Finding a Narrator

Thanks for following along with me on my writing and publishing journey. About a month ago, someone asked me why I had not written about what it takes to self-publish a book. My prior post, “Have You Ever Self-Published a Book?” was the introduction. This post is the second, and there will be a third about the marketing and reviews.

Then we’re off to Istanbul!

With my debut novel, I opened an account through ACX and began exploring audiobook narrators. For a month, I read everything I could find and even experimented during the proofing stage of my novel by recording my audio. I’m not qualified to engineer my audio file, and with the current time constraints, I decided to bite the bullet and pay for a narrator.

“Wait, why did you pay up front?” you ask.

The blunt answer is that I planned for this cost. I use audiobooks for half my reading. I knew this book would need to be in audio format at some point. I have a monthly budgeted amount for my book expenses and a master spreadsheet to keep track of them, and to send to the CPA each year. I can wing a few things here and there, but not a significant expense like this one.

There are other methods on ACX for paying for your narrator.

• With option one, you pay the narrator up front.
• Option two allows you to pay part of the cost upfront and then enter into a royalty share agreement with the narrator for the remaining amount.
• Finally, you can have a complete royalty share agreement, pay nothing, and the narrator gets paid based on your book sales.

But there’s a catch. If you chose either of the royalty share agreements, the way I read the contract, I was again locked into ACX exclusively distributing my audiobook. I’m not an exclusive kinda girl. (We are not discussing husbands here, we are talking books. Don’t get frizzy on me.)

If I were a narrator, unless I were convinced the author would become a best-selling phenomenon, I would not accept any level of royalty share agreement. Creating an audio file of a 350-page book requires time and hard work. If the book only sells a hundred copies, the narrator may never receive sufficient payment to cover their studio costs and time. Once this book is complete, I will ask my narrator these questions.

With this book, I wanted a top-notch narrator right out of the gate, and payment is necessary. But that’s my opinion. If you think differently, please let me know why in the comments.

Finding narrators in ACX is relatively easy.

Once you input the information about the book and determine what type of narrator you’d like, you can review all the possible narrators in the system and send a message to those you are seriously interested in. ACX opens up your book to all remaining narrators, and you can receive indications of interest from these folks. By the end of the first week, I had two dozen possibilities, male and female. Half of those came from my initial list of preferred narrators.

Great! “Should be easy,” you say.

Not so fast.

Does the gender of the narrator matter?

My debut novel has a female protagonist. I assumed I needed a female narrator. But after reviewing dozens of audiobooks and tracking down every book narrated by my favorite male narrator, I learned it’s up to the author. There seems to be no hard and fast rule. So here’s my thinking for the first two series:

• I will use a female narrator for the domestic series beginning with Forever Gone. The protagonist and the majority of characters in the book are female. There are male characters, but not too many for a talented narrator.

• The next book in this series has the same female protagonist, but with a highlighted male character being more of the novel's focus. Maybe a male narrator here? Or male and female? (Man, this cost is getting crazy at this point.)1

• My international series might have a male narrator or, again, a male and female narrator. The Expedient Wife has a female protagonist and sidekick, but the remainder of the characters are male.

It's not so easy now. Yet, all these decisions can be made one step at a time.

Enter the famous Marketing Genie.

I had Marketing Genie listen to all the interested narrators, and then she narrowed it down to the ones she liked. I selected her favorite and mine, and then submitted them to other readers. Yep, you guessed it. Marketing Genie won hands down. Everyone chose her favorite, so we hired her.

Now what?

A week later, I received the “15-Minute Checkpoint.” “What’s that?” you ask. The narrator reads fifteen minutes of the novel, and you make sure that this is the narrator you want before he or she reads the entire book. This checkpoint was terrific, and the narration is underway.

Will it be ready on the same publication date as the ebook and the paperback? Nope. But for Marketing Genie, it’s a no-brainer. She gets to create hoopla all over again for the audiobook—job security at its finest.

“Is it expensive?” you ask.

I think so. It will cost me more than a few thousand for this audiobook. Since I planned for this expense long in advance, it is part of doing business. My concern is for the indie author who is on a tight budget. Eleven Labs is perfect for the author to record their audio, but at this point, they cannot upload their audiobook on Amazon/ACX if that audio has any AI included. (Note: This is in transition as of early May. See Audible link.)The expense is minimal if the author has a pleasant voice and doesn’t care about taking time to learn the audio software and the engineering requirements. There are no restrictions on a live voice. As with anything, it is a factor of time and money.

There are more marketing questions to be answered that might impact the international series and my use of ElevenLabs. But we’ll see.

There is something about hearing a professional voice read your book that gives one the shivers—in a good way. I want to see what she does with the nasty chapters involving the villain and the touchy scenes with the children. She has already nailed the protagonist cold.

I’m sure you can tell I’m excited for the audiobook to be finished.