ACX audiobooks: They're your words
ACX is a great service. It matches up actors and writers to produce audiobooks together. Its best feature for indies like me is that it allows royalty share; the actor can agree to share 50% of the royalties for the audiobook instead of an up-front per-hour payment. ACX handles the split for you.
Here's how ACX works:
When you find the actor you want and s/he submits an audition you like, you send him/her an offer with deadlines for when you want the first 15 minutes and when you want the entire audiobook finished. The offer is accepted, and you wait for the first 15. When you get that, you're supposed to give feedback to the actor if you're not quite happy--wrong tone, character voice needs to be higher, pronunciation of a name is off (though I try to give those right off the bat), and so on--or tell the actor everything's awesome and he can get on to the rest of the audiobook. When the final audiobook is submitted, the same thing is supposed to happen. Some actors will even send you unofficial off-ACX chunks so you can give feedback as needed, or they'll at least ask questions.
The voice actor I approached for "The Mage's Toy" will go unnamed. He has a great voice and his samples showed great talent. I thought he would be perfect for it, I approached him, he submitted an audition. I gave him some feedback on it--not so serious, it's a light-hearted romp, here are the correct pronunciations--and offered him the production contract. He accepted. I was really excited.
