The 2019 Audies took place this past Monday night, March 4, and for those who haven’t heard… We produced the Audiobook of the Year!

An enormous congratulations to the always amazing Bahni Turpin (is there anything she doesn’t sound amazing narrating?) and the Macmillan Audio team. So many people are involved in the production of a single audiobook, it very much is a team effort and we are fortunate to be a part of some of the best audiobook teams in the world.

Congratulations to all the big winners Monday night as well! You can check out all the winners here.

We are honored to announce that titles we’ve worked have been nominated for 10 Audie Awards!

The Audie Awards recognize distinguished performances in audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment, and we are beyond thrilled to have worked on these amazing projects amongst such amazing company.

A huge thank you and congratulations to the teams behind these projects, including our friends at Macmillan Audio, Oasis Audio, Scholastic Audio, Blackstone Audio, Peguin Random House, Recorded Books, Lyric Audio and 518 Books, and Weston Woods. Congratulations to these supremely talented narrators and all of our fellow nominees as well! 

We look forward to celebrating with everyone in NY on March 4, come say ‘Hi’ to Deb, Jamie and Koroosh if you’ll be there, we love meeting everyone involved in this industry. And of courser a HUGE thank you to APA for making this all possible!

The Deyan Audio family would like to extend a huge thank you to all the wonderful narrators, producers, engineers, directors and authors we had the pleasure of meeting and working with this year! As we bring another year to a close, we couldn’t be more grateful for all the wonderful people in our lives and the amazing stories we get to help bring to life every day.

If you’ve been following along on Facebook, we’ve been counting down our Top 5 Moments of 2018:

#5 - Participating in the annual ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, in honor of Bob Deyan and all the brave men and women working to find a cure for this terrible disease. We know Bob was someone who always looked for the positive and he’d be overjoyed to see so many people come together every year in support of a common goal.

#4 - Another year of incredible classes at the Deyan Institute! We were honored to host master classes with the likes of Ray Porter, Sean Pratt, Andi Ardnt, Jeffrey Kafer, Grover Gardner, and Julie Wilson, and of course our inimitable host, PJ Ochlan. The feedback from everyone who attended was really amazing and we look forward to more growth and great classes in 2019. Email info@deyaninstitute.com if you want to be the first to hear about when new classes are announced.

#3 - Finding out titles we worked on made it onto a number of year-end “Best of” lists! The greatest honor is getting to work on projects that make a difference in people’s lives, or even better, projects that make the world a brighter place. Thank you to AudioFile Magazine, Audible, and Slate.com for the recognition!

#2 - Along the same lines, seeing everyone’s hard work pay off with a number of big wins keeps us motivated and hungry for more in 2019! Hours and hours of tedious work are painstakingly put into each and every production and it is incredibly satisfying when all that hard work gets the recognition it deserves. For those keeping score, titles we worked on in 2018 won:

• 17 Audie nominations, and 4 Audie wins

• 12 SOVAS nominations, and 2 SOVAS wins

• 28 Earphones Awards

• the prestigious Odyssey Award AND 2 Odyssey Honors

#1 - Even better than the award wins, though, was getting to work with all of YOU this year! Wonderful voices and magic filled our studios all year long and we are so grateful to call you our community and family. Here’s to continued growth to all in 2019, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Wow, we can’t believe 2018 is already winding to a close, but what an exciting year it has been. We were fortunate to be a part of so many amazing audiobook productions and we couldn’t be more proud of the hard work many talented narrators, engineers, and producers put in this year!

The end of the year also means it’s time for many “best of” lists to start popping up, always an exciting time and we have some great news to kick things off below:

Two of our nominees took home SOVAS awards this year, Borne (narrated by Bahni Turpin for Blackstone Audio) and Don’t Let Go (narrated by the Steven Webber for Brilliance Audio.) Congratulations to both Bahni and Steven!

Also, AudioFile recently released their “Best Audiobooks of 2018” list and we had the pleasure of working on 5 of the featured titles:

• The Good Neighbor - 2018 Best Audiobooks - Biography & History

  • Narrated by LeVar Burton for Oasis Audio

• RFK: His Words for Our Time - 2018 Best Audiobooks - Biography & History

  • Narrated by James Lurie and Jim Meskimen for Harper Audio

• Merci Suarez Changes Gears - 2018 Best Audiobooks - Children & Family Listening

  • Narrated by Frankie Corzo for Brilliance Audio

• You Don’t Know Everything, Jilly P - 2018 Best Audiobooks - Children & Family Listening

  • Narrated by Nora Hunter for Scholastic Audio, with a full cast including Katherine Lee McEwan, Taylor Meskimen, Miebaka Yohannes, Sisi Johnson, Rachel Jacobs, Marc Samuel, Maxwell Glick, Blythe Auffarth, Em Eldridge, Cherise Boothe, and author Alex Gino

• Children of Blood and Bone - 2018 Best Audiobooks - YA

  • Narrated by Bahni Turpin for Macmillan Audio

Thank you to the terrific narrators and production teams for your excellent work, and thank you to the producers at Oasis, Harper, Brilliance, Scholastic, Macmillan, and Blackstone for your trust and friendship; Here’s to many more amazing audiobooks to come!

