How to Publish an Audiobook
Note: there’s a public forum for comments, suggestions, and improvements at Reddit’s r/selfpublish forum.
Contents
Introduction
I had the pleasure and pain of creating an audiobook version of my new novel, and I learned a great deal along the way. What surprised me the most was how hard it was to find good how-to guides for audiobooks.
You want to publish a regular book? There are dozens of great web sites. From writing to editing to publishing, then on to marketing and publicity, you’ll find plenty of books, web sites, and blogs. Reddit’s r/selfpublish, Kindlepreneur, David Gaughran’s web site and books, Writers Beware … the list goes on and on.
Audiobooks? Not so much. There are almost no independent how-to sites for creating audiobooks. Most articles I found on the web were from of companies selling services. Lots of it is quite good, but it’s written with an eye toward getting your business.
And … I’m going to jump ahead here because this is important … the worst part of doing an audiobook is figuring out where to sell your book. This is covered in the second-to-last section of this essay, but I’ll give you the TL;DR right now: there are no good choices, and you’ll probably want to use a time-consuming and frustrating process of distributing through several non-exclusive channels. Before you do anything concrete, I suggest you read this entire document to get an overview of what you’re up against, because choices you make early can affect the options open to you later.
So with that in mind, here are my experiences and thoughts on my audiobook experiences.
Should I Do an Audiobook?
The very first question I had to answer was, Why do this at all? To make money? To increase exposure as an author? To bolster my ego? What’s in it for me?
Publishing an audiobook is a lot of work, and if you hire a professional actor (much more on this below), it can cost thousands of dollars.
In the e-book and paperback markets, sales are heavily weighted to a very few successful author. That is, a few authors sell thousands or even hundreds of thousands of books, but 90% of authors never break the 100-book mark.
Thus it is with audiobooks. The chances are high that, unless you’ve already had great success as an author, you’ll only sell a modest number of audiobooks.
And worse than that, audiobook royalties suck. You can get 70% of the sale of each e-book on Amazon, so (for example) a $4.95 title will pay you around $3.45 per sale. By contrast, Audible lists my audiobook at $24.95, but I seem to get paid about $2 per book. They claim to pay 40%, but buried in the fine print is a bunch of inscrutable BS that results in actual payments of around 10% of the list price. There is lots of frustration in the author community over Audible’s policies and opaqueness, but so far Audible’s near-monopoly position has prevented any serious threats to their business model.
In other words, you have to sell a lot of audiobooks to make any profit.
Some of other audiobook stores have better royalties but just don’t have the reach of Audible (which includes Amazon). (Spotify has come under fire for terrible changes to their contract that could screw authors royally; they’ve backed off, but reserve the right to change the contract at any time. More on this later…)
On the other hand, there are far fewer audiobooks on the market than e-books and paperbacks. Something like three million regular books are published every year, whereas there are only 200,000 titles on Audible, the biggest audiobook retailer. (This number is suspect, it may be higher, but accurate data is hard to find.) Google Play claims to have five million titles, but this can only be because they use AI narration, which simple doesn’t compare to a real human actor.
Another interesting fact: 30% to 35% of all ebooks are self-published, but only 1% of audiobooks are self-published. (I’m not sure how that’s relevant, but it surprised me.)
So even though audiobooks are expensive to create, there is far less competition in the audiobook marketplace.
Next, consider your genre: Do people buy audiobooks like yours? The most popular audiobooks (as of 2024) are in the science fiction and mystery-thriller genres, followed by the rapidly growing romance-erotica genre. You should research your genre and make sure that there’s an audiobook market for your readers.
And finally, should you do it now, or wait a while to see how your e-book and/or paperback are doing? If you’ve just published your book and have no sales data and no reviews, you might want to wait to see how things go. If your book isn’t going to sell, your audiobook will probably do even worse because the audiobook market is smaller.
Beyond all of this, there are personal intangibles that are hard to quantify. It’s cool having an audiobook to your name. Having an actor interpret your story and bring it to life is an amazing experience, a miniature version of watching a child grow into an adult and do things you never could do yourself. While you can’t take these intangibles to the bank, they may be important to you.
