How to Create an Audiobook for Audible Advice for Authors, Recording and Formatting Info, and More for ACX, Audible, and iTunes Written By: Rob Archangel and Buck Flogging www.ArchangelInk.com Published by Archangel Ink Copyright © 2014 Archangel Ink This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Table of Contents Introduction Is an Audiobook Right for You? Recording Euipment and Programs Tips for a Better Recording Audiobook Formatting Please Leave a Review Excerpt from Kill Your Blog by Buck Flogging About the Authors Introduction back to top Welcome to audiobook 101 for indie authors. My name is Buck Flogging, author of a crapload of books under multiple names and narrator of 25 audiobooks and counting. In this book you’ll learn the basic things that you will need to do in order to produce an audiobook from a manuscript, preferably yours. If you are an aspiring professional audiobook narrator, this probably isn’t the book for you. For true, professional-grade work you’ll probably want to get better equipped. But for independent authors who self-publish their material, and who have little to no interest in the ins and out of the voiceover industry, the guidelines outlined in this book should help you get it good enough to pass. By pass I mean people will buy it and not complain about lousy sound quality. Hey, I would love to have Morgan Freeman narrate my books, too. As self-published authors interested in perhaps making an extra few hundred bucks a month by listing a book on Audible and iTunes, that’s not really in the cards now is it? Even paying Jack Noname, the mediocre, nobody’s ever heard of him voiceover guy is still going to be way out of your budget. Spend $4,000 to get an audiobook made that’s going to take you a year and a half to break even on? Too risky. Not worth it. So, sometimes it just makes sense to do it ourselves. And the good news is, you can totally tap into the audiobook market with a book you record and master yourself. Like I said, it may not be perfect, certainly not Morgan Freeman narrating that penguin movie, but with a week’s work and $50-100 for a good microphone, you can definitely get in the Audible game. This book will help you decide on whether or not producing an audiobook is a good use of your time, and if you decide it is, it will guide you on the basic steps to getting it to sound as professional as it can (without paying any professionals!). We’ll also give you the scoop on how you can get your book narrated at reasonable cost and save yourself a lot of trouble if the task of doing it yourself is too daunting. Is an Audiobook Right for You? back to top Of course it is! What, you think we put this little book together to tell you that making an audiobook is a BAD idea? Audiobook sales are expected to grow from an estimated $200 million in 2013 to $750 million in 2016. At least, that’s what I thought I read in Tom Corson Knowles’s book, Secrets of the Six-Figure Author. I was never good at figuring out pie charts though. Yeah I read that book, shut up. I am a six-figure author so back off man! I can read whatever I want. I’ll read Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops if I feel like it. You should read some of Tom’s books, too. Every self-published author should read them. I personally feel very hopeful, nay, excited, about the audiobook market. Smart phones come with an Audible or iTunes app already installed. Every new car has a port for your phone or iMP3Pod or whatever they call those things. It’s just getting easier and easier to listen to books. So why wouldn’t you? Reading is hard on the eyes anyway. And we are doing so much of it these days on computer screens that audiobooks provide a nice reprieve. Plus, although you can read an eBook on a smartphone, it’s still too small to be fun and totally kills your battery life. Listening does not. And who wants to carry around both a smartphone AND a book or eReader? With just one device and some ear buds you can still get your story on wherever you may be. And then there’s driving of course. Listen while driving—yes. Read while driving—no. Okay I’ll stop. But I will say that I was fully convinced of their potential long before I saw any sales predictions on audiobooks, and the sales predictions are outrageously good. In terms of ACTUAL sales figures, this is what I’ve seen recently: • December 2013: 110 audiobooks sold • January 2014: 155 audiobooks sold • February 2014: 255 audiobooks sold Growth I tellz ya! General trends and forecasts aside, this is what I believe based on my personal experience with selling audiobooks… You can probably count on adding about 10-20% total revenue to the sale of a book by listing it with ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange), which lists the book on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. So, if you are making about $1,000 per month on your book currently, publishing it in audiobook format should bump that up to $1,100-1,200 all other variables equal, although some books are a lot more conducive to becoming an audiobook than others. There are some strategies that we’ll discuss that can bump that significantly higher as well. That said, in some cases, as with one of our projects, The Genie Within you may end up striking a chord with listeners and earning more with your audiobook than in paperback and Kindle sales combined, all without doing much active promotion. Like eBooks or paperbacks published through Createspace or something similar, you will get a commission on all of the sales of your books. If the buyer entered through an affiliate link of yours, you’ll get a little extra commission on top of that—same as what happens when you send someone from your website to Amazon to buy a book through an Amazon Associates affiliate link. Nothing new there. But unlike eBooks and paperbacks, there are several innovative and lucrative ways to make money off of the sale of audiobooks. One way to make more off of the sale of your audiobook is to take advantage of Audible’s great affiliate program. Audible has a 30-day free trial. If you send someone to the site to get your book (or any book for that matter) through your affiliate link, and they sign up for the free trial, you get $10. If they go on to become paying members, that jumps up to $25. Not bad. So if you have a big audience, a big subscriber list, a huge social media following, and