The Society of Voice Arts Award Nominees have been announced for 2018 and we are once again so excited to some familiar titles! We’ve had the honor of working on some truly amazing audiobooks this past year and it is wonderful to see these narrators and authors get the attention they deserve. We are especially excited to see 2 nominations for Spanish language titles we produced this year!

A big thank you to Blackstone Audio, Brilliance Audio, Shira Block, Macmillan Audio, Podium Publishing, and Lyric Audio for entrusting us with these productions, and a huge congratulations to all the narrators. We love working with you all!

(Click through to see the banners!)

Best Sci-FI VO Narration — Mass Effect: Initiation // Blackstone Audio // Narrated by Fryda Wolff // Recording

Best Sci-Fi VO Narration — Borne // Blackstone Audio // Narrated by Bahni Turpin // Recording

Best Author Performance — Limerence // Glendale Press Audio // Narrated by Catherine Hunter // Post-Production

Best Thriller VO Narration — Don’t Let Go // Brilliance Audio // Narrated by Steven Webber // Recording

Best Business/Education VO Narration — Campaigning for Clean Air // Author’s Republic // Narrated by Pamela Almand // Post-Production

Best Teens VO Narration — Children of Blood and Bone // Macmillan Audio // Narrated by Bahni Turpin // Full Production

Best Classics VO Narration — 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea // Blackstone Audio // Narrated by David Linski // Recording

Best Fiction VO Narration — Next Year in Havana // Blackstone Audio // Narrated by Frankie Corzo & Kyla Garcia // Recording

Best Romance VO Narration — Taking Turns // Oh My Books // Narrated by Tad Bransen, Joe Arden, Ava Erickson, and Sebastian York // Recording

Best Romance VO Narration — Part-Time Lover // Lauren Blakely Books // Narrated by Shae East and Grace Grant // Post-Production

Best Spanish VO Narration — La batalla por el paraiso: Puerto Rico y el Capitalismo Del Desastre // Blackstone Audio // Narrated by Valentina Latyna // Full Production

Best Spanish VO Narration — Una Arruga en el Tiempo // Brilliance Audio // Narrated by Susana Ballesteros // Full Production

On Thursday, August 9th, Deyan Audio hosted our fifth annual Ice Bucket Challenge at our Northridge location. Our staff and several wonderful narrators were able to join us :)

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge remains one of the most effective fundraising campaigns in the battle against this terrible disease. Over $100 million has been raised through this initiative and remarkable breakthroughs have been made in our understanding of what causes ALS because of it. 

Deyan Audio hosts an Ice Bucket Challenge event every year in honor of Bob Deyan, our founder and all-around amazing man. We lost him to ALS several years ago and it is our hope that we will soon be living in a world where no one has to suffer through the awful experience of losing a loved one to this disease.

If you'd like to contribute, donations of any size are appreciated and can be made at this link, in memory of Bob. You can also join the "Billion for Bob" team for the upcoming Walk to Defeat ALS, happening on November 4, 2018 at Exposition Park (in LA) and many other locations around the country.

A note from Debra Deyan:

Another year is upon us and we are still battling ALS. My dear Bob – some of you knew him, and some of you only heard stories of the wonderful, humorous, loving man he was – remains alive in my heart! 

This awful disease that ravaged him is still destroying the lives of countless people throughout the world. It saddens me to know how many wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children, and friends have to watch a loved one battle ALS, as I did with Bob, or happen to be that person battling ALS. I know, many of you were right there with Bob and me through his struggle and I will never forget the love you showed us.

Thank you!

Deyan Audio would like to extend a huge congratulations to all the talented narrators, engineers, producers, and audiobook professionals who were recognized at the 2018 Audies Award ceremony last night. You can check out all the winners on AudioFile here.

We'd like to give a special shout out to the following titles which we he had the honor of working on this past year. Thank you to the publishers for entrusting us with these projects and thank you to the narrators for your tireless and always amazing work!

