Please allow me to pull back the curtain (which is kind of becoming my ‘thing’ it seems) on audiobooks and the Indie Author.
There are a few options for an Indie Author to get their books into audio. Tantor Media is one. They work like this.
Often, they will approach an author who is doing well with an offer. They give a small advance to the author for the rights to produce their books in audio for a term of usually seven years. The author gets paid somewhere between 20 and 25% of the net sales of audiobooks. This money goes to the advance first until it is repaid. Once that is met it means the author ends up with pennies per audiobook and they keep the majority for the term.
The second option is through Amazon/Audible. They offer a program called “Royalty Sharing”. This lets you hire a narrator(s) without paying them up front. They agree to split the royalties 50/50 with you.
This is great, to a degree. The problem is any established narrator, who either has a following of their own, or is really good at the job, won't do it. It's too much risk for them to ever get paid for their time and work. In my experience this is almost always very new, unestablished, and often times very green narrators who are learning the ropes and skills to do the job. Viable, but hard to get a good quality narrator.
The third option is that the author pays the narrators and all the costs up front. They then own all the rights to the product produced which they publish and watch the money roll in. Except it doesn't happen that fast.
In my experience, with the length of my books, and paying for my preferred “double narration” (a male/female duo for the alternating viewpoints) it costs a minimum of $200 per finished hour, but the really good ones (like the two who did the first five Tajss books) charge $400 or more per finished hour.
My books, on average six to ten hours. Which is about $2400 per book. That's a big upfront investment for an indie author. In order to get say the next five books done we are looking at $12,000.
Audiobooks do not pay out like e-books. They give a lower percentage of the sale to the author, even if you own all rights. I have a lot of author friends who are doing it, and they are making money, but it takes six months to a year before they recoup the initial investment. During that time, you, as an indie author, have to be able to spend that much money and not have it for other things like paying your bills.
Unfortunately, right now James and I are not in a position to do this. We don't have enough money to invest into getting good quality audiobooks produced. The costs I listed also doesn't include the time it takes to handle and get the audiobook done, which on average is twenty to forty hours starting with negotiations all the way through to final proofing of the product. A lot of time not spent writing.
There is a fourth option I haven't gone over yet. Amazon and a few other platforms are offering “virtual voice” or some other title for what is, in reality, AI narration. I did try this. I did it as a test on Audible/Amazon with the Red Planet Jungle series. It took several hours per book to get the AI to say the words right, to pause in a natural way, all the little things a narrator would do. It hasn't really worked.
I don't see them selling much and I have gotten several emails saying that listeners/readers don't like it. Hence, I haven't done any more. It was a test of the water but even I wasn't really happy with it. A great narrator acts out the scene. They don't just read it, if that's all it took, I'd do it myself. It's a lot more involved than that and takes an entire specific skill set.
Do not lose hope, though! James and I are working on this project and like many things, we won't stop until we figure out a way to make it happen. I will tell you there is something quite magical about hearing your words brought to life by a narrator and I can't wait to hear the rest of the Tajss series!
Do you like audiobooks? Do you have a favorite narrator(s)? Let me know!