A friend of mine suggested that I do an audio-book version of a book I wrote. A few days ago he talked with a graphic artist who had done an audio-book and said that the audio version was outselling the print version. ("How can you do an audio version of a graphic novel?" I hear you ask. He does the dialog, and narrates the scene the way they'd do in old radio broadcasts.) How many of you have done this? Did you use your own voice or hire somebody else. And, if the latter, at what cost? And are there any sources you can direct me to on the technique of recording and marketing audio versions of their books?
I have published two novels with audio. The first was with a young woman who did voice overs for commercials. I had originally hired her for the trailer, but her voice ended up being perfect for the main character. I was able to convince her to tackle the novel of which she did an excellent job. It was then sent to an audio tech to make sure the file was clean and it was converted to ACX. I hired the tech through Fiverr. The novel was written in first person which made it sound like a memoir from my character's point of view. After my second novel had been released for a while, Kindle contacted me with an offer to convert it to audio at no cost. I was reluctant at first because I hate computer generated voices, but I have family members with MS who would like to read my book—they have a hard time keeping things in focus. I checked out the voices from Kindle and selected one that I thought sounded like my narrator--written in third person—and proceeded from there. It's not great, but it seems to work for the few that have heard it. PM me and I will send links if you want to listen to the samples.
All I know is Scott Sigler used this method to build an audience for his Infected and Galatic Football League series. He narrated the books himself which lead to traditional publishing deals for the works.
I'm an audiobook fiend. I love them, and I can't wait to hear my book read by a pro. Unfortunately, while popularity grows every year, audiobooks only account for about 5% of book sales at the moment, so don't count on a huge return on investment. That being said, there have been examples of books becoming famous on Audible before they made any splash in print or ebook. A few authors have even self-published in audio and ended up with major book deals from them. Again, that's rare, but you never know, right? There's a process for self-publishing on Audible and iTunes. It's not completely free like Amazon's KDP option for print and ebooks because you have to pay the performer/producer, but it's supposed to be fairly simple. As I understand it, you find a reader you like on acx.com. (I don't think you have to use AXC, but it seems to be the website everyone uses. I know there are readers on fiverr.com, too, but I believe they go through the ACX process anyway. Not sure about that.) You can even ask potential performers to read a sample from your book to audition before choosing one. Then you sign a contract with them and either pay them a fee up front or share royalties with them if they're willing to do that. I think more readers, especially the pros, ask for the up front fee, though. They charge per finished hour, and the average audiobook contains about 9300 words per hour. I've seen a lot of readers charging $50 or less per hour, but the more experienced readers charge in the $200+ range, so for a 100K word novel, you'd be looking at about $540 for an amateur and $2150 or more for a pro. Most of the readers do their own production, which is included in the price, and in the end, you have a file you can upload to Audible and iTunes. You can publish elsewhere, too, like audiobooks.com, but Amazon has a deal where you get a higher percentage of royalties if you publish exclusively to Audible and iTunes (iTunes being included in your deal with Audible.) That's about all I know. Hope it helps.
Can you give us a ballpark figure on how much this cost? I'm debating subscribing to an AI voicing service, and want to do the comparibles. And how did you find your narrator (Search terms, etc.)?
I spent seven-hundred dollars for 60,000 words. The Kindle computer voice for my second novel was free. My memoir, and several others of my books, did not qualify for some reason. I wasn't interested in converting anything else, so I didn't research the reason Kindle had for not allowing the other books. If you want, I can message you the title of both and you can listen to the sample.
I wouldn't at all mind listening to samples of both. I've long thought it'd be good to get my novels into audio. Lately, a friend of mine is nagging me to do it, do it, do it. Being the suggestible type, I've spent an absurd amount of time the past couple weeks looking into it.
