Discover the immersive audiobook

A word from producer Dan Short…

I was contacted by an Auran in early 2026 who explained he had finished a book, it was being published shortly, and they wanted to explore the possibility of turning it into an audiobook. From the get-go, I’d explained this is not something I have experience in, but immediately after that call, I started researching the requirements and began understanding what it might take to see this through to the end.

Along with capturing the narration, voices, environments, and action, there was something far more important than this. Ensuring we got on well enough to spend a large portion of our time creating together with minimal friction.

I worked hard to create an environment that allowed us to create freely, and experiment with tonnes of different sounds and voices from the start, and Auran spent a lot of time thinking of characters’ accents and performative style so we could retain some authenticity of the characters.

What that means in practice is that scenes aren’t just read, they’re built. Characters move through space, environments shift around them, and music is used to carry tension rather than sit underneath it. In some moments, you’re hearing a conversation naturally in a room. In others, you’re pulled into something different, where voices, sound design and music blur together to match the narrative.

Each location has an identity not just in what you hear, but hopefully in how it feels. We avoided static situations and instead focused on subtle movement and highlighted the big moments and variations, so nothing ever feels overly repetitive or detached. The aim was to make it easy to follow without relying on the constant narration cues, allowing the listener to stay immersed without being pulled out of the experience.

It sits somewhere between a radio drama and a traditional audiobook, but still keeps the structure and pacing of the original story, with not much changed writing-wise. The goal was simple: to make it feel like you’re inside the story.

We booked our sessions in bulk, not knowing how long it would take.

We took to attempting two chapters a night in three-hour blocks - the methodology behind this was that we would both experience fatigue attempting more; voices get tired, and things are missed. We managed to stick to that pretty consistently with variations for some super long chapters and some quick update chapters

What can you expect from “Immersive” audiobooks

When I started this project, I had the idea of not only capturing the voices - and accents - but capturing the atmosphere, and that equated to composing music, adding city scapes, explosions, voice transformations, phone voices, masked voices. Some very unique dream sequences and locations required some lovely experimental synths, and to be honest, it’s been a joy to be a part of.