By noreply@blogger.com (Alexandra Sokoloff)

by

On Amazon
On Audible

If you buy or already own the Kindle edition, you can add audio for just $3.47.

The Romantic Times Booklovers convention is one of the biggest conventions I go to all year, and I was surprised this year at how many panels and workshops there were with titles like “Audio is the New Black.” I met up with lots of author friends who have been doing a brisk business in audiobooks through the ACX program, and I thought I’d better blog a little about it here, because this is another potential income stream that authors need to be aware of these days, and ACX is a terrific production and distribution resource. Even if you know exactly zero about audiobook production (that would be me!), the ACX site has streamlined the process into a step-by-step system that anyone can follow to produce a quality audiobook.

ACX has thousands of professional and highly experienced actor-producers already signed up for the program. When you start an audio book, you choose a five-minute segment of your book for actors to audition with and upload that to the ACX site, and specify the qualities of voice that you’re looking for (comic, brooding, spooky, etc.) You choose whether you’ll pay the narrator a flat fee yourself, or do a royalty share deal. Then the project gets posted to ACX’s entire stable of actor-producers, and immediately auditions start coming in. You can also browse for actors yourself by searching vocal and tonal qualities and listening to samples. I was having flashbacks to my directing days as I listened to over three dozen auditions. (I know, yike – but you don’t have to listen to the whole audition to know if a narrator is in the running).

I actually found my terrific narrator, RC Bray, myself, by searching auditions on the site (Bob is also the narrator of the blockbuster audio The Martian, among other titles). I was blown away by Bob’s vocal range (just wait till you hear his reading of Epps!), and the way he’s able to convey theme and suspense in his reading. Bob loved Huntress and signed up to do the book immediately, and he’s such a professional that we had no problem working together by e mail. I could ask him to do something in a slightly different way and he’d instantly get it. I’m thrilled with the book and I hope you audiobook listeners will be, too.

I’ve really enjoyed working on the audio version of Huntress, though I have to warn it’s a lot of work. But ACX’s team was incredibly supportive and helpful – any time I hit a snag or didn’t understand a step in the process, I could contact the support team and get talked through it. I know other authors opt to make audio deals with great companies like Audible rather than taking on production themselves, but I love that I’m now making the lion’s share of profit from this book. I think maybe a mix of self-produced and publisher-produced books might be the way to go, just as a hybrid mix of indie published and traditionally published books can be the most profitable (and manageable!) route for authors these days.

I have audiobooks of Blood Moon and Cold Moon out from Thomas & Mercer, produced by Audible.com and narrated by Bob Bray, but I’m also releasing two more through ACX, Book of Shadows and The Unseen.

I highly recommend that all authors check out the ACX site and read about how the process works. And of course I’d love to hear from others of you who have worked on your own audiobooks! What was your experience?

– Alex

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Via: Alexandra Sokoloff