so on—you’ll likely be able to generate much more than a 10-20% bump in total revenue. Another way you get paid is when your book is the first book downloaded by a new Audible member. When that happens, you get a $50 bounty. Yes, $50!. This is another huge game- changer regarding audiobooks, and is why I think nearly everyone should go to the trouble of turning every manuscript into an audiobook. For example, my best-selling book, Eat for Heat, is just a teeny tiny 20,000 words or so. I typically sell it for just $2.99 on Kindle for a royalty of just over $2. It’s also available to be borrowed through the Kindle lending library, which gets me about the same $2 every time someone borrows the book. In January of 2014 I sold about 750 Kindle downloads including borrows—about $1,500. In comparison, I sold 40 Eat for Heat audiobooks in the same sales period. Not many in comparison, but this is why I think audiobooks are PFE (Pretty freakin’ exciting)… Audible prices books based on the length of the recording. Eat for Heat is a short one so it is priced at Audible’s lowest price point, which is $6.95 as of this writing. Already I get over $3 per copy (40% commission rate if published exclusively through ACX, which is what we recommend), which is more than I get from Kindle sales. The cool thing is that out of 40 copies, a remarkable 4 qualified for the $50 bounty. That’s an additional $200. Thus, I made somewhere around $350 total off of just 40 book sales. That’s almost $10 per copy! Plus I got affiliate commission of over $100 that month as well. Keep in mind that I am a nonfiction writer, and write mostly health and nutrition-related stuff. Even though fiction generally sells better, some nonfiction genres perform better than others. And in some ways nonfiction is superior to fiction because of the reduced competition and because nonfiction books tend to be shorter. This means faster production and turnaround time, and a lower final price, reducing buyer hesitation and generating more sales. “Once upon a time there was a polyunsaturated fatty acid…” Well, boring stuff to listen to when it’s someone other than me narrating. No matter what I read, listening to my voice is like making sweet love to a schoolboy. Oh come on! Movie reference. I would never. Dumb and Dumber? Jim Carrey? You guys had to have seen that one. Anyone? So perhaps, considering my genre, these numbers are a little low. Your outcome might be better. I know one book that I narrated, The Genie Within by Harry Carpenter, is more of a self-helpish type of book with guided hypnosis, making it much more enticing as an audiobook than the kindle and paperback versions of it. It sells better than any of my audiobooks, yet I sell triple the amount of kindle books that Harry does. I’m pretty sure with the right strategy, Harry could make more revenue off of his audiobook than his kindle and paperback versions—if he were so inclined. I don’t know where exactly to fit this next discussion, but I wanted to point it out somewhere, and that is audiobook length and pricing as a deciding factor. This is more important to take into consideration if you are paying someone to produce your audiobook, but it’s still something worthy of pointing out even for the audiobook self-producer. Like most things in the self- publishing game in the year 2014, the advantage goes to the “short, cheap, and plenty of it” strategy. You get a $50 bounty for the sale of a book from a new audible member. You trigger more sales of a cheap book than an expensive book, with more opportunities at a bounty. Audible prices its books based on length. I don’t know exactly where the cutoffs are, but I think anything less than an hour is currently $3.95, and anything between an hour and somewhere between two and three hours is $6.95. Longer than that and price takes a big jump up to $14.95. First, think about what a customer sees when browsing your book on Amazon. They will see a Kindle price, a paperback price (if you have one), and an audiobook price. If you’re going to sell a lot of audiobooks, and you should aim for that because, like I pointed out earlier, you’ll probably get more money per copy sold (and also provide the customer with a much more intimate experience—especially if you narrate it yourself)—then you want the price to be in the same ballpark. I consider 20,000 words to be the magic number for book length these days. This gives you a book that will come out just long enough to justify paperback production (for extra sales), and the book will be just short enough to come in at $6.95 on Audible, which will probably be even cheaper than what you price your paperback. If someone has any inclination to hear the thing as an audiobook, $6.95, priced less than the paperback version even, is a steal. They’re in. It’s also a small enough price that you can give a customer that little bit of extra motivation to maybe go ahead and finally become an audible member—buying yours as their first for a $50 bounty. And, most importantly, a 2-hour audiobook isn’t expensive to have done for you, nor is it such a big chore to do yourself. Hell, I turn out a fully polished, edited, mastered, 20,000-word manuscript to my clients for just $500. A longer audiobook that’s priced higher and sells fewer copies, generating fewer bounties, might cost you $1,500 to pay me to record. If that was confusing, the summary is simple. Got a 100,000-word manuscript? You probably shouldn’t do an audiobook or pay someone else to do it unless you are doing it based on a royalty split with a narrator (no up-front costs) or unless that book is riding high on the bestseller lists with dozens of sales per day in Kindle and paperback. Got a 20,000-word manuscript that’s selling a few copies a day? Better turn that into an audiobook ASAP. It’s a no-brainer. You can’t lose unless you narrate the thing drunk while chewing gum in an empty hallway. So I guess that’s it. I just wanted to throw a little straight talk at you and let you know the things I take into consideration before deciding whether or not a book is a good candidate for audiobook production. It might be smart to produce an audiobook. It might not be. This is not a book about getting you so psyched out of your mind, dollar signs in eyes, that you start humping Rob’s leg for showing you the technical tips that are going to make your future riches possible. No need to get crazy,