Like my earlier entry about how I published my novel, this series is not about the One True Way to publish an audiobook. It’s not even about how you should publish one. It is about how I published my audiobook. You may learn something from my example. You may learn something from my mistakes. You might just be amused at what I went through. Or, maybe, you’re curious about how this whole process works. If you’re looking for any of those, you’re in the right place.
The first thing I decided when I started looking into publishing an audiobook was that I didn’t want to do the narration myself. I wanted it to be good, so I decided to hire a professional.
Currently, the audiobook is just about done, but not published yet. Which is why “Selling My Audiobook” is going to be a later installation in this series.
Where to Look for a Narrator
That’s the important bit, right? If you don’t want to do the reading yourself you’ll need someone else. Depending on who you hire for the narration, you may need to also arrange a recording studio, an editor, and an engineer. Fortunately, there are a whole lot of people who do all of these together, and deliver finished audio. And there are a number of sites which exist for the sole purpose of putting these people in contact with those who want to hire them.
I found ten sites that help connect authors to voice actors. None of them charged for using them, so I didn’t see a problem signing up for them all. After some investigation, I ended up calling for auditions on four of them.
First, the sites I didn’t use
ACX
This is Amazon’s service for feeding audible.com, and was the most annoying and frustrating of the sites to try to use. It didn’t like that my author name didn’t match my “Full name exactly as it appears on your tax return”. It makes you select your book, which I eventually found on the second page of search results, even though I entered the exact title in the search window. But then, it wouldn’t let me select it, telling me that the book was already claimed by someone else (who was me) and that to resolve it, I would need to have the publisher (who is also me) reach out to them to resolve the issue (without providing any hint about how “they” would do that.) I gave up. I may have to go back to them eventually to upload the files, but I decided I could deal with that later.
The Voice Realm
https://www.thevoicerealm.com/
Their rates are set, and are non-negotiable. They were higher than I’d budgeted for, though not unreasonable.
Auditions are limited to 75 words. That’s enough to get a feel for the person’s voice, but not for the range. More about that later.
The real deal killer for me was that all communications with my narrator had to be done through their site, and I wasn’t allowed to contact my narrator directly. I’m glad I skipped this one, because I ended up communicating with my narrator a lot. She had questions, sometimes about how to pronounce things, sometimes about what a particular character was like. Sometimes she had corrections that she wanted my approval on before fixing it. (She found several errors that I’ll be fixing in the second printing coming out next year.)
Fiverr
I’ve used Fiverr in the past for other work, and really like it. The problem with finding a voice actor, though, is they don’t audition, you have to go find them and contract them individually. Some said in their bios they are willing to read a sample script you send, some said they are not, and most didn’t mention it one way or the other.
Pricing is all over the place, and sometimes it’s hard to tell what it is. If you do go comparison shopping here, read carefully. Are their listed rates per hour? Or per 15 minutes of finished audio? Are they even charging for finished audio, or for the time they work on it? Some of them list a price then, later, you discover that’s just for narration, and editing is separate, if they do editing at all. Some listed a price per word count. So, read their posts carefully. I don’t think there’s anything dishonest going on there, there’s just no standard way to price their work.
I listened to quite a few sample reads that the narrators had on their pages. Of the ones I listened to, about half were pretty amateurish. I could hear background noise, pages turning, weird pauses or over inflections. I decided to leave this site for now, and come back to it if I didn’t get any good auditions from the other sites. I got a lot of great auditions (more on that later), so never came back.
The Voice Crew
This site seems geared toward commercials, and contains no information that I could find on audiobooks. You can post an audition script, with a 30 word max, which was way too short for my needs. You then had to choose who you wanted to invite to audition, after listening to their samples. Every single sample I listened to was a commercial, with all the background music and blaring clanging sound effects that implies, nearly drowning out the voice and making it painful to listen to.
Worse yet, there is no organization to the narrators. They’re just listed in alphabetical order, hundreds, possibly thousands of them. I don’t know how many, but I gave up before I got to the Bs. If you’re on this site as an actor, make sure your name starts with an A or nobody’s going to find you.
Voices.com
https://www.voices.com/voice-actors/category/audiobooks
This one looked promising. They had a section aimed specifically at audiobook narrators, and accepted an audition script of up to three minutes long. Once I’d entered all the details of the project, they recommended a budget, but then accepted my changing it to a much smaller number.
The next day, I got a message that they had rejected my script because it contained profanity. Kinda wished they’d mentioned that earlier, or had some kind of indication on their site that that was a problem. As it is, I’m glad my audition script had profanity in it, and I didn’t discover that rule only at the end of the whole process, because the book itself has a lot of it.
The sites I used
There were four sites that I did end up using. With only a couple of exceptions, every audition I received was high quality, well edited, and professionally read. None of them had any background noise, page turning, breathing sounds, or anything, like some of the Fiverr samples did.
Voiceovers
They accept an audition script of only up to 50 words. By far, I got the fewest auditions through this site, and of those only about half read my script. The rest sent in samples from other sources. None of them were finalists.
VO Planet
https://www.voplanet.com/audiobook-narrators
I almost didn’t submit to this site. Their home URL doesn’t have a link to the audiobook-narrators page, so I didn’t see it at first. It turned out to be one of the best, though. Of the 12 finalists, seven came from this site. If I were going to do this whole process again, this would probably be the first place I go.
Voice 123
https://voice123.com/#how-to-search
There’s an option for “Get custom auditions” that I didn’t notice until near the end. I posted my script as part of the audition call, but nobody read it, they all sent their standard samples. I only liked one of them enough for that narrator to be put into the finalists.
Also, for the most part, people using the site ignored my offered price and quoted their own, most of which were in the usual $200-$400 per hour range. One quoted $53,000 for the whole project, which was way outside my budget. For that much money, I’d want someone who would bring in their own audience as well as their voice talent. One wanted $1.6 million. He was a legitimate professional actor. I looked him up on IMDB and he’d been in a couple of Star Trek episodes, but if I was going to pay a million and a half for a Star Trek actor, I’d want to get Wil Wheaton.
Bodalgo
Like VO Planet, they accepted my full three-minute-long script. There wasn’t a place for me to put an offer, and they all quoted varying amounts, all within a reasonable range. Of the two dozen auditions I got from here, five were finalists.
Results
Between the four sites, I was expecting maybe 5-10 auditions.
I ended up with 83.
So, tune in next time for the thrilling story of how I had to send out 82 rejection notes.
If you’re curious about the results, the first chapter of the audiobook is available now for free download. You can sign up for my newsletter when you do, and be notified when it is released (you don’t have to, but, I mean, why wouldn’t you? It’s awesome!).