For my novel, I started with really strong reviews from my beta readers that gave me lots of confidence, followed by respectable sales in the first few months (low thousands of copies sold). Within a few months, I had hundreds of ratings, averaging 4.3 stars of 5, which is way above average. (I’m not bragging, OK maybe a little, but this is relevant to why I went forward with an audiobook.) These numbers put me in the top few percent of all books published, and gave me confidence that the audiobook had a chance to go somewhere.
A Quick Word About the Industry
Before you can understand some of the choices you’ll have to make, you need to understand the basic structure of the audiobook industry.
The quick version is this: Audiobook publishing companies offer front-to-back services, and each company wants you to use them exclusively for the whole process. But you can pick and choose. That is, if you hire a professional actor to narrate your book on Authors Republic, you do not have to use Authors Republic to actually publish your book. Once your narrator finishes and you upload your audio files, you own those files, and you can choose to publish them anywhere or nowhere.
Here’s the longer version. There are basically three companies that dominate the audiobook publishing business: ACX (Audible/Amazon), Spotify (formerly Findaway), and Authors Republic. All three of these companies offer full audiobook publishing services:
- Search for, audition, and hire an actor to narrate your book.
- Manage the narration process: communication, contract terms, escrow for funds, dispute resolution, quality control, and final approval.
- Publish your audiobook: Enter the metadata, cover graphics, book blurb, author’s bio, price, and make the audiobook available for sale.
- Distribute the book to stores.
- Manage your royalties and send you payments.
In addition, there are two other companies that you might use: Upwork.com and Fiverr.com. Both of these companies are freelance sites where you can find an hire professional actors to narrate your audiobook, after which you’ll use one of the aforementioned three companies to actually publish it.
The key point here is that you can pick and choose. For example, I used Authors Republic to find and hire my narrator, but then decided to “go wide” and distribute through both ACX and Authors Republic. (There’s a lot more about this later in the “Selecting a Publisher” chapter below.)
Record It Myself, or Find a Professional Narrator?
Should I narrate my own audiobook or hire a professional actor to do it?
There are thousands of authors who have produced self-narrated audiobooks with little technical expertise and no prior acting experience. It can be done.
But make no mistake: recording an audiobook yourself is hard work! And even if you get through the technical challenges, it probably won’t be very good.
I had all sorts of friends and family tell me I should do it myself. “You have a great voice! And you’re a computer expert too!” True and true. I even recorded the first fifty pages of my novel. And … it wasn’t bad. You could listen to it and enjoy it. But here’s the thing: I can strum my guitar and sing around a campfire, too, and it’s fun. But you’d never mistake me for Jason Mraz. And if I recorded an album, you wouldn’t buy it.
That’s how it is with audio books: the difference between an amateur and a pro is like the difference between me and Jason Mraz. Professional actors are good. Their voices are interesting. They don’t just read, they act. They add a whole new dimension to your story, an interpretation of your characters that you never dreamed of.
That’s what happened to me when I hired Timothy Andrés Pabon to narrate. Tim has narrated over five hundred books and won many awards, so that gave me confidence. Before hiring Tim, I listened to excerpts from his other books and was very impressed. But even then I was blown away when I got the recordings of back. He brought my characters to life, adding depth, complexity, and realism that I’d never dreamed of.
(By the way, I use the term “actor” rather than “narrator,” because these people are doing far more than mere narration. They’re acting in every sense of the word.)
So here’s my list of the pros and cons of each choice.
Narrate It Yourself
Advantages:
Cost. You can do it essentially for the price of a good microphone.
Disadvantages:
Quality: A professional actor will almost certainly do a better job.
Software: You’ll need to download and learn how to use Audacity, a free audio recording/editing program. It’s great, it’s free, it’ll do the job, but it requires a significant amount of time to learn how to use it properly.
Hardware: You’ll need a professional-quality microphone and very quiet computer (i.e. no fan).
Quiet environment: You’ll need an extremely quiet place to record. The background-noise requirements for audiobooks are very strict.
Proofing and Editing: Every narrator, including you, makes mistakes, and they have to be corrected. It is very hard to catch your own errors. And editing an audio file is a skill that takes time and patience to learn. (The Audacity program mentioned above helps you do this.)
