Oh, I wish I could do audiobooks, but there’s three facto...

Oh, I wish I could do audiobooks, but there’s three factors stopping me: time, cost, and return. Based on my conversations with other indie authors, Audible is basically set up to screw authors who aren’t with the big publishing houses.

Audible has a royalty sharing audiobook production with their own book readers but that would involve exclusivity contracts with Amazon. Beyond that, Audible’s and other services’ fee structures would put the price of each audiobook at close to the paperback or greater if I planned to see any returns on it. And by returns, I mean a single US Dollar per book.

I could produce an audiobook independently, but with the length of Receiver of Many and Destroyer of Light, and with The Good Counselor being a similar word count, we are talking $5K per book for the studio time if I read it myself. With my continually advancing asthma, doing long takes would be difficult, and my natural voice is too nasal with too much glottal fry, and has too prominent of a Southern California accent for the market. The better option would be to hire a professional, which would make the cost of production $10K per book based on word count.

Accessibility is important to me. I had originally wanted to produce an audiobook for my readers and fans who have dyslexia or other visual processing or sight disabilities and wish that the fee structure, cost and returns would let me do it. But for the moment, they simply don’t.

I’m so happy you’re looking forward to The Good Counselor and my continuing saga of Hades and Persephone! I have it available for preorder NOW through Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords, plan to set up preorders on Kobo, Google Play and other platforms, and will have the paperback available soon for preorder as well. Cover is in the works and coming soon!