#SelfPubAdvice: Turn your book into an audiobook!

In this post, an excerpt from The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing on creating audiobooks.

Audiobooks are a fast-growing segment of the book market thanks to the ease of listening to books via smartphones and tablets. Did you know that you, little old you, you the indie author, can turn your book into an audiobook for a total cost of ZERO DOLLARS?

For real. You can turn your book into an audiobook and sell it at Audible, iTunes, and Amazon, and you don’t have to know thing about audio production, and you don’t have to spend a single penny to do it. Here’s how:

1. Set up an account on acx.com, the Audio Creation Exchange, which is another Amazon company.

 2. Create a project for your book with the cover, blurb, and details about what type of narrator you want.

 3. Include what sort of payment agreement you can offer. To make your audiobook at no cost to yourself, offer potential narrators a royalty share agreement. They get no money up front, but the two of you share royalties once the book is for sale.

 4. Go shopping for narrators. Search for potential narrators whose voices and accents fit your criteria, select three or four to start, and contact them, asking if they’d be interested in producing your book.

 5. Once you have a narrator and you’ve settled on deadlines and payment, all you have to do is wait. When the narrator finishes the book, “proof listen,” request any needed corrections, and then approve your book.

 6. Quality control at ACX will then review your book and either publish it or ask the narrator to make changes.

 7. Once your book is done, ACX will distribute it to Amazon, Audible, and iTunes, and you’ll start earning royalties.

When I first heard about ACX, I thought it was too good to be true. What professional audiobook producer would want to make my book for royalty share? But since it cost me nothing to make my account, I gave it a try.

The narrator for Watch Me Disappear found my project and expressed interest in producing it. We made an agreement, and she did the rest. The process for my first book wasn’t all smooth sailing. The narrator was relatively new to the process, and ACX found technical problems in her first effort. Also, she missed every single deadline we set, even extended deadlines, but then again, I wasn’t paying her, so I can’t blame her too much. And, at the end of the process, I had a professional audiobook with a narrator who was pitch-perfect for the voice of my book.

For The Latecomers Fan Club, I approached three possible narrators with royalty-share options, and all three replied, one asking for payment upfront instead of royalty share, and two requesting the full manuscript in order to see if the book suited them. Both who requested the manuscript offered to produce the book, and luckily my first choice of narrators, Becket Royce, was available to make my book on the timeline I was targeting.

Becket was an absolute pro throughout the whole process, and I could not be prouder of the audiobook that resulted. When I say she’s a pro, I’m not kidding. She’s also the narrator of Family Tree, by famed women’s fiction author Barbara Delinsky, and Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, who has won a Pultizer and a National Books Critics Circle Award.

One of the greatest things about working with a producer on an audiobook is that you feel like you have a team behind your book—because you do! And if you are in a royalty-share agreement, as opposed to a flat payment agreement, your audiobook producer is likely to help in marketing your book, as he or she only gets paid if the book sells.

The only part of the process that might cost you money is cover formatting. For ACX, you’ll have to turn your rectangular ebook cover into a square. If you paid someone for cover formatting, that person should be able to do this very easily for you. If your cover designer wants more than $20 to do it, find someone else because your guy is ripping you off.   

Good luck!

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