Production Time: Most narration is 9,000 words per hour, so a 100,000 word novel is about eleven hours. But a do-it-yourself author will likely spend ten more hours for each hour of recorded material to edit and produce the final tracks. In other words, plan on well over a hundred hours for a typical book. And that’s not counting the time buying a microphone, installing Audacity, setting up your recording area, and learning to use the Audacity software.
Tricky technical specs: These are complex and hard to understand if you’re not a sound engineer. And there are a lot of these technical specs. Here’s a link to Authors Republic’s specifications. If you not familiar this sort of stuff, it’s going to add even more time to your project:
https://www.authorsrepublic.com/learn/blog/57/understanding-audio-requirements
Hire a Professional Actor
Advantages:
Quality: A great narrator/actor will create great audiobook, much better than most of us could do ourselves.
Production: Your narrator will have a whole team behind him/her. In addition to access to a professional studio for recording and a professional recording engineer, your narrator’s team will include a sound engineer and proofreader (“prooflistener”?). They’ll find and fix most errors before you get the files, and then work with you to correct any last-minute errors that you find.
Disadvantages:
Cost. Narrators typically quote anywhere between $20 and $400 per finished hour. That’s a huge range! Needless to say, narrators with good reputations and many successful recordings cost more.
$20/hour will get you an inexperienced novice actor trying to break into the industry. He/she could be great, but you’re taking a big chance. And some of the cheap ones are scammers. Each finished hour represents several hours of actual work for a pro, so a bid of $20/hour means either they’re getting $5/hour or they’re not doing it right. For $20/hour, you may find a fantastic actor who is just breaking into the industry, or you may get screwed.
If you want a quality product, you should plan on spending $100 to $250 per finished hour for an experienced actor. This will amount to somewhere between $500 and $2500, depending on the length of your book.
Conclusions
If you can afford to hire a narrator/actor, do it.
If you can’t spend that much, by all means do it yourself. But go into the project realistically. It’s not a matter of just reading out loud for ten hours; it’s a lot more work than that.
Record It Yourself
I didn’t record my own book, but I did research the do-it-yourself method quite a lot before I decided to hire an actor, so I’ll tell you what I learned. You should do your own research too.
(Skip this section if you’ve decided to hire a professional.)
Let me start by reiterating: If there is any way you can afford to hire a narrator and his/her production team, you should strongly consider doing so!
A while back I bought an audiobook from a well-known mystery/horror author who shall remain unnamed here, but you know him. The narration was absolutely top notch—a beautiful, deep voice, a good cadence, and a smooth but vaguely creepy affect that was perfect for the horror genre. Each character was distinct from the others and appropriate to their personality. Then half way through the book … WTF?? It switched to a different narrator, and it was terrible! The new narrator sounded like an amateur. He had a flat, boring tone, didn’t articulate very well, and seemed to just drone on. Well, it turned out that somewhere during recording, the author and narrator must have had a spat, or maybe the actor got sick. Who knows. Either way, this famous author finished the job himself. Big mistake! It was terrible.
Narration is acting, not just reading aloud. Just because you’re a good writer doesn’t mean you’re a good actor. An actor can bring your characters to life and breath a whole new dimension into the words you’ve written. Just like an actor in a movie, the actor you hire to narrate your book can make or break the experience for your listeners.
Can you narrate in a pleasant, relevant voice? Can you modulate your voice into different characters so that the listener knows instantly which one is speaking? Do you speak clearly and precisely, but not in an annoying way? If your characters include foreigners, can you do a good foreign accent? If so, then recording your own book might work out. If not, find someone who can.
In my case, for example, one of the main characters grew up in Mexico, and a little bit of the story takes place in Mexico. I needed an actor who spoke perfect American English and perfect Spanish (with a proper Mexican accent, not like someone from Spain). On top of that, he had to speak English with a realistic (but not overdone) Mexican accent, and speak bad Spanish with strong American accent. There was no chance I could do all of that! But Tim Pabon, my narrator and a native of Mexico, was marvelous.
The first thing you should do is read a lot of tutorials and specifications. Both ACX (Audible/Amazon’s “front end”) and AuthorsRepublic have excellent tutorials and explanations of the requirements. Personally, I strongly prefer AuthorsRepublic over ACX because I seriously object to ACX’s business practices (exclusivity, royalties, and other business practices that I believe are monopolistic and unfair).
