Creating an Audio Book on Amazon - Andrew Crofts
So, working on the theory that the more platforms a book
appears on, the better its chances of getting noticed, I decided that it was
time to create an audio version of my novella, Secrets of the Italian Gardener. (It is already available as a
paperback, a hardback and an e-book). As promised in an earlier posting on this
site, this is my account of the audio-adventure so far.
It all starts with ACX Audible, (easy to Google up). This
company is owned by Amazon – like so many good things in the new publishing
world. Once on the site you tell them your requirements and put up an extract
from the book which actors can use as an audition piece.
This is the first stroke of genius. The actors can audition
for you without any of the embarrassment of face-to-face rejection – you know
the scene; the starving thespian gives their all in an empty theatre to a bored
director sitting in the darkened auditorium, only to hear the words, “thank
you, we’ll be in touch … next!” I did not want to be having to say that to
anyone.
Within an hour or two of me submitting the brief the
auditions started to arrive in my in-box. Each time a new one was up-loaded by
an actor, ACX sent me an email and I was able to listen immediately. Within two
days I had received nearly thirty. A large proportion of them were from Americans
who did not even attempt an English accent, despite the fact that I had
requested it in the brief, so that narrowed the field and helped with the final
decision.
Although they are all professional actors/voice over
artists, they are also described by ACX as “producers”, meaning that they have
some sort of computer/studio set up. They know how to record and edit as well
as do the reading. All good news since I had no idea how to do any of that.
ACX also asks you to stipulate the sort of money that you
would be willing to pay, measuring it by the number of hours the final reading
will fill. Secrets of the Italian
Gardener is only about 40,000 words long and would therefore come out at a
bit under four hours, (a calculation which ACX does for you). I had said I would be willing to pay up to $400 an hour,
so the final bill would not rise above £1,000.
I chose an English actor called Matthew Lloyd Davies, whose
audition piece sounded most like the voice I had imagined my narrator to have,
and who had a great deal of experience in audio books.
Matt responded with total professionalism. ACX require that
the actor/producer first does a fifteen minute sample, but Matt did thirty
minutes. I happily accepted the sample and he went on to do the whole book,
delivering it nearly three weeks before the promised deadline.
It is not an easy book to read out loud because of the
varied nationalities of the characters including a Middle Eastern dictator, an
elderly Italian, an English narrator, his American wife and two other female
characters, one from an unspecified Eastern European country and the other the
product of an Indian father and French mother. Matt negotiated them all with
aplomb. I had no hesitation in approving the reading.
The next step ACX required was a cover design and here I hit
my first hiccup since it had to be square, (there were other technical
requirements which were double Dutch to me), meaning that I could not upload
either of the existing cover designs. Matt galloped once more to the rescue,
creating a new design which the ACX system accepted.
All that remained to be done was for me to pay Matt and for
Amazon to approve the book, a process which may have been completed by the time
this posting appears.
A fantastic experience – thank you Amazon and thank you
Matt!
Comments
But I should also take this opportunity to offer another view on the process - a negative one which, happily, you've avoided. I had 2 books with a now defunct publisher. They were keen on getting all their list onto audio and some of them proved very successful. My two, however, drew the short straw. I had no say in the auditions so, by the time I got to hear samples of the readings, the artists had been booked. I only needed a few minutes in each case to know that the results were awful. I made my feelings known, the publisher made sympathetic noises, but the contracts had been signed.
Both books are supposed to be funny, so the reader's timing was critical. The two readers had none. One of them must also have had a quite restricted vocabulary. His version of 'pastoral idyll', for example, came out as 'puh-STORE-l idle'. The other decided that one of my obviously Scottish characters should have what I assume to be a Scouse accent. Unfortunately, he also couldn't do Scouse so the character's bons mots were reduced to mini-soundscapes. With both of them the delivery was monotonous, the pacing wrong and the listening experience (for me anyway) excruciating.
Since the publisher's demise, I've written to Audible to tell them all this. I actually asked them to withdraw the titles but apparently, since the deal is a profit-sharing one, that would mean I was depriving the artists of income, so I'm stuck with them. That income is pennies but I can't help feeling that anyone listening to them would very quickly decide to steer well clear of any other books by Bill Kirton.
I'll quickly add that this is a very specific and unfortunate set of circumstances and my intention isn't to criticise audiobooks. On the contrary, having done plenty of voice-over work myself, I'm thinking of making my own recordings of some of my other books. (It seems that readers actually like the idea of books being read by their authors.) My message is - take Andrew's route, listen to