Indie Life: With ACX, There's no Good Reason Not to Do An Audiobook

I read a book from the early part of the 21st Century that placed doing an audiobook as a very expensive way to promote your work with expensive studio and production costs.

By the time, I'd read that, I was already in process of publishing my sixth audiobook production at no cost to me.

ACX (the Audiobook Creator's Exchange) brings together writers and narrators to put together audiobooks for download at Audible.com, Amazon.com, and the Itunes store. Authors can produce their book with no upfront costs, by agreeing to split audiobook profits with the producers. (Note: You do also have the option of paying your producer an hourly rate.)

Of course, you may question why you want to split the royalties with a narrator when you can do it yourself. The good news is that ACX is set up so if you have the talent, you can do it yourself and keep all the royalties, but some of us have a simplistic view of what doing an audiobook takes.

I always thought I'd do my own audiobook. After all, I have a pretty good reading voice. Alas, that's not enough. You have to produce a product that runs for hours without any skips or stumbles and then edit it into a professional package. I made two stabs at starting to record Tales of the Dim Knight and neither went well or got beyond the first chapter. The audiobook for Tales of the Dim Knight is 11 hours and I'd never made it through without professional help that would have cost hundreds of dollars. Audiobook producers earn every center they get.

The royalty payments from ACX are generous beginning with 50% for you and your producer to split from the first copy sold and increasing based on your number of sales. If you sell 20,000 copies, the royalty goes up to 90%. Even if you're splitting some of the money with your producers-royalty rates of 25-45% are hard to beat.

While I can't guarantee you'll rake in the big bucks with 20,000 sales, you will have a new outlet for your books that has less competition. While the number of people who listen to audiobooks increase with our busy lives that makes sitting down and reading a luxury, their options remains pretty limited. There are millions of books on Amazon, there are more than a million of books for the Kindle.

There are just over 100,000 audiobooks available on Audible and Itunes. That's a lot of room for authors to find a place in the market.

So, how do you get your audiobook published through ACX. The website will have the general details, but I can relate my experience with each aspect of the process:

1) Post Your Project to Find a Narrator: Unless you have a specific narrator in mind, or you want to try searching for your dream narrator, the easiest thing to do is to post your project to make it searachable for the available narrators.

The one part of the process that's worth commenting on is the audition script. Choose a piece of your work that represents it best. If it's a work of fiction, use one of your important scenes. Does it sound like you want it to? Don't just choose the first chapter, choose something that conveys the tone of the book at its best.

2) Wait for a Narrator: The most difficult part of my process was waiting for a narrator. If you opt for a passive approach of waiting for a narrator, let me urge you to be patient. Someone will come along because narrators want to have work and build their audiobook business just as much as you want to have an audiobook done. In my case, it took months on each project, but every single audiobook I submitted found a narrator.

Don't just take any narrator who submits. I received an audition for
All I Needed to Know I Learned From Columbo that was so wrong, I marked it no. This is your book and you want someone who can make it great.

I was very lucky to find Scott Wilcox who did Tales of the Dim Knight and the Adventures of Powerhouse, giving voice to each of the characters and making each character sound unique.

3) Wait for the Finished Product: You'll need to make an offer when you find the right narrator. Set reasonable timeframes and then wait. Be patient with reasonable delays. As it happens to writers, it happens to audiobook producers. If you write long enough as an Indie author, you'll miss a deadline. Same thing will happen with producers.

4) Carefully Review the Finished Project:

This is the part where you work. You sit down and you listen to your own audiobook. To me, this is actually pretty fun. To hear my own words read by a professional is a wonderful experience.

It's also important to make sure you put out the best product. The changes will usually be minor, but you have to work to make it as good as possible.

And once the changes are made, you approve the Audiobook, wait three weeks and the whole world can not only read your book, they can listen to it as well

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