A word of warning: The three major audiobook publishers (ACX, Findaway (Spotify), and Authors Republic) provide start-to-finish services, but you don’t have to use their whole package. For example, you could hire an actor on Authors Republic, but then distribute your audiobook via Findaway. For this chapter, I’m only talking about finding and actor and recording your book. I’ll talk about how to publish it in the second-to-last section.
With that preface, here’s an outline of the steps you’ll need to take if you decide to record and produce your audiobook.
Read the Specifications: AuthorsRepublic has several excellent articles on the intricate requirements for your audiobook files, along with links to various tutorials that are super helpful:
https://www.authorsrepublic.com/learn/blog/67/self-narration-guide
https://www.authorsrepublic.com/learn/blog/57/understanding-audio-requirements
Create Your Studio: You’ll need a super-quiet place to actually do your recordings. Most urban homes are not quiet enough; the slightest sound will raise your noise levels above the acceptable threshold. A car driving by, an airplane flying over, a dog barking, even a bird singing, can be too much.
Lots of people find that their clothes closet works pretty well. The hanging clothes absorb sound and prevent any sort of echo, and the closet is often inside your house, away from exterior walls. Before you settle on a location, you should listen throughout the day to find the quietest times, like maybe early morning or late at night when there are no cars and the dogs and birds are asleep.
Get Audacity: There are a number of audio programs you might use, but Audacity is strongly recommended. It’s a free, open-source program, and is designed to do exactly what you need to do. More importantly, most of the tutorials I found for recording audiobooks assume you’re using Audacity.
Buy a professional microphone: The microphone in your computer isn’t good enough; you’ll need a professional-quality microphone. I’ve used the “Blue Snowball USB” microphone with good results, but that was a few years ago; you should do your own research. Plan on spending $100 or so for this.
Buy a microphone stand with a boom: You need the microphone close to your face, and you don’t want to lean toward it for ten hours. Buy a boom mike stand that’s easy to adjust, one that will let you sit comfortably in your chair with the mike within a couple inches of your mouth.
Get a comfortable chair and small table: You need a quiet chair, one that doesn’t make any noise if you shift your butt around. And you need a small table to put your laptop on so that you can easily work the Audacity software from your chair.
Get a quiet computer: Your laptop must be silent. As in, no fan comes on, ever. Most modern Macintoshes are completely silent, as are many (but not all) modern Windows computers.
Test your setup: Once you have all this in place, record a chapter or two, then use Audacity to ensure that it meets all of the technical specs for loudness and noise. Do not start the real recording until you get this right. You could waste a lot of time making useless recordings.
Get organized: Figure out a good file-folder organization for your computer, and decide how you’re going to name all your files as you create them. Having a file named “Wednesday 9/24 13:25:26” doesn’t tell you that it’s the edits you made to the 14th paragraph of chapter 17.
Record and edit your book: Pay attention to all of those specifications, like blank lead-ins, chapter announcements, uniform voice, volume, and cadence, and so forth. Find a way to mark errors as you record so that they’re easy to find and fix later.
Create your final files: Export the chapter-by-chapter files from Audacity into your final directory.
Back everything up! Make sure that you have at least one, and preferably two, external copies of everything. Like on USB thumb drives, Google Drive, iCloud … you get the idea. How often should you back up? How much are you willing to lose if your computer goes belly up? At least once a day; I do it every few hours.
Hire a Professional Actor
You’ve decided to hire a professional actor to narrate your audiobook. Great! Here’s what’s next. (Skip this section if you decided to do it yourself.)
What’s My Budget?
How much can you afford, and how much are you willing to invest in your audiobook?
It’s important as you make this decision to be realistic: unless your book is already selling well, you’ll be making this investment with only a modest chance of getting your money back in sales.
You should only spend as much as you can afford to lose. And even if you make money, it won’t be for months or years. You need to be able to “float” your investment, to spend the money knowing it will be months or years before you make a profit. Don’t invest money that you need back soon.
I recommend that you plan on spending between $1,000 and $3,000 for your narration. With that budget (and depending on your word count), that will get you an experienced actor in the $150 to $250/hour range, one with a number of book credits and whose narration skills have been proven.
(Note that these figures are dollars “per finished hour.” That is, they’re quoting the length of your book, not their actual time. A typical ten-hour book might take thirty or forty hours for a pro to narrate, edit, and produce; you’re being charged for the ten-hour length of the book.)
