Authors

Talking with James Patterson & Edoardo Ballerini

At this year’s BookExpo America conference, we had a chance to sit down with author James Patterson and narrator Edoardo Ballerini and talk audiobooks. This is an excerpt of our conversation; the full interview is available on YouTube, and the AudioFile blog.

AudioFile: When did you first get interested in audiobooks?

James Patterson: You know what, for me, when I moved out of New York City and started driving my car all the time, that’s when I became addicted to audiobooks. And I do not get in my car without putting an audiobook in now. Right now it’s ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY, which I don’t understand a word of, but I’m listening anyway.

Edoardo Ballerini: That’s the value of a good narrator: Even if you don’t know what you’re listening to, you keep going.

AF: And what about you, Edoardo?

EB: I came to audiobooks after many years in film and television, which I still do, when somebody approached me to do a recording of Machiavelli’s THE PRINCE because I speak Italian, and I said, “Sure.” And then from there it just sort of took off, and now I find myself also listening, especially at night when I’m too tired to hold a book and actually read it. I can lie back in bed and dim the lights and listen to something.

AF: And Jim, what about the first time you heard one of your own books: Do you remember which one it was?

JP: I don’t remember what I had for breakfast. No, I don’t remember which one. I listened to BLACK BOOK, and I thought it was terrific because I love the book. A lot of them I don’t listen to on audio. I mean, I’ve already been through them 10 times at that stage. One of the things about listening to them, though, is you do get a good feel for when your dialogue stinks, you really do. You go, “You know what, that just is bad, that’s bad.” So what I want to do from now on is, with the manuscript, I want you to read it, and then I’ll know what to fix.

EB: We’ll drive around; it’ll be like you have a live audiobook happening in your car.

JP: Yeah, that’s right; yeah, perfect.

AF: And what about you, Edoardo, do you remember the first James Patterson audiobook you narrated?

EB: It must have been the NYPD Red series, which we’ve done, I believe, four of now . . .

JP: Wait a minute, we’ve only done three.

EB: Oh, okay.

JP: You’ve done one I haven’t even written yet. Yeah, there are four, there are four.

EB: I secretly wrote a fourth one . . .

JP: Excellent.

EB: Because I felt I knew the characters so well at this point.

JP: Yeah, probably.

AF: Pacing is so important in your books, in the way you write but also in the way you narrate. How do you set a tone, first as a writer, because you have a sense of where you want to leave people at the end of each chapter, but then as the narrator following that?

JP: Well, Michael Connelly, bestselling mystery writer, said, “What Jim does is every single chapter moves both the characterization and the plot forward and turns on the movie projector in our heads.” And whether I succeed or don’t succeed, I’m always trying to do that. I want people to see the scene; I want them to feel that they’re there. I think audiobooks can be quintuple what they are now in terms of popularity, and I think the productions could be a lot richer. So one of the things we might try to do with the book with President Clinton [THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD, due to release June 2018] is really go for the kind of production that I don’t think anybody’s done yet in an audiobook.

EB: I agree. I’ve often said, and I know it can be cost prohibitive unless you have bestsellers such as yours, but to have sound effects, to have all this kind of richness behind it, to make the production bigger would make the whole thing better. But I did want to say something about pacing, to your question, and also I guess, to what Michael Connelly said about the visual nature of your books, which I find to be very true. I often feel like I’m watching a movie when I’m reading these books. Everything comes so alive, and I can really see the clothes and the buildings and the cars. The pacing is so dictated by the writer that I feel like it’s there waiting for me to follow. If you have a lot of staccato short sentences, that’s going to suggest something; if you have these long sort of flowing sentences, that’s going to tell you what the author wants in terms of pace. I’ve always believed that the narrator is in service to the author, that it’s my job to present the book as the author intended it. And so I look for these clues, I look for the kind of sentence structure, I look for the kind of characterizations, and I try to follow that.

JP: Would you mind going out to Hollywood and explaining that to all of the scriptwriters, the show writers, the actors?

EB: Here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to get in a car, we’re going to drive, I’m going to read your next few books aloud to you so you can hear them . . .

JP: On the way to L.A., yes . . .

EB: We’re going to get to Hollywood, we’re going to set up some meetings, and we’re finally going to make something happen out there.

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2017

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