people talking about this stuff, which is how I came across it. And again, in the spirit of being an open community, if anybody wants to write to me and ask me more about it, feel free. I'm happy to answer questions.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

That's so great. So now we know how you prepare to not pass out in your studio.

Edoardo Ballerini:

Yes.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

So we're going to talk about just what you do in general. So before you go in to record an audiobook, what does your day look like? How long does it take you to get into that place you need to be to do what you do.

Edoardo Ballerini:

You know, it's interesting. I used to have more of a kind of a routine, and it was very much about, like, eating something at a certain time and drinking my cup of tea and then spending a few minutes in the booth quietly without recording, just sort of sitting, getting there. And then I discovered over time, because now I think I've put in my 10,000 hours, as they say. So I've earned that. I'm really able to just kind of get in and go, and I can sort of turn it on and off more easily. And it's a muscle. And at first it took me a long time, not a long time, but it took me a fair amount of time to sort of get myself into the right place. And now I have better vocal control. I can tell when my voice is in the right place. If it's not in the right place, I know how to get it there quickly. I can also tell when I'm tired, when my voice is tired. And I have a few tricks that I do to give myself that extra half hour to keep going. But I also know that at a certain point I have to stop because I just can't go on. And so I've learned to kind of baby myself in that respect and take care of myself. And now I don't really have much of a routine anymore. I just kind of jump in and go. But as far as prepping the book goes, I did want to touch on this briefly because people have various ways of approaching the text. So we all, or we should all at least read the book beforehand so we know what we're doing. If anybody out there is really not reading the book, I don't know how you're doing it. But what I try to do, and this may be a little different from my fellow narrators, is I read the book, but I read it somewhat quickly. And I don't mean that dismissively. I do this deliberately. I want to know the book. I want to know the story. I want to know the principal characters. I want to know the author's voice. I want to know the tone, I want to know the style. But I don't want to know everything about the book because I do feel like it's important for me to have some discovery as I'm going along with the book. And so early on in my career, I remember sort of overpreparing some books, I kind of knew them almost too well. And so by the time I actually got to record them, I was kind of done with them in a sense, and I felt like the performance suffered a bit. So what I try to do is find this balance of, like, knowing what I need to know but also leaving room for a little kind of surprise and improvisation and discovery, and it keeps me on my toes. So that's the way I've always approached preparing.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

I think that's interesting, the whole notion of leaving room for surprise; be open to having a spoiler because you need to know where you're going away. So when you say you read it quickly but it's not that you're missing the key parts. It's that you're just kind of getting through the book, but not being so engrossed in every little detail that there's no room left for you to discover nuance along the way.

Edoardo Ballerini:

Right. And I like to be also on the journey with the listener, and the listener doesn't know everything that's coming. I like this idea of being in the listener or reader's kind of shoes a little bit. Like, let's go on this journey together. Yes, I know that everybody dies at the end, and I'm certainly going to build to that, but I also don't want to know every detail. I want to be coming across pages and say, ‘oh, wow, I didn't realize that about this character,’ right? It keeps me alert to what the author is doing in a way that I really feel like if I over prepared new every detail that I would lose something. It's an ironic twist but I feel like I would lose something by knowing everything.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, and we can never really know everything I think in life, it's just there, I don't know. No one is completely expert in any number of subjects even though we know a lot about them. So it's a great journey of just learning and obviously narrating the audiobooks has likely had an impact on you personally, too. So could you tell us how has narrating audiobooks changed your life?

Edoardo Ballerini:

Well, first of all, what I mentioned earlier is that it changed my lifestyle and that I was not filming odd hours and odd places and I had a much more regulated kind of schedule which was very important to me, is very important to me. I've not really missed anything of my children's lives since the day they were born, which is extremely important to me. It has also opened me up to writers and books that I would never have read otherwise. There are so many great writers, there are so many good books and a lot of them we don't have time for all of them. And so I have come across some extraordinary writing which has really deeply affected me. I'll very briefly touch on one, I did this series by this Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård, who is this epic 3600 page six volume opus and we recorded it over the course of years because we were waiting for the books to come out and it's this first person narration and it had a deep effect on my life. I was playing this man, I was doing this 133 hours monologue and it really changed the way I viewed myself and I viewed my past and I viewed my family and I viewed my career because I was so engrossed in this character and it was such a wonderful experience for me. The other thing that I do and a lot of narrators do is long form narration of articles. So we read articles for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine and all these places and there again all these articles I probably would not have read but now that I'm doing so professionally and it has opened me up to all kinds of ideas and international stories and things that so it has really enriched my life in a way that film and television has enriched my life in a certain way and this has enriched my life in a different way. And so I love combining those two things and I just feel like and we've been touching on this theme, it's like the richer you can make your life, the better your world and I believe the better the world for those around you. So let us all be open to taking in as much as we can and listening to as many voices as we can and hearing other people's stories, because that will ultimately make everything better around us.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Well said, Edoardo. So, for those of you out there who are listening or watching, and you would love to know more about Edoardo Ballerini, which I'm sure you probably do, Edoardo, where can people go and find you and learn more about your work? Well, it's the usual spots. I do have a home page, EdoardoBallerini.com, and of course, I'm on social media, and people can easily find that there aren't too many Edoardo Ballerinis in the world. So it shouldn't be too hard to look me up and figure out which is my account. I think there are a few, though, believe it or not.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

All right. That's awesome, Edoardo. Well, it's so wonderful to catch up with you. Thank you for sharing your time with us and also your talent with the world.

Edoardo Ballerini:

Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

And that's the way we saw the world, through the lens of Voiceover this week. Thank you for listening to Vox Talk, and thank you to our special guest, Edoardo Ballerini, who has shared a wealth of knowledge as well as some amazing studio tips, by the way. But honestly, go read a book. Go to Project Gutenberg. Find some royalty free public domain works. There's some amazing books that have just come out this past year. I'm sure we'll have Edoardo back again, just to talk about various things in audiobook land that we did not touch on today. But until then, dear listener, I am Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices, the host of Vox Talk. Our producer is Geoff Bremner. Thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you next week.