If you can’t afford that much, there are plenty of actors who charge less than $100/hour, but I strongly advise that you check their work and listen carefully to the audition they provide. You’re taking a risk, but you may get lucky and find an excellent actor who is breaking into the business and charges less to get some experience.
Royalty Sharing
For those of you on a tight budget, there’s another choice: royalty sharing. This is where the actor does the job for free or at a reduced price, and in return, gets a fraction (usually half) of your profits.
This is great for you if your book does poorly: you didn’t spend a bunch of money. On the other hand, your narrator is really happy if your book is a big success: he or she gets far more money than they would have in a fixed-fee arrangement. It’s a gamble for both of you: you’re sharing the risk, but also sharing the profit.
And if you don’t have a couple thousand dollars to toss at this project, Royalty Sharing could be your only option.
For example, ACX’s basic “Royalty Sharing” option, you pay no fee up front, then you split all profits 50/50 with the narrator. So Audible gets 60%, you get 20%, and your narrator gets 20%.
Here’s a problem, though: unless you’re a well-known author with proven sales, basic royalty sharing won’t get you a top narrator. The only actors who agree to take on a basic royalty-sharing job are inexperienced newcomers who are breaking into the business. They’re willing to take a risk on your book in order to get more credits to their name.
If you want a top-notch narrator but still need to save money, you can use a hybrid model, where you still pay for narration but at a discount, and then share royalties 50/50. For example, with ACX’s “Royalty Sharing Plus”, you share royalties 50/50, but you also pay an up-front narration fee, typically pay about half of the full-price fee. A typical Royalty Sharing Plus might be around $50 to $100/hour for an actor who would otherwise charge $100 to $200/hour. (You can negotiate the exact amount with the actor.) You’ll still split your royalties with the actor, but you’ll get more experienced and higher-rated actors bidding on your audiobook.
Authors Republic and Spotify also have royalty sharing options. Note that if you hire your actor via Upwork or Fiverr (more on these companies below), you can’t use royalty sharing.
And before an actor will agree to a royalty-sharing option, they’ve got to believe your book will sell. You’ll have better luck if you have prior successful books, or if your book has been on the market long enough to get significant sales and good reviews.
Also, be aware that there are restrictions: If you choose royalty sharing, you must go exclusive with that company. You can’t sell your audiobook anywhere else. There are more nuances, such as a buy-out option; you should read the company’s terms carefully before choosing this (or any) option.
Find and Hire an Actor
There are five main web sites where you can search for, audition, and hire professional narrators.
General-Purpose Freelance Sites
The two big general-purpose freelance sites are Fiverr.com and Upwork.com. These freelancer web sites are not specific to the audiobook industry; you can hire a variety of professionals, including computer programmers, IT specialists, writers, illustrators, editors, accountants, book-cover designers, and (what we’re here for) narrators.
Upwork offers freelancer profiles, ratings, and portfolios, and you can hire someone either by the hour or as a fixed-price bid. They also provide secure, anonymous messaging, invoicing, escrow for funds, dispute resolution, and a payment-protection plan. Upwork charges roughly 15%; see their web site for exact details. I’ve personally used Upwork to hire editors, beta readers, and cover designers, and was very happy with their workflow and the talent I found.
Fiverr is more oriented to packaged services, what they call “gigs.” Freelancers create packaged services and list them for sale. Fiverr also has profile pages for their freelancers, messaging, escrowed payments, and customized gig quoting (which is what you’ll use, given that every book is different). Full disclosure: I haven’t used Fiverr, so this information is from their web site and other online articles comparing the two.
Both of these sites have thousands of actors hoping to get your business. There’s lots of great talent to choose from.
Audiobook-specific Freelance Sites
The next three places to find a freelance narrator are the three audiobook companies we’ve already encountered: ACX, Spotify, and Authors Republic. As far as I can tell, all three of these companies are fairly equivalent when it comes to hiring a freelance author to narrate your book. All three have a large number of actors looking for your business; they all offer actor profiles and customer ratings; they provide messaging, auditions, payment escrow, and dispute resolution.
