Why Sheldon Collins Chose Indie Production Over Corporate Audio Giants

Producing an audiobook was not something Sheldon Collins had really ever planned on doing. But this year, the author and filmmaker’s new audiobook, The Legend of Valentine: An Ancient Historical Love Story, won four awards for production and sound design, including the 2026 Independent Press Award.

To produce that quality, Collins didn’t turn to a massive audiobook corporation. Instead, he used Pro Audio Voices, an independent audiobook and podcast production company run by a team of just 20 people. In a phone call this summer, he walked BookCAMP Magazine through the process of creating that award-winning work from start to finish.

“First and foremost, it was important for me that a production partner would allow me creative freedom,” Collins said. “It appealed to me to work with more of an independent-type production and distribution company. The idea of working with a company where it felt more like an independent community of people was attractive to me because it reminded me of my own background in independent filmmaking. When things get too big, too corporate-like, you lose a lot of the creative collaborations along the way. Pro Audio Voices appealed to me because they weren’t too big for their own britches, so to speak, and they allowed me the creative leniency to do what I wanted to do.”

Collins didn’t originally write The Legend of Valentine to be an audiobook. But as an avid audiobook listener himself, he found as he was writing the story that the epic, sweeping nature of the tale would lend itself well to audio. With 20 actors playing multiple characters and over 100 original musical compositions, it promised to be a highly complex, ambitious project. So Collins wanted to make sure he got everything right. 

He co-directed the project with Pro Audio Voices CEO Becky Parker Geist, a professional theater actress and narrator who founded the company in 2019. Working with a smaller company, he said, gave him the flexibility to adjust.

“ It was way more important to me to slow the time down and make sure that there was this incredible attention to detail on every step of the way, from casting, to directing the performance to the initial edit, to the sound design, to the music, and then to the mix,” Collins said. “It was very important to me that it was always as good as we could possibly get it. A bigger production entity, like an Audible or a company like that, might have said, ‘We’ve got to get this done by this month.’ But Becky really understood how important it was to me and to the project to make sure that we nailed this. And that worked out to be part of the ingredients to the winning formula.”

One telling example of this approach was the musical composition. 

“ We got to a point where we had put some music in there, we had licensed either low-paid royalty or royalty-free,” Collins said. “But I quickly recognized that this is not as good as it could be. Everything else was so strong. The performance was strong. The story was strong. But the music just was not orchestral enough for me. It just didn’t give me goosebumps.” 

Collins consulted with Parker Geist and the music team, and brought in Grammy-nominated composer Stephen Endelman to develop little musical themes for each of the characters and design how those themes would interact. By the end of the four months that process took, in addition to the four months spent on sound design, Collins said, the audio file was the biggest that the company’s audio mixer had ever seen. And Collins was able to complete it for under $100,000. 

“ The giants in the industry would’ve produced this audiobook at probably somewhere between five to eight times the price, easily, based on the epic nature of this audiobook,” he said. “Pro Audio Voices  recognized that we had to do this at the right budget, and they were capable of doing that without there being too many hands to feed, so to speak, with a bigger company.”

The Legend of Valentine received eight nominations in the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences’ (SOVAS) 2026 Voice Arts Awards and won two, including one for Best Sound Design in the Outstanding Audio Engineering category. Pro Audio Voices’ Daryl Bolicek took home that award. The other win was for Best Producer, which went to Parker Geist on behalf of the team. 

Collins himself received three SOVAS nominations for directing. He admitted his situation was a bit unique—Parker Geist has never allowed anyone else to direct an audiobook with her company before, but allowed him to work with her specifically because of his filmmaking experience. When asked what advice he would give to other authors looking to direct or produce an audiobook production of their work, Collins laughed. 

“ I think you have to be insane, first of all,” he said, chuckling. “Insanity is required. But I would say that, with almost anybody in the creative arts right now, beyond the skill and the talent there has to be an incredible will to take it to the next step. I think the first thing that somebody needs to do who’s an author is really decide whether or not this is for them or not. You could very easily pass it over to Becky and just let her company run with it, in which case you’re going to get a great result.”

Pro Audio Voices, and AMPlify Audiobooks, its distribution imprint, offers a full production service. After an author has agreed to work with the company and completes a planning session, the company will start working on casting and standardizing manuscripts. 

“An audition text is created from your manuscript and our Casting Team will invite narrators from our talent pool to audition,” the company’s website describes. “We vet the auditions, then provide 3 or (typically) more narrator samples for you to choose from.”

There are also usually some manuscript adjustments that go into converting a written piece into an audiobook script.

“As part of Pre-Production we help develop a production manuscript ready for recording,” the website states. “For example, many character attributions (e.g., ‘he said angrily’) can be omitted, as long as we have been introduced in the scene to the voice playing that character. We don’t need to say ‘angrily’ since the actor will be acting that.” 

To date, Pro Audio Voices lists over 200 audiobooks in its portfolio, ranging from children’s books, to romance, to law and politics. 

“ Becky’s leadership is unparalleled,” Collins said. “The people who work with her love to work with her. She always wants the best product, and she really wants to understand the goals of the artist. It was the first time I ever co-directed anything with anybody. And Becky and I hadn’t spoken about this, but she was open to working with me, and I was open to working with her, and we both clicked, and it worked out fantastic. It was just the way a collaboration should be.”