Why Should Indie Authors Have Audiobooks and How to Create Them?

The process for developing and producing your audiobooks can actually take several different forms.

If you are narrating it yourself, you are narrating, editing, REVIEWING, uploading, publishing, promoting, etc.

If you work with a narrator or voice actor you will need to find a voice actor that you like. You can try to find one independent of the existing systems, but ACX and Findaway offer a matching service. You can have people audition for your book, they send back samples, you pick which one you want to read your book. Now this locks you into a few things. With ACX, you can only communicate with the narrator through their platform. I didn’t use a narrator for my experience with Findaway but I would expect that it would work the same. They don’t want to get cut out and they also want to protect both parties. Using this service means that both the author and the narrator are in the respective systems and then they handle all royalty distributions. IF you selected a royalty split.

Effectively you have two options with your audiobooks that are narrated. You can pay up front for the narration and editing, or you can offer a royalty deal so they make money when you make money, or some hybrid of a down payment plus royalties.

Once you pick the narrator, set on the fee structure, they will start to record the chapters or sections of your book. You will set a deadline in the system and provide a copy of your book so that they can access it for reading and plan to get it back to you on time. As they upload chapters I would highly recommend listening to them so you can send back any edits early and often instead of leaving a whole pile until the end.

In this scenario the narrator should be reading and editing their chapters. They may contract out to an audio engineer or they may do the audio edits themselves.

You should listen to everything and be good with it before you hit submit. If there are issues with the audio after ACX or Findaway reviews they should send those edits to both of you, but just in case I sent edits back to my narrator through the system as well.

It can take 5-7 business days for this review EACH TIME (ACX) . So if the first review took 7 business days and there was an issue, when you resubmit the clock resets.

Once the book is approved it is out there. For my first three books, I added the audiobook as an option after the book was already out, so for me it was kind of the sooner the better. No need for a pre-order. You can set up a pre-order with Findaway Voices yay! And you can set one up with ACX, but ONLY if you are exclusive with ACX. Because …AMAZON.

This is the first of several videos I will be doing about audiobooks, so if you have more questions, post them below.

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Have a great day and now you can get back to writing your book!