One advantage of using one of these companies over Fiverr or Upwork is that their services are tailored to audiobooks. They understand the unusual requirements you might have for finding a narrator; for example, their search system includes gender, age, and foreign languages and accents. And when the actor finishes the work, he/she can upload the files for easy download or to go directly to the publication phase.
Searching for a Narrator
There are two ways you can go about this: Search for a narrator, or post a job and let them come to you. I strongly recommend doing your own search.
Why? Because when you post a job for general bidding, you’ll get overwhelmed with requests, and most of them will be a poor match to your needs. Dozens or hundreds of actors with little or no experience seem to bid on every job that comes along, and you’ll waste a bunch of time filtering through unqualified actors.
Instead, I recommend doing the search yourself, and offering your job to the actors that you think are suitable. Decide what’s important to you: budget, male or female, experience in your genre, accents, cadence, and tone. And most of all, how you like the samples they provide on their profile page. A macho male voice that would be perfect for a hard-boiled thriller would be completely wrong for a light-hearted comedy. (Don’t even bother with actors who don’t have samples you can listen to before you contact them.)
I suggest that you find at least three candidates, even if you really like the samples of one particular actor.
And make sure you’re auditioning only full-service actors who will not only narrate but also edit and produce your audiobook. You’re paying per finished hour, not for raw, unedited recordings. Some budget actors may do their own editing, and that’s fine. But most good actors use a professional tech team that turns the raw recordings into high-quality audio files. They fix all the errors, remove breaths, tongue clicks, and the place where you bumped the microphone or left a long gap. They double check that the amplitude is correct and consistent across all your files, and that the noise is below the maximum allowed.
The Audition
Once you find candidate actors, you’ll send each one a paragraph of your own writing to narrate. This is your moment to ensure that the actor can meet any special requirements for your work. You’ve heard other books they narrated, but your book isn’t other books.
These auditions are short—you usually only get few hundred words or so. So don’t just copy-and-paste a paragraph from your manuscript. You need write a custom paragraph that includes all the important elements of your story. You want to hear the actor do a couple of your characters, and show some emotion. If one or more characters have an accent, be sure there is at least one line of dialog from that character (and be sure to tell the actor what you expect). If it’s not obvious from your paragraph, tell the actor what the overall tone is that you hope for. If your book is a high-action thriller, do that. If romance and sex are central, do that.
And so forth. In other words, this brief audition paragraph is your only window into how your book is going to sound when narrated by this actor, so make the best of it.
Let me reiterate: it’s important to audition more than one actor. In my case, the samples one actor posted on his profile sounded great, and he could speak with both an American-English accent and a Mexican accent. I thought he’d be great as my narrator until I got his audition back. It was just … flat. Maybe he had a bad day, I’ll never know. But I continued my search, and was super happy that I’d passed on that actor.
When you get the right actor, you’ll know. It will just feel right. It should send a little chill of excitement up your back, or make your hair stand up. Something that tells you this is the one.
Hiring your Actor
Once you’ve found the actor you want, the rest is pretty straightforward. You make sure you’re in agreement on price and schedule, use the web site’s “approve”, and send your manuscript.
I took the additional step of sending a “biography” of each character to Tim, my narrator, which helped him to understand how each one might sound, react.
Here is a sample of how I described my main characters to Tim:
Liz (Elizabeth Velasquez Caen), First Lady of the United States: Elizabeth is based on a good friend of mine, and the early years of the book’s character were taken directly from the real Elizabeth’s life: family, school, misogyny she faced, growing up in Guanajuato City, defying the odds and social pressure to go to college and get a master’s degree, and finally immigrating to America. The fictional Elizabeth is a vulnerable and lonely woman, and she’s not afraid to show it. But she’s not soft. This is best illustrated in Chapter 12, the transition point when she goes from trying to trick Owen into being straight with him. The transition is the line, “Suddenly her whole aspect changed.” She’s a powerful woman, the First Lady of the United States, and she didn’t get there by riding on Warrick Caen’s coattails. She was as responsible as he was for his political success. Unless she’s being deceptive, she’s never submissive.
Warrick Caen, President of the United States: I’ll leave this one to you. He’s basically a smooth-talking asshole, a Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to his private/public personas.
Owen Richter, computer hacker: Owen is just an ordinary guy, a computer scientist, a regular Silicon Valley California boy with a genius for computers and a fucked up marriage in his past. Beyond that, I trust your actor’s intuition.
