How does the adage go: a professional will cost you less than DIY, for the same quality of work. For all intents and purposes, yes, an author is completely capa

How does the adage go: a professional will cost you less than DIY, for the same quality of work. For all intents and purposes, yes, an author is completely capable of recording their own audio book. But - and this is a big but - it's most likely going to sound pretty bad. It will have a small dynamic range (lack of an audio booth and quality microphone), the quality of the various voices will typically be poor (voice acting), there will be essess and 'plosions all over (pop screens, high pass filters, de-essing filters), there will be volume and tone changes where fixes are cut in (voice acting experience), and in the worst cases there will be background noises throughout (recording space and post-processing). It could also take them between 2x and 10x as long - time where they aren't writing - since they don't have the experience required to do efficiently record, edit, and clean up their work. I've recently been listening to fan narrations of light novels, and these are the kinds of problems that crop up all over these fan works. I don't mind in these cases, because they're free.