Why I Chose a Woman to Narrate My Audiobook

That's a clickbait title

There are over 308,000 followers to my Facebook page. I launched the page in the spring of 2011 as a fitness page, with the display name as “Body for Wife”. Later I changed it to “James Fell – Body for Wife,” and then eventually to just “James Fell.”

After nine years it had climbed to 80,000 followers, and 67% of those followers were women. Fitness generally is of more interest to women than men, because patriarchal bullshit saying women aren’t allowed to gain weight, and also I wasn’t one of those douchebro get swoll kind of writers, but rather a more inclusive sort who just wanted to help people enjoy being active while not being a fat-shaming jackass about it.

Anyway, three years after switching to writing sweary history, the page almost quadrupled in the following. Interestingly, the percentage of women following it climbed a bit, to over 70%. Perhaps it’s the stories of badass women from history that I write about.

None of this has any bearing on why I chose a woman to narrate the audiobook version of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.

I’ll note that Random House Audio offered me the job of narrating the book. That’s fairly common with nonfiction, and I did it before with my 2019 book The Holy Sh!t Moment. It was my experiences with narrating an entire book that made me say never fucking again. That shit is NOT EASY. I was absolutely exhausted at the end of each day, and my sweary history book is twice as long as The Holy Sh!t Moment.

There is also the fact that I don’t think I was very good at it.

I mean I guess I was okay, but writing is my talent. For this audiobook, I wanted a true professional. So, why did I choose a woman?

Answer: Because I didn’t like any of the men.

The publisher sent me samples of six different men and I wasn’t excited about any of them. None of them seemed to have that kind of sarcasm and occasional snark that permeates my writing.

“Got any women I can listen to?” I asked.  

And so, samples of female narrators were sent and Kelli Tager stood out. In her sample she was reading a first-person story about a woman who ran into her gynecologist at a coffee shop and it was some funny shit. I liked her immediately; I thought her personality the perfect choice to represent my book. If you want to hear the clip that sold me on her, go to this page on her site and halfway down the right column click on the one that says “Non-Fiction, 1^stPerson, Comedic Memoir.”

I wanted to have a quick phone call with her but of course that had to become a Zoom meeting with the director and publisher, but the cool part I remember was Kelli saying to me, “It’s not often I get to tell an author whose book I’m narrating how much I loved reading it.” So that was cool.

Anyway, my name is on the audio version as one of the narrators, but I only speak for a couple of minutes. I read the “Author’s Note” and then handed things over to Kelli for the next 366 days, then do a brief outro.

Side note: I got to do the recording in a much nicer studio this time. Last time I did all the recording in a scuzzy death metal studio in a sketchy part of town. I’m not kidding. It was nasty.

Although I (poorly) read all the stories for paid my Substack subscribers with a shitty $100 microphone in my echoey basement, I never did a proper audio version for the self-published books. This is the first real audiobook for my sweary history, and I’m certain that Kelli has done a masterful job.

And so, for all those people who for the last couple of years have been asking for an audiobook of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN, it’s now available to pre-order.