The Hate U Give

• Winner 'Best Female Narrator'

• Winner 'Best Young Adult'

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

• Winner 'Best Fiction'

Restart

• Winner 'Best Multi-Voiced Performance'

Each year, the American Library Association gives out the prestigious Odyssey award to one deserving audiobook production. The award is given to "the producer of the best audiobook produced for children and/or young adults, available in English in the United States" and is decided by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) and the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), divisions of ALA, and is sponsored by Booklist magazine.

We'd like to say that we couldn't believe the news when we found out that we produced this year's Odyssey winner, but then again, Bahni Turpin's stellar production in this title has been getting fantastic recognition all year long. A humongous round of applause for her performance in The Hate U Give, this year's Odyssey winner, and a huge thank you to Caitlin Garing at HarperAudio for entrusting us with this production.

We were very honored to discover we worked on 2 of the runner ups as well:

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, read by Michael Sheen for Listening Library, an imprint of Penguin Random House Audio Publishing

A Boy Called Christmas, read by Stephen Fry for Listening Library, an imprint of Penguin Random House Audio Publishing

A big round of applause to these narrators as well and more thank yous to Penguin Random House for getting to work on these exciting projects.

You can see the full list of honorees here.

The APA announced this year's Audie finalists today! Considered one of the highest honors in the audiobook community, for the past 23 years the Audie Awards have recognized the hard-working narrators and awesome projects we all get to enjoy in our earbuds as we go about our day. With awards in 27 different categories, there's something for everybody to love. Who knows, your next favorite listen may be among them...

Deyan Audio is proud to have participated in the production of 14 nominations this past year, a new record for us! Congratulations to all the narrators, authors, and publishers, without whom none of this would be possible. We can't recommend the following audiobooks highly enough:

The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness - Narrated by Paula Poundstone - Tantor / Highbridge

(Nominated for Audiobook of the Year AND Best Humor)

The Hate U Give - Narrated by Bahni Turpin - Harper Audio

(Nominated for Best Female Narrator AND Best Young Adult)

Getting There - Narrated by Jorjeana Marie, Renee Ruiz, and Alex Hyde-White - Novel Audio

(Nominated for Best Business / Personal Development)

His Alone - Narrated by Summer Morton and Jay Crow - Harlequin Audio

(Nominated for Best Erotica)

Taking Turns - Narrated by Ava Erickson, Sebastian York, Tad Branson, and Joe Arden - Oh My Audiobooks

(Nominated for Best Erotica) 

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Narrated by Cathleen McCarron - Penguin Audio

(Nominated for Best Fiction)

Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud - Narrated by January LaVoy - Graymalkin Media

(Nominated for Best History / Biography)

Refugee - Narrated by Michael Goldstrom, Kyla Garcia, and Assaf Cohen - Scholastic Audio

(Nominated for Best Middle Grade)

Restart - Narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross, Laura Knight Keating, Ramon de Ocampo, Andy Paris, Suzy Jackson, Graham Halstead, and John Kroft - Recorded Books

(Nominated for Best Multi-Voiced Performance)

Don't Let Go - Narrated by Stephen Weber - Brilliance

(Nominated for Best Thriller / Mystery)

Disappeared - Narrated by Roxana Ortega and Christian Barillas - Scholastic Audio

(Nominated for Best Young Adult)

Mother Bruce - Narrated by Rob Dean - Weston Woods

(Nominated for Best Young Listeners)

Another round of congratulations to all involved! Check out the full list of finalists here.

We love celebrating the New Year with good news! Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal Review both released their "Best Audiobooks of 2017" lists and we are delighted to see a few we worked on in our very own studios. Congratulations to all the narrators and publishers involved!

The Hate U Give - Narrated by Bahni Turpin for HarperAudio - Publishers Weekly: Best Audiobooks of 2017 (YA)

Refugee - Narrated by Assaf Cohen, Kyla Garcia, and Michael Goldstrom for Scholastic - Publishers Weekly: Best Audiobooks of 2017 (YA)

The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness - Narrated by the author, Paula Poundstone for Tantor/Highbridge - Publishers Weekly: Best Audiobooks of 2017 (Nonfiction/Memoir)

Frogkisser - Narrated by Marisa Calin for Penguin Random House - Publishers Weekly: Best Audiobooks of 2017 (YA)

The Wangs Vs. The World - Narrated by Nancy Wu for Recorded Books - Library Journal Review - Best Media 2017: Audiobooks

Looking to produce your next YA adventure? Are you an author interested in narrating your own memoir? Drop us a line and let's make an amazing audiobook in 2018!