Jordan Hawke, Owen’s business partner: Next to Liz, I think Jordan is the most interesting character. She’s described as having autistic tendencies, but mild. As in, she speaks pretty normally, with no strange voice affect or flat tone. Just direct and maybe gruff. She doesn’t do sarcasm, roll her eyes, or speak with irony. She just says what she thinks.
I’m not sure this is standard practice, but I recommend it. You may have a pretty clear idea of your characters’ voices and mannerisms, and it may even be somewhere in your book. But you shouldn’t expect your narrator to read your book cover-to-cover before he/she begins narrating. Giving these hints will save you and your narrator time and help create a great audiobook.
Selecting a Publisher
Now that you’ve finished narration of your audiobook, it’s time to get it on the market. But this is the hardest part: there are conflicting and sometimes unresolvable conflicts in selecting a publisher. And a wrong choice can cripple your audiobook sales.
I’ll start with my tale, which illustrates some of the pitfalls you’ll encounter.
My Crooked Path
Like everyone, I pondered the basic choice of narrow, exclusive distribution via ACX, or “wide” distribution via Findaway (now Spotify) or Authors Republic.
ACX offers strong incentives to list with them exclusively. If I selected ACX, I’d get 40% royalties, versus just 25% if I also sell my book elsewhere. In addition, ACX would give me a bunch of “tokens” that I could send to reviewers, bloggers, and others who would (hopefully) like my book, give it good ratings, and blog about it. Pretty good incentives. And since ACX dominates the market with something close to two thirds of all audiobook sales, the 40% royalty might make up for sales I’d lose by not selling through other outlets.
But I objected to ACX’s terms of service. Once you list your book exclusively with ACX, you can’t withdraw it for seven years, and they have policies that I consider anti-competitive and unfair to authors. On top of all that, a bit of research turned up the fact that their 40% royalty claim isn’t what it seems—authors never get 40% of the list price. It’s a complex formula, but instead of 40% of a books list price, most authors seem to actually get about half of that.
So I said, “Well, f*ck that!” and signed up with Authors Republic. I’d get the same distribution as ACX—Authors Republic also distributes to ACX’s outlets (Audible, Amazon, Google, and Apple)—plus about fifty other stores. Sounds great. I also thought Authors Republic terms of service were very fair to authors, and they give you full control over your audiobook (e.g. you can withdraw at any time). But there’s cost: Authors Republic takes their royalties on top of ACX’s already-paltry 25%. Still, I decided to go this route, take the lower royalties, and hope the other fifty stores would generate enough additional sales to compensate.
Well, that was a mistake too! For reasons I never expected. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover the problem until a month after I published my audiobook.
What went wrong? Advertising. In order to effectively market a book, you have to know whether it’s selling or not. A key component of every ad campaign is the cost per sale: Are you spending $1 to make $2, or the other way around? Ads are expensive, and you need to track sales on a daily basis. You need to be able to place several ads and know which one is driving sales. You need to cut off the ads that aren’t working.
The problem was that it took sixty days for Authors Republic to post my first sale.
Yikes. That’s utterly useless when trying to advertise.
It’s not really their fault; they distribute through fifty stores, and they can only report to you after the stores report to them. The stores report monthly, and Authors Republic consolidates all those reports and reports them to you the next month. So if you sell a book on January 1st, you may not hear about it until March 1st.
After pondering and investigating options for a couple weeks, I finally contacted Authors Republic and asked them to withdraw their distribution to Audible, Amazon, Google Play, and Apple (those are ACX’s distribution channels). Once the books disappeared from those stores, I created an ACX account and re-published the book there with their non-exclusive option.
Unfortunately, by the time my audiobook was available again, I’d lost almost three months of potential sales. But it was the right choice. Now, via my ACX account, I can see sales within 72 hours, which is good enough to run an effective ad campaign. (I still don’t know why ACX takes three days; Amazon reports domestic book sales within hours, and international sales within a day.)
This tale illustrates the pitfalls you could encounter when you distribute your book. The issues are complex and interwoven:
- Are the terms of service acceptable to you?
- Are you willing to go exclusive with one company?
- Does their royalty structure seem fair to you?
