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Take Your Book to Audio

Take Your Book to Audio

By Julie Tollefson

Anne Marie Lewis, a classically trained opera singer whose days were filled with auditions and rehearsals and raising four sons, fell in love with audiobooks to reintroduce reading in her busy life. Now an audiobook narrator herself with a home recording studio and 42 books to her credit, Anne Marie offers five tips especially for independent authors interested in bringing their work to the vast audience of audiobook readers.

1) Listen — Once you decide to take your work to audio, become familiar with other audiobooks in the genre to get a feel for current trends and to get to know narrators and their styles.

“You have to start to dip your toes into it to get a feel for it,” Anne Marie says. “Once you start immersing yourself in the sounds of the genre, you’ll have a better idea of what you like.”

One decision you’ll have to make early on is who will tell your story. A single narrator? Dual? Do you want a female-sounding narrator to perform all the female character parts and a male-sounding narrator to perform all the male voices? Or, in the ideal world, would you enlist a full cast for your work?

“The more elements you add, the more expensive the production’s going to be,” Anne Marie says.

The least expensive cast is likely to be one narrator or a dual narration (in which two narrators alternate) that doesn’t require much coordination beyond basic approaches to character voice, the overall tone of the book, and pronunciation of place names.

Duet narration that requires splicing pieces of different recordings together — when two characters voiced by different narrators have a conversation, for example — is labor intensive and will be more expensive to produce. A full multicast is only possible when the book is written with multicast in mind, and even then, it will be extremely expensive.

2) Get real about finances — As an indie author, you can choose from several models for producing your book in audio form. To make the right choice for you, take an honest look at the amount of money and time you’re willing to spend. Three basic types of contracts are common in the audiobook industry.

Under a “royalty share” contract, which requires no up-front payment from the author, the author and the narrator split the money from sales of the audiobook.

“If you opt for such a contract, you need to be prepared to give a very solid marketing plan to your narrator because the narrator is taking a risk,” Anne Marie says.

Narrators considering a royalty share contract will look at your Amazon Kindle sales rankings, reviews, and social media presence, in addition to your marketing plan, to help them decide whether to take a chance on you.

“If the rankings are in the millions, even something over 500,000, we may not want to take a risk on that book,” Anne Marie says. “If we see the sales rankings are 5,000, that’ll catch our attention for sure. That would make that book a much better candidate for royalty share.”

Book length, too, will be an important factor for the narrator. Generally speaking, narrators won’t be interested in royalty share contracts for really short books or really long books— those less than four hours do not sell well and those longer than 13 hours are a huge time-commitment and greater risk for the narrator. So how long is your book? The industry standard is 9,300 words per hour. Anne Marie’s narration averages about 8,500 words per hour. Some narrators speak faster, some slower.

At the other end of the spectrum, authors pay for the full production of their audiobook under a “per finished hour” contract. SAG-AFTRA, the union for audiobook narrators, sets a minimum rate of $250 per finished hour for narrators. Other production expenses — proofing, editing, and mastering the files — cost extra. Fun fact: It takes about six hours of studio time (recording, editing, proofing, and mastering) to produce one finished hour of audio. And this does not include the time it takes for a narrator to prep a script.

Between the two extremes is a “royalty share plus” contract, in which the author pays for post-production work, typically at about one-half the narrator’s regular per finished hour rate or with a union minimum of $100 per finished hour.

When it comes to paying to produce your audiobook, you don’t necessarily have to empty your bank account. Anne Marie has seen authors successfully appeal to their fan base through crowd sourcing platforms such as Kickstarter or GoFundMe to raise money to bring their books to audio.

3) Arm yourself with a top-notch marketing plan — That marketing plan Anne Marie mentioned? It’s super important for the author, the narrator, and the success of the book in audio form.

“Every time you mention you have a book, if it’s in audio form, you need to mention that as well,” she says.

You never know who will hear you. For a lot of people, it’s not feasible to read print, ebook, or paperback content.

“Whether it’s because of disability or they aren’t able to sit down and open an actual book, the ability to get audio changes the game for them,” Anne Marie says. “It’s always, always beneficial to say that your book is in audio.”

4) Decide how much DIY you’re up for — ACX, the Audiobooks Creation Exchange, is a do-it-yourself website that provides you total control over your audiobook production. Part of Amazon, the service allows you to set up a call for auditions, sift through (possibly hundreds) of samples, and select the narrator or narrators you want for your book.

An alternative, if that sounds intimidating, is to hire a production company.

“Oftentimes, production companies already work from a list of vetted narrators,” Anne Marie says. “They know they’re reliable, experienced narrators.”

Lead time can be anywhere from two to six months, assuming the manuscript is in final form and ready to be recorded.

Here’s a rough estimate of the time you can expect each phase of production to take:

Two to four weeks
The author auditions and selects the narrator.

Up to two weeks
The narrator reviews the manuscript and preps for recording.

10 days to three weeks
The narrator records a 15-minute sample to give the author a chance to listen to their interpretation of the characters and discuss the overall tone and feeling of the book. “With an ACX contract, you get to do two revisions with the 15-minute checkpoint,” Anne Marie says. Clear and thorough communication with your narrator is very important here because after this step the narrator gets to work on the performance of the book.

Big scary block of time for the author
The narrator records the book and arranges for proofing, editing, and mastering.

Two weeks
The author reviews the finalized book and flags any mistakes, misread lines, and mispronunciations. Only corrections are re-recorded at this point. That’s not to say you can’t change a manuscript, but if you do decide to rewrite a big chunk of the book after the narrator has finished recording, be prepared to pay more.

10+ days
ACX processes and releases the book. “They won’t release it until the narrator says, ‘Yes, I have been paid for this project,’” Anne Marie says.

5) Help a potential narrator out — When you’re ready to hold auditions, you can take steps to ensure you hear what you need to hear.

“It helps if you can put together some character information — socioeconomic, education background, age, accent, a traumatized past that comes out in the way they speak,” Anne Marie says. “These kinds of things help the narrator flesh out these characters.”

Be selective about the passage you ask candidates to read. Pick a section that will allow you to evaluate the narrator’s approach to key aspects of the story: action scenes, male and female voices, main narration. Keep it short and representative. “You can tell in five minutes, you can probably even tell in 30 seconds, if this is the voice you want,” she says.

If you happen to fall in love with a specific narrator when you’re doing your research, you can bypass auditions altogether and reach out to the narrator in person to ask whether they’re available.

Bonus: Writing for audio

“It’s really helpful if you can write with audio in mind,” Anne Marie says. “It makes a huge difference for how it’s going to come across in narration. It’s not as much about making it easier for the narrator as it is making it more accessible for the listener.”

Some tips you’ve likely heard before: Overuse of dialog tags is annoying for listeners. Unusual words used repeatedly may not jump out on the page but will jump out in the ear. Unintentional alliteration can sound comical in even the most serious passages.

Other tips may be less well known, which is why Anne Marie also shared a list of resources to help us think about listeners as we write.

AudiobooksJulie Tollefson