January 2026 – Happy New Year!

Last year (2025) was a record year for me. Most noticeably, I saw a huge increase in interest in my audiobook narration business. I narrated around 40 titles in 2025, in addition to long-form narration for a story app. This all means I spent a lot of time behind the mic and in the studio last year. Phew!

But no rest for the weary (wicked?)… I started off 2026 with a hefty queue of work:

• Santa brought on Christmas morning the order out of nowhere for an audiobook for Justin Spencer’s page-turner novel Terminal Anxiety.
• Soon after that order came in, came a request to narrate a four-part series for the Patriot Dreams app.
• I started work on those projects right after starting pre-production on a new audiobook for Book 1 in David R. Leng’s Echoes of Fortune series. I will continue work on Book 1’s new audiobook early in January. (For Book 2 in the series, I already did an audiobook this year.)
• I will put finishing touches on the audiobook for Elevated: My Journey Co-Laboring with God, written by Kenneth Hill with Lanny Richardson, on which I did a bulk of the production work in December.

A number of authors and agents have contacted me about possible audiobooks come the new year, so I am bracing for a busy month! The list of all my audiobooks narrated to date is compiled here on my voiceover website, Voiceoverpro.co.  That business is my related to my other voiceover businesses with my wife: Voiced By Us and PoliticalVoiceovers.com.

I still have not completed work on the audiobook for my 2012 book Long-Form Improv. The audiobook has been a side project on which I have put no time pressure to complete. (I suppose I can start calling its audiobook “long-awaited”!)

As far as my work as John Oliver’s stand-in on the Emmy Award-winning variety series Last Week Tonight, the series is currently on its regular hiatus. This coming season will be my twelfth season on the series, and I’m very much looking forward to what the show will be up to! The series will be back in February.

As for working out, I got slammed with audiobook work so much that that my body entered a detraining phase. That’s a bummer, because I was able to bring my VO2 max to the “excellent” zone as recently as last month. Hopefully I’ll figure out a way to balance audiobooks and running better (trying to disregard the cold). It’s such a tough balance of many factors. With that said, I try to get in the gym whenever I have an early morning opening. I’m doing the best I can here!

-Ben