- Do they provide timely sales reports?
I ultimately picked the “hybrid” model described above (Authors Republic plus ACX), which gave me the wide distribution I wanted, and didn’t tie me to ACX for seven years. By avoiding ACX’s exclusivity, I also avoided most of their terms-of-service requirements that I found objectionable. Yet my book was still available on the most important stores.
Publishing Your Audiobook
If you’re creating an audiobook, you’ve almost certainly published a print/ebook version, too, so you know the basic deal: You sign up with one or more distributors (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Books, etc.), fill in your author bio and the book’s “metadata” (blurb, keywords, etc.), upload your manuscript and book cover, set your price, and click the “publish” button. And voila, if everything is in order, your book is on the market in a few days.
Audiobooks are, in theory, the same process.
As I mentioned earlier, there are three main companies you’ll need to consider.
ACX
Audible.com is the “800 pound gorilla” of audiobook sellers, and the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) is their pipeline to get audiobooks into their store. It’s a “marketplace for professional narrators, authors, agents, publishers and rights holders to connect and create audiobooks,” (Wikipedia). ACX distributes their titles to Audible (obviously) and Amazon (which bought Audible in 2008), and also to Apple Books and Google Books.
Spotify/Findaway
Originally an independent audiobook company, Findaway was highly respected and the go-to place for authors who didn’t like ACX’s terms of service and seven-year contract. In November 2021, Spotify, the giant music streaming service, bought Findaway. Authors were wary at first—Spotify has been heavily criticized for treating musicians badly and capitalizing on their monopolistic dominance of the music-streaming market. But things were fine at first. The in early 2024, Spotify posted new terms of service. These were not just bad, they were horrible, utterly unacceptable to any author with any sense. Spotify claimed the right to “translate, modify, [and] create derivative works” from your audiobook. In other words, they could create sequels, use your characters, translate to other languages, even modify your book!
This caused a major firestorm, and a number of prominent authors withdrew their audiobooks rather than accept these terms. Spotify quickly revised their terms of service, but the damage was done. This episode, combined with their long-standing poor treatment of musicians, left many authors, including me, unwilling to use Spotify to publish their audiobooks.
Authors Republic
Authors Republic is the only remaining independent audiobook distributor. They provide start-to-finish services, from finding and hiring your narrator, to publishing your book at over fifty stores, to managing your royalties. Their terms of service are fair to authors, and they take a modest royalty of 15% on top of what each store takes.
Included in these fifty stores are the big ones: Audible, Amazon, Spotify, Apple, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, and so forth. By using Authors Republic, you’ll get the widest distribution possible.
The downside, as I mentioned earlier, is that you only receive a sales report thirty to sixty days after the sale is made. It makes it difficult to track the effectiveness of your ads and to spend your money effectively.
Do It Yourself
The above-mentioned services provide convenience: they’ll sell your book on multiple web sites with just a few clicks. But there’s no reason why you can’t do the same yourself: post your audiobook on each store individually. It’s a lot of work, both to set up each account, and to monitor your sales. It’s unlikely you’d want to do fifty separate stores, but you might pick a half dozen to a dozen of the most important outlets and just grind through them one by one.
This has the obvious disadvantage that it’s a lot of work, but the advantage that you’re in full control of each account, and you’ll get more timely sales figures.
Hybrid Publishing
As mentioned earlier, I used a hybrid model. I used Authors Republic to find an actor to narrate my book, then distributed via ACX (Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play) and Authors Republic (all the other stores). You could also do something like ACX, Spotify, and then manually do a half-dozen of the other well-known audiobook stores.
The Bottom Line
There is no bottom line. There is no choice that is obviously the best. You may not be concerned about ACX and Spotify’s terms of service and monopolistic aspirations. Or you may have lots of time on your hands and a do-it-yourself approach works for you. Check out each service, read the contract and terms of service carefully, and decide what works best for you.
Final Thoughts
Publishing an audiobook is both incredibly frustrating and incredibly rewarding. I hope I’ve provided a little insight into the process and maybe saved you from some of the dead ends and mistakes that I encountered.
If you’d like to join the discussion about this article on Reddit, please visit this link. There, you can see what others think, add your own thoughts, and participate in a discussion about the joys and pitfalls of publishing your own audiobook.