This is Part Four in my Publishing an Audiobook series.
In Part One, I list the sites I found to search for narrators on, and why I used or didn’t use the ones I did or didn’t.
In Part Two, I describe my process for narrowing the auditions down from the 83 I received to the one I chose.
In Part Three, I talk about the process of working with my narrator to create the audiobook.
Part Five will be about marketing and selling the audiobook, and that will be sometime later this year, once I’ve found some successful strategies for doing so.
For now, here’s how, once I got all the completed files from my narrator/engineer, I got them to various sites to sell them. That process turned out to be remarkably easy, once I found a few key pieces of knowledge.
Prerequisites
Before you start creating accounts and uploading to various sites, you need to have the following:
Complete Audio Files – They need to be edited to specific formats. If you used a professional engineer, they should know what those are and deliver them for you. If you recorded your own audiobook, there are guides on acx and findaway voices that describe the necessary standards.
In addition to one file for each chapter, you’ll need separate files for front matter and back matter (Acknowledgements, About the Author, etc.), also opening credits and closing credits.
Also, have a separate 3-5 minute sample file. I just had my narrator send me the first five minutes of the first chapter, but you can take it from any part of your book you like.
ISBN – Your audiobook needs to have its own ISBN. Remember back in the Publishing blog how I recommended buying a block of ten because it’s cheaper than three individual ones? Here’s the third ISBN you’re going to need (or the fourth, if you did a hardcover.) So, go to myidentifiers.com (or your country’s equivalent if you’re not in the US) and register one of your ISBNs for “Downloadable Audio.”
Narrator Bio – You should have your own short bio from the information you used to publish the paperback & ebook. For the audio book, it’ll want a separate one for your narrator, so you might as well get that early.
A Square Cover Image – ACX and Findaway Voices both require a square version of your cover. Findaway will add black bars to the side of the cover to make it square, while ACX requires you to send them a square one. Since you’re making a square version anyway, you might as well use that same one for Findaway, it’ll look better. It needs to be at least 2400×2400 or ACX will reject it.
Bank Account Information – You want to get paid for sales, right? Have your bank’s routing number and your account number handy, so you can enter them when you set up your first audiobook.
Lots of Time – You’re going to have to upload one chapter at a time to two different sites, possibly more than once. On a slow connection, this can take a couple of hours.
Platforms for Selling Audiobooks
The Ones I Didn’t Use
Publishdrive.
Publishdrive publishes to only two retailers that the rest don’t cover: gardners.com and ereading.com. But they also require a subscription for $9.99/month. I couldn’t find anything else they provide to be worth paying a monthly fee in addition to a portion of the price of the book, so I skipped them. Gardners and ereading do sell audiobooks, but they are nowhere near the largest sellers out there.
If you do decide to use Publishdrive, deselect distribution to everything except Gardners and Ereading, as all the rest can be distributed to through Findaway, which gives you a larger percentage of each sale.
Author’s Republic
Author’s Republic has a lot of overlap with Findaway Voices in the retailers they distribute to. While there are several that are exclusive to Author’s Republic, mostly distributors that focus on languages other than English, you are unable to choose which channels to exclude, other than Amazon and Apple. Findaway does let you choose distributors one by one, so, while it would be possible to distribute via Author’s Republic, and then also Findaway, selecting only the stores that Author’s Republic doesn’t serve, that would mean you’re distributing to all of the larger retailers with Author Republic’s lower 70% royalty rates as opposed to Findaway Voices’ 80%.
I chose not to use them for this reason (and also because I’d already set my novel up through Findaway before I discovered the existence of Author’s Republic.) If your audiobook is non-fiction, or in a language other than English, you might want to look into them more closely, though, before making the same decision.
The Ones I Used
ACX
This is Audible, by far the largest seller of audiobooks in the world. Books published here will be available for direct purchase through Audible, Amazon, and also Apple Books. They’ll also be available through Audible’s subscription service, and you get paid when people use their credits to buy their book.
Non-Exclusive
Select Non-Exclusive. They will pay you a lower percentage of the sales, 25% instead of 40%, but you’ll be able to sell on other platforms. If you select Exclusive at this point, it locks you into selling your audiobook only through them for seven years. If another platform becomes more popular during that time, you’re out of luck.
Finding your book
Your book has to already be on sale on Amazon before you upload your audio files, so it can connect them. The Search isn’t very good: Despite only one book anywhere having the title “Yellow Tape and Coffee”, searching for that exact phrase didn’t find my book until the second page of results. You might have better luck searching by author.
Quality Checks
When you upload the files, it will do two automated quality checks on the files. The first right when you upload them, and the second within a few hours. So after you finish, keep checking back until it tells you everything is approved. When I uploaded the Yellow Tape and Coffee files, I got errors in the second check telling me I had RMS errors. I had no idea what that meant, but I passed it on to my engineer, who knew what was wrong and sent me corrected files less than an hour later. It pays to maintain a good working relationship with your engineer.
Price
They will set a price that they sell your audiobook at, and you can’t change it. If you selected Non-Exclusive, you’ll get 25% of it for each sale.
Time to Availability
They tell you when you upload that it’ll be 7-10 days before it’s available. Mine was available three days after I sent them the final files.
Findaway Voices
Findaway is a distributor of audiobooks. They publish to 43 different sites and add more all the time. (It was only 41 when I first started writing this.)
Uploading Your Files
It will ask if your book has been available on other platforms before. At this point, it has not. Even if you did ACX first, it’s not available yet, so say No here.
Source Copyright is the year the book was published. Audio copyright is the year you’re uploading them. You should be the owner of both.
Under Distribution, deselect Audible and Amazon, since you’re going through ACX for those. Leave all the other options checked.
You’ll upload the audio files one by one, and it will change the names of each, so you’ll have to manually edit chapter names. These are the names that will scroll across the car stereo display that people shouldn’t be looking at while they’re driving.
Price
Findaway Voices lets you set your own price. I did some research and found prices compared to print prices and ebook prices all over the place. I finally decided to set my price at $21.99, to be the same as the paperback book. Then when I uploaded the files, Findaway recommended, based on the length and their own marketing research, that $15.70 would maximize sales numbers, so I just went with that. I assume they did more marketing research than I did, so trusted their numbers.
Time to Availability
After everything is set up, they tell you it will be about 20-30 days before retailers start finding and selling the book. Mine got picked up by the apparently very efficient and well organized library system in Italy within a few days, by Bingebooks a couple of days after that, and within a couple of weeks it was everywhere.
Direct Sales
I’m not doing any direct online sales yet. When I do, I’ll be selling it for the same amount that I quote through Findaway, so as not to undercut my resellers.
While I was in the middle of this process, I got an ad on Facebook for 50 4GB thumb drives for $60, so I bought those, made some custom labels through Avery for them, and will be selling my audiobook that way at any public appearances I’m at in the future.
If you do this, pay attention to the size of your audiobook. Mine, at about 24 and a half hours long, comes out to just about 2GB. I went with 4GB drives just to make sure.
If you want to sell CDs, there are also websites that will custom burn CDs for you and ship them in small batches, but I decided not to do that, so have no recommendations there.