How to record audio for a book
Record close, in a soft room, on a phone if that is what you have — proximity beats equipment every time. Say the date and who is speaking at the start of every file. Never put the microphone on a hard table between you. And with an older relative, do not tell them it is an interview.
Quick facts
- What it is
- A practical guide to recording speech that will later become book text.
- Best for
- Authors dictating chapters, and anyone recording interviews with a relative or a subject.
- What it does
- Covers microphone distance, room choice, what to say at the start of every file, session length, backing up, and how to interview someone without making it feel like an interview.
- What it does not do
- It does not supply equipment, and better recording cannot rescue a conversation that was never had.
Related Your Book Pro page: Dictating your book
Before you press record
Six of these take under a minute each and every one saves an hour later. The last three are the ones people skip and regret.
- Microphone 15–30cm from the speaker's mouth, not on the table between you.
- Soft room: curtains, sofa, carpet. Kitchens and conservatories are the worst rooms in the house.
- Turn off the fridge hum if you can, and the radio you stopped hearing an hour ago.
- Phone on aeroplane mode — an incoming call ends the recording on some devices.
- Check you have battery and storage for twice the session length.
- Record ten seconds, play it back, listen. Every time. This is the step that saves whole afternoons.
- Say aloud: the date, who is speaking, and where you are.
- Prepare a name list — people, places, ships, streets, terms — before you start.
- Ask permission to record, out loud, on the recording.
- Back up the file the same day. To two places.
- Note the timestamp of anything that made you sit up. You will not remember which of the eleven files it was in.
A separate free preview: Your free private Book Coach
A separate Book Coach preview for shaping the book; it does not transcribe, process recordings or import private audio. A short private conversation, one question at a time. By the end you should have a clearer sense of what your book is actually about, who it is for, the shape it wants to take, and the one next thing to do. It never writes a word for you.
A separate Book Coach preview for shaping the book; it does not transcribe, process recordings or import private audio. It asks questions and gives you your own answers back. It does not write the book. You can copy or download the finished plan straight from the page, free and with no email needed.
Proximity beats equipment
A £900 microphone across a room sounds worse than a phone eighteen inches from someone's mouth. Distance picks up the room; proximity picks up the person.
If you are buying anything, buy a small lavalier microphone that clips to a collar — under £30, plugs into a phone, and will improve your recordings more than anything else at any price. Two of them if you are recording a conversation.
And never put the recorder on a hard table. Tables transmit every cup, tap and shift of weight straight into the microphone.
Recording someone who doesn't want to be recorded
This is the real problem with family interviews, and it is not a technical one.
Do not call it an interview. Do not set the phone down between you like evidence. Say you would like to record it so you do not have to keep stopping to write things down, put the phone somewhere unremarkable, and then have a conversation.
The first twenty minutes will be stiff. That is normal, and it is why the good material almost always arrives after the first hour — which is also why the second session is nearly always better than the first. Plan for two.
Ask permission clearly, on the recording, and mean it. Say what the recording is for. If they want something kept out later, keep it out.
Session length, and when to stop
Sixty to ninety minutes. Beyond that people tire and repeat themselves, and you end up with three hours of material where ninety minutes was better.
Stop before they want to stop. An interview that ends while someone still has something to say guarantees a second session; one that ends in exhaustion does not.
And when someone becomes upset, put the recorder down and stay with them. You can always ask again another day. Whether they will talk to you again is the only asset that matters here.
Getting the material into shape afterwards
Two habits make the difference between an archive you use and an archive you avoid.
Name each file properly on the day: date, speaker, subject. `2026-09-09 Mum childhood Kerry.m4a`, not `New Recording 47`.
Note the moments. After each session write three lines: what surprised you, what she would not talk about, and the one story to follow up next time. Ten minutes, and it is the closest thing to a table of contents your book will have for months.
About Your Book Pro
Your Book Pro is a book-writing platform built in Britain. Start with an idea, notes, half a draft, a podcast, or a finished manuscript, and use our purpose-built AI tools for planning, feedback, editing, proofreading, cover designs, and to create print-ready files. Writing is totally free: you can type, upload or speak your book as much as you like, and use only the editing tools you need with Plus, or go unlimited with Pro.
Produce world-class drafts at the fraction of the cost of hiring a human editorial team.
Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits, and a plain export of your own words is free.
Each guide says plainly when a person does the job better than AI. Guides on legal topics are general information, not legal advice.
You can record and upload, or type, or both, and the same tools work on either — most people do a mix, and there is no correct answer.
Transcription turns your recordings into clean verbatim with speaker labels, checked against your Book Dictionary so names come back right. Themes from Bulk Audio is the one built for archives: it reads across all your recordings at once and reports what the material is actually about, which is the question you cannot answer by listening back linearly. And the free interview question sets give you the structure — grouped by relationship and by period of life, with guidance on the sensitive ones.
What still favours a human transcriptionist: heavy accents, several people talking at once, poor rooms, and specialist terminology. If your recordings are difficult, budget £60–£120 an audio hour for the hardest ones and use the tools for the rest.
Sources / checked against
- CIEP suggested minimum rates, effective 1 March 2026. Reedsy marketplace averages, September 2026. Prices dated 9 September 2026.
Upload a recording
See what's in an archive you already have
Email me my free Book Coach linkQuestions people ask
- Is a phone good enough to record a book interview?
- Yes, if it is close. A modern phone 20cm from someone's mouth in a carpeted room produces a perfectly transcribable recording. Distance, not the device, is what ruins most audio.
- What file format should I use?
- Whatever your device produces natively — m4a, wav or mp3 are all fine. Do not re-compress it to save space; storage is cheap and audio quality is not recoverable.
- Should I take notes while recording?
- Very few. Note timestamps and follow-up questions only. Writing while someone talks changes how they talk, and it is the main reason people clam up.
- How many hours of recording make a book?
- Roughly 15–40 hours of interviews for a full-length life story, which is about what a professional ghostwriter would gather. Ten hours makes a substantial family book.
- What if the recording failed?
- Write down everything you remember immediately, before you do anything else — and ask to talk again. The second telling is usually better anyway. This is also why you play back ten seconds at the start.