This Tucsonan hears audiobooks before you do — in his recording studio

Luckily, they will have people like Jim Pavett to help us hear it.

The owner of Allusion Studios in the Sugar Hill Neighborhood north of downtown Tucson, Pavett has recorded some 100 audiobooks over the years, giving him a special role in the ecosystem of modern letters.

According to Publishers Weekly, the sale of audiobooks surged 13% last year and has moved past e-books in several sub-genres of fiction.

A good story is important, and no one underestimates the importance of expressive narration, but the audio engineer deserves more than a little credit, too.

“People ask me if I listen to audiobooks,” Pavett said with a smile last week. “Well, yes I do. Before anyone else — usually three or four times!”

Among his recent projects was “Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats” by Tucson author and TikTok sensation Courtney Gustafson, who narrated the book herself. Released April 29 by Crown Publishing, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, the book quickly reached The New York Times bestseller list.

The 6-hour, 50-minute audiobook has been equally popular, earning a 5-star rating from listeners on Audible, Amazon’s vast library of spoken-word literature. For that, Gustafson gladly shares credit with the audio engineer who fine-tuned her voice.

A Tucsonan since 1990, Pavett earned a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Arizona, thinking he might wind up someplace like GE or Honeywell.

Instead, he combined his engineering degree with his passion for music by opening Allusion in 1998.

Musicians and advertising agencies still keep the lights on, Pavett said, but the surging popularity of audiobooks has brought an increasing number of publishers and authors through the door, as well.

“As a rule, I’m hearing from authors and narrators who live here or are vacationing here,” Pavett said. “We did the audiobook for Gabby Giffords’ and Mark Kelly’s book, ‘Enough.’ We’ve done two or three with Andi Arndt, a hugely popular narrator whose parents live here. She can come out for a week or two of vacation and get some work done while she’s in town.”

It was the publisher who contacted Pavett about Gustafson’s soon-to-be-released memoir, “Poets Square.”

Recording took place over two-and-a-half days in February, and the experience was an eye-opener for her.

“I was blown away by how much work goes into producing a single audiobook,” Gustafson confessed. “Going in, I figured it was my own book, I knew how I wanted it to be read, this was going to be easy. But it was way, way harder than I expected, and my part was just the beginning.”

Gustafson was positioned in a small, soundproof room with an easel to hold her laptop and a microphone suspended about a foot in front of her face.

Pavett was stationed at his console in an adjacent room, reading the text as he listened, and a producer from Random House Audio was wired into the session remotely.

“You don’t realize how many sounds your mouth makes that need to be edited out,” Gustafson said. “Even though it was my own work, I kept tripping over words and sentences that I needed to read again. And if I took a break, I needed to come back with exactly the same voice, same volume and same pace as they were before. I started to get the hang of it, eventually, but it was hard.”

On Day 3, just when Gustafson thought she was finished, Pavett suggested they do the first chapter again.

“He said I had gained confidence as I went along, and he wanted to hear it in Chapter One,” she recalled.

Once the final narration was complete, the real work began for the audio engineer. Pavett spent another day editing, re-editing and formatting the final cut he would send to Random House.

“There are always clicks and pops and audible breaths to remove,” he explained. “There are places where I might add or subtract a second or two of silence to help with the flow. Then, once I’ve gone through the entire recording a time or two, I need to make sure it fits the requirements from Audible and the other platforms that carry audiobooks. They have specific range specifications for things like sound levels, volume levels, and length of chapters, so I need to make sure the book fits all of those.”

In general, Pavett said, a seven-hour audiobook such as “Poets Square” will take 30-35 hours to produce.

Pavett recorded his first audiobook in 2000, a CD that “readers” would play in their cars.

By 2010, he was also producing digital versions that could be downloaded to computers and iPods.

Today, audiobooks are generally distributed in MP3 and easily accessible by cellphone on platforms such as Audible, Libby, Hoopla and Libro-fm.

Pavett said 95% of his book work comes from local authors, and 95% of those are narrated by the authors themselves.

“It’s a little more work because they aren’t professional narrators, but once they get settled in you can hear the emotion and the conviction coming through, just like they had writing the book. Then I know we’ve got something.”

Footnotes

— Eight years ago, poet Nicole Sealy realized it had been a while since she had read a book of poetry. She decided to challenge herself — and all her friends on social media — to read a book of poems every day in August. The Sealy Challenge quickly exploded in popularity and it has been a late-summer staple ever since. This year’s renewal will begin Friday, Aug. 1. To learn more and find a list of suggested reads, visit thesealeychallenge.com.

— The University of Arizona Poetry Center will celebrate the release of Katherine Larson’s new collection of lyric essays, “Wedding of the Foxes,” next Sunday, Aug. 3, at Hotel Congress. Larson will be there to discuss and sign copies of the book, which will be available for purchase. The program will begin at 4 p.m. in the hotel’s Century Room. To learn more, visit poetry.arizona.edu.

— Stacks Book Club in Oro Valley will welcome author Megan Miranda and her new mystery, “You Belong Here,” Wednesday evening, Aug. 6. For tickets and additional information, visit stacksbookclub.com.

— The Pima County Public Library said more than 1,000 people attended last weekend’s “MegaMania” at the downtown campus of Pima Community College. Billed as a comic con for young people, the event caps the library’s annual summer reading program for students.