Audio Books - How did you do it?

[Jamie]

Greetings All,

In updating the bookstore pages on my website (www.jamesmmccracken.com/bookstore.html) I noticed and added links for those of you who have made audio recordings of your novels.  I am also creating a resource page - think Yellow Pages - where people can go to find help (via links to websites) with finding someone to proofread/edit or format their manuscript, where to publish their novel etc.  I'd really like to include links to help people who would like to make audiobooks of their works.

So, for those who have done this: can you share a link to the people/company you used? and also a brief note about you experience - were they easy to work with?
If you did the recording yourself can you tell us what program and equipment you used and a link to where you acquired it?

Thank you.  I appreciate your time and help.
~James M. McCracken 

[Amber Cook]

This is actually a side note, Jamie, but I have a new cover for my second book now (to match the new one for my first one), and I'm hoping to update it everywhere I can, including your site.  Can I send it to you, or a link to the Amazon page?

I haven't done an audio book yet, but many authors seem to really like ACX, so we'll see what people say here.   

[Andy Bunch]

Acx.com is the createspace of audio books, right down to being owned by Amazon.com. Like createspace it's pretty easy, free, and you can handle distribution, which could otherwise be challenging.

I have done several projects through acx with 3 different producers/narrators. One I used friends, for both voice and studio. That's definitely the best quality and was much harder to do/took longest for a short project.

The biggest asset to an audio book, in my opinion is that it opens another sales channel with minimal work from you.

The challenge is that it will never sound like you imagine it will. I decided at the beginning that I didn't know what made a great audio book & I didn't have time to learn, so I left it up to my narrators. It kept me from going nuts, but I should have given little more feedback on my fiction.

There's option to acx now, but I don't have direct experience with them so I will leave that for someone else.

On Sep 11, 2014 10:32 PM, "Amber Cook" <unchan...@gmail.com> wrote:

This is actually a side note, Jamie, but I have a new cover for my second book now (to match the new one for my first one), and I'm hoping to update it everywhere I can, including your site.  Can I send it to you, or a link to the Amazon page?

I haven't done an audio book yet, but many authors seem to really like ACX, so we'll see what people say here.   

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[Brian Tashima]

I used ACX as well and found the process to be easy and user-friendly, for the most part. I hired a narrator that I knew through my work with Autism Empowerment, and he did an amazing job. The whole thing took a bit longer to complete than we both expected, though, so that's something to keep in mind.

[Andy Bunch]

Yep. Now that I have watched the guy edit the sound files I'm more long suffering with my narrators.

[Amber Cook]

I read a book out loud once for an author friend, a shorter YA novel into a recorder, and it does take a long time.  It can easily be twenty minutes or more for a chapter, and the reader can't do more than a handful of chapters at a time or it strains the voice.  And that wouldn't include do-overs for words read wrong or dialogue read with the wrong infliction, etc.  

[Jamie]

Thank you to all who shared their information.
I checked out the ACX website and posted a link on my resource page.

I am even going to give it a try.  Anyone want to share how long it took before they received a response
from producers/narrators?

This will definitely be an experience.
~Jamie  

[Andy Bunch]

Usually a day or two.

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[Amber Cook]

Is ACX the one who hires its voice talent from New York stage/Off-Broadway folks?  I've heard the voice quality is really very good from whichever company that is...

[Andy Bunch]

No, everyone on ACX is Indie just like the authors. Well, I suppose there are some studios who have "production houses" of sorts with several narrators under there banner. I have a friend with a music studio who's signed up through ACX right now, so that if I wanted to do another book with my own voice-over actor and they didn't have a studio I could do a 3-way royalty share contract. What I did last time was pay my narrator myself for his time and then do a 50/50 royalty share with the studio. Most of the narrators I've worked with on ACX have had their own equipment and have done the narration and editing, etc. for their half of the revenue. 

You can also hire most of them at an hourly rate and keep all the royalty if you have pockets deep enough. Or you could record you're own audio book and simply upload to ACX to use there distribution. It could be worth giving away half your royalty to ACX just so that you have one spot that distributes to the top three retailers without any fuss. It's all a question of preference/strategy. 

There are other players in the game I get emails from but I don't have there info handy. 

Is ACX the one who hires its voice talent from New York stage/Off-Broadway folks?  I've heard the voice quality is really very good from whichever company that is...