Assembling an Audio Book
I have my first audio book recorded, produced, and ready. It has cover art, chapters, and everything. This fully-finished book is ready for listening!
The problem is… getting it to the market.
My hope was to get the audio book of Descent available through Audible and iTunes using a service called ACX. Audible is the largest library of audio books available, so I thought it would be a great place to start and ACX is the primary path for independent authors to publish on Audible. Basically if you’re someone like me and you want to get on Audible, you go through ACX.
I uploaded my book, Descent, on Wednesday after some several-hours-long formatting complications, file-type issues and calls with customer service. Alas, finally everything came through and I was able to submit my book for approval.
Now I have to wait through the approval process. This entails an ACX staff person literally listening to the file to make sure it is formatted correctly. ACX has extremely particular formatting requirements for their stories and if it isn’t done the right way exactly as they want it, the story will not be approved.
Audible is a company with a good reputation and customers come to Audible for a certain expectation of the product. I can understand a company’s desire for consistency associated with their brand. However, from the perspective of the artist submitting work for approval, I am somewhat disappointed that ACX requires certain stringent formatting rules. For instance, putting the credits at the start instead of the end, how to introduce title pages, so forth. I have my own certain way I prefer to do things and that did not always align with what the requirements entailed.
In the event that the story is not approved, I do have a back-up plan: Spotify.
Like iTunes, Spotify is typically thought of as a place for music, but it has a vast list of audio books available. While the audience for books may not be as large on Spotify, it will be an alternative place for my audio book to live and will hopefully bring in a new audience in the form of podcast listeners who click over to this (I could see podcast listeners really liking this).
More on that when I learn more. In the meantime, check out the cover for the audiobook of Descent below:
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