When I decided to self-publish my new book last year, I viewed it partially as an adventure: having done everything myself a decade ago, what had changed? Was it easier or harder? More costly or cheaper? Would I do it again? I included not only doing the marketing (which I’ll talk about in a later blog; it’s not going well), but also publishing my book as an audiobook, if it didn’t cost too much. The only data point I had was a previous estimate from a company in Santa Fe who quoted $10,000 for Teddy’s War, which had about the same number of words. Giving you the current status first, I just signed a contract with an experienced voice actor in Alaska to produce an audio file of Death In The Tallgrass by November 1st, for about $1200. When I have that file, Audible (a subsidiary of Amazon) will freely make it available for purchase from Amazon, Audible, and Itunes. I have no control over the price and won’t know until after it comes up. Audible makes their money off the deal by keeping a healthy chunk of the sale amount. I only began working on this a week ago and it’s been a pretty exciting process. Producing an audiobook is provided by a company called ACX, which stands for Audible Creation Experiment, also a subsidiary of Amazon. My book had to have been published in Kindle format, so that I could use the same file to submit my book to ACX. Using a page created for me by ACX, I typed in the title of the book, the author of the book, my budget range, and a short description of the book. In that description, I named some of the characters and described what I thought they sounded like. I didn’t think I had good enough descriptive words, so I said Harry was like a young Tom Selleck, Alice was like a Melissa McCarthy, and Charlie Goodnight sounded like a fat Tommy Lee Jones. It seemed to have worked pretty well. I narrowed the potential audience of Narrators-for-hire by requesting a male voice (my book uses a first-person male to tell the story), chose “storyteller” from a long list of “voice styles”, and indicated a budget range of $50-$100 per finished hour, which is an hour of reading the final edition of the audiobook. ACX used my word count (105,635) to estimate that it would take 11.4 hours to listen to the final audiobook. It takes 3 to 6 hours of work time to create one finished hour of properly recorded, edited, and formatted story. Different Narrators use different levels of time and effort in producing their final product and earn it back by adjusting their cost per finished hour. I provided an “audition file” of 2 to 3 pages excerpted from my book. Those excerpts featured scenes of dialogue between different characters to help the Narrator know what would be needed in terms of the voice, style, pace, intuition, and interpretation throughout the story. I chose five scenes, each of a paragraph or two of dialogue or monologue by four different characters. After broadcasting my request for a Narrator (taken care of by ACX), any Narrator interested in voicing my book sent ACX an audio file of them reading the audition file. ACX takes care of the communications and all I had to do was sign into my account, go the auditions page, and listen to the different auditions received. It was very easy. In addition to hearing my own words read by the Narrator, I could click on their name and go to their “profile” page. From a listing of finished books they had narrated, I could listen to excerpts. Between those excerpts and my audition file, I developed a good sense of how my book might sound with their voice. I sent out my request on a Friday, and within two days, I had eighteen different Narrators respond with an individual audition. It was pretty exciting to hear my words come to life. I listened to each audition three or four times, eliminated the easy ones (i.e., the Narrator sounded too old or was too tenor), and then did a side-by-side comparison until I got it down to four candidates. It was not easy. I wanted, in particular, to judge how much a Narrator changed his voice to present different characters, and how much “acting” was done as opposed to “narrating”. Only two out of the eighteen had great variations in their voices; one Narrator actually provided a female partner to read the female parts. My final selections all made small changes in their voices for the different characters. Their changes in pitch, pace, enunciation, and pauses were enough to hear and imagine each distinct character. After picking my final Narrator and confirming they were available in the right time frame, I filled out an electronic form with only 5 questions (including price and due date). ACX sent the form to the Narrator. When that form is approved, my next step is to choose a 15-minute segment from the book, submit it to the Narrator, and have him read it in the voice and style that he has chosen for the whole book. He will record the 15-minute segment, send it to me, and I will iterate with him until I am satisfied. I will approve it when finished. After that, it’s off to the races! When the whole book is finished, I will have two chances to read, comment, and ask for changes to any part of the audio, hopefully honing it to be perfect, and then his job is finished. He will give me a final version of the audio file and I will submit it to Audible; it should be for sale within 24 hours. I hope this all works and from what I’ve seen so far, it will. Everyone concerned seems to have the process down and are working to produce a professionally-done, significantly-good product. It takes a long time to produce an audiobook, so I’m content to wait a couple of months to have it done well.
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AuthorDon Willerton has been a reader all his life and yearns to write words like the authors he has read. He's working hard at it and invites others to share their experiences. |