Try Not to Die: It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure (Now in Stereo!)

Sooo…. they’re making the Choose Your Own Adventure books into audiobooks.

Yep.

Mmm. Mmm hmm.

So….. I have a lot of questions about that.

As an 80s child, this series was always an old reliable. I would plunk down on a step in my Grandma’s front yard with a book, and then systematically stick my fingers into every page where I had to make a choice. That way, if I died (and OH, how I died) I could just work my way backwards until I hit an ending I preferred.

And now they’re making this an audiobook thing. Awful hard to stick your fingers in an audiobook. I figured the best thing to do was to talk to producers Nick Martorelli and Olivia Langen to figure out how, precisely, this was gonna work. And it turns out, that was a pretty smart way of getting some clarification:

---

Betsy Bird: Nick! Olivia! There are few children’s book series from the 80s more beloved than Choose Your Own Adventure (Goosebumps maybe, that was more of a 90s thing). The very title worked its way into the public zeitgeist. You say “Choose Your Own Adventure” and your average joe on the street instantly knows what you mean. But before we get into anything else, tell us how you got connected to this project. Also, what’s your own personal connection to the Choose Your Own Adventure series? 

Nick Martoreli: We producers at Penguin Random House are incredibly lucky because we get to choose our own projects. So when I found out we were creating audiobooks for Choose Your Own Adventure titles, I volunteered immediately. I have such fond memories of those books from growing up. I would get several at once from the school or local library, and after reading them once, I would flip through them over and over, trying to find the best ending, trying to find every ending. And, of course, trying not to die.

I must have read every one I could get my hands on. I was a huge sci-fi kid, so I remember having a lot of the science-fiction ones. The books felt like stepping into an episode of your favorite television show (mine was Star Trek.) These books were my chance to be the space captain, the fighter pilot, the explorer wandering through a haunted house. Who wouldn’t like that?

Olivia Langen: I heard Nick mention that he would be working on this series during one of our regular producer meetings, and I couldn’t help but immediately start asking questions. Like, how was he going to adapt these books that are so interactive into audio?! Turns out, the answer was lots and lots of pre-production prep. So that’s where I came in.

Flipping through the pages of The Abominable Snowman brought back such a distinct sense memory to my elementary school library. (Shout-out to the librarian at the time, Mrs. Ladouceur!) This series was in many ways my gateway into reading novels. They are so easy to pick up and so hard to put down. Kids have very little agency in their own lives, and I think that’s what makes these books so exciting—they’re the ones calling the shots.  

BB: The mental gymnastics one must undergo to work out how precisely a Choose Your Own Adventure audiobook would work would lead one to believe that such a thing was impossible. Walk us through this. How exactly does this work? Do you skip to specific minutes on the recording? And is there any precedent for this? 

Nick: The Choose Your Own Adventure books send readers to different pages depending on the choices they make, so we knew we would need an audio version of that experience. The clearest solution turned out to be chapters – instead of “turning to page X,” listeners would be “go to chapter X.” We’d done small things like this before — directing listeners to another section, or saying, “If you want to learn more about this, go to Appendix 1” — but never anything on this scale.

Olivia: Just like reading the print books is an incredibly active experience, so is listening to these stories in audio form. It’s definitely not the type of audiobook where you can hit play then sit back and relax for hours on end, but I don’t think that’s what Choose Your Own Adventure fans will be looking for, anyways!

BB: I’m going to need you to tell me about “the chart”. You know the one I mean. The chart you had to construct of all the pages and the choices you can make. First off, did you know going into this project that, from the start, you were going to need a chart, or was that a discovery later. And how did you break up the work of making it? Also, what does it help you to do? 

Olivia: Much respect here for R.A. Montgomery, the original architect here. If you look at each choice in the story as a branch on a tree, you’ll end up with a pretty big tree. That’s what Nick and I found out early on. In order to create the audiobook, we had to stay as organized as possible when labeling each chapter, since each one had to correspond to a specific track.

As we built out the charts for each of these four books, we were amazed by how distinct each story was from one another. For example, The Abominable Snowman has a finite set of conclusive endings. But in Space and Beyond, you may find yourself in an infinite loop. I was working in circles for a while before I realized I got caught in one myself, which goes to show how important the chart was for our narrator to have in studio. Better to get stuck in a time loop in pre-production than during our recording sessions!

Nick: The chart was really the key to the whole thing. I give the credit to Olivia, who did an enormous amount of excellent work building the charts. Early on, we realized that in the original books, you might get sent from page 5 to page 7, then from page 7 to page 13, and only then would you arrive at a choice. We wanted to avoid listeners clicking through multiple tiny chapters just to get to the next decision, so we knew that every audiobook chapter would have to end with a choice.

This meant page 17 wouldn’t correspond to Chapter 17, and so we had to go through all four books page by page and create a chart of how the choices in the stories actually flowed. Once we had that, we could start assigning chapter numbers to each branch of the story. Once those charts existed, everything became much clearer. We could see the story threads at a glance, assign chapter numbers, and create a really clean roadmap for us to use in the studio.

We keep calling it a chart, but honestly, it really was a map. It became this incredibly useful guide through the entire process. When the narrator was recording in the studio, we could easily see what storyline we were in and where we’d just been. I was literally crossing boxes off during recording sessions to make sure we captured everything. What started as a prep tool became a checklist to make sure we got every piece of audio we needed.

BB: You haven’t just done a single Choose Your Own Adventure title. You’ve selected a distinct four. Why did you choose the four that you did? 

Nick: These four stories are available in the box set called Origin Four. And also, these stories are awesome. They take you everywhere. You go under the sea, into outer space, up into the mountains seeking the Yeti, and deep into the jungle searching for lost treasure. The books really have everything, and that was a huge part of why we were so excited to adapt them.

Fun fact: early on, we talked about producing each audiobook separately. But once we started dealing with the sheer scale of the project, we realized it was actually less work to build the whole system across all four books than it would have been to tackle them one at a time.

BB: Here’s a tricky question. Did you have to edit the original books at all? I mean, this was the 80s, after all. Some forms of entertainment don’t, ah, age quite as well over time.

Nick: We didn’t make any editorial changes to the books themselves. We were working from texts that had been revised and reprinted in 2006, and one thing we definitely did not change was how deadly these stories are. Sometimes it feels like almost every ending is, “You die and are never heard from again.” And honestly, we loved that. That’s one of the things I remembered most vividly about these books as a kid. So throughout the process, we were constantly laughing about how unexpectedly grim some of the endings are.

One thing that was especially fun was working with the team at Choose Your Own Adventure to make sure we pronounced everything correctly — names, historical figures, invented locations, alien races, unknown planets, all of it. We wanted the audiobooks to fully reflect the imagination and intentions of the author R.A. Montgomery.

Olivia: If you’re not dying tragically on your first read-through, then you’re doing something wrong. Rereading them in adulthood, I can confirm that these stories are as iconic and timeless as they felt the first time.

BB: Sean Patrick Hopkins snagged your narrator role. Did you audition a number of voice actors or did you know from the start that Sean was the one? And what does he bring to this project that no one else could? 

Olivia: Speaking of timeless—Sean Patrick Hopkins brings an immediacy to these stories like they’re unfolding as you listen. We came up with a shortlist of narrators for the job, and ultimately, we went with Sean for this reason.

Nick: Sean Patrick Hopkins was one of our top contenders from the very beginning. We spent a lot of time talking the narrator for these books, because with any Choose Your Own Adventure, a reader is always imagining themself as the protagonist.

For the audio, we wanted a voice that could believably sound like you — but maybe a little more experienced, a little more worldly, a little more grown up. We wanted listeners to feel like they were stepping into a slightly older, more adventurous version of themselves.

Sean has this incredible ability to tell an exciting story in a way that feels immediate and clear and immersive. He makes you feel like you’re right there in the action alongside him. Because in a Choose Your Own Adventure story, you’re not really alongside the narrator — you are the narrator. You’re the one making the choices. You’re the one deciding what to do when danger threatens. Sean makes those moments feel grounded and real, like these things are actively happening to you as you listen.

BB: Finally, are there plans to do more past the initial four? And where will people be able to find these audiobooks?

Nick: What’s so exciting about Choose Your Own Adventure is that the stories can take you anywhere. There are science fiction adventures, deep-sea explorations, supernatural mysteries, and fantasy quests. Every book opens up a completely different genre and a completely different experience. There are just so many opportunities to bring these stories to life in audio and so many ways to entertain listeners with them.

Given the chance, I would happily do many, many more of these projects.

You can find the Choose Your Own Adventure audiobook collection, Origin Four, at your local library, or wherever audiobooks are sold.

---

---

Huge thanks to both Nick and Olivia for taking the time to answer my questions today. Thanks too to Kate Smith and the team at Penguin Random House Audio, Listening Library for helping to put all this together.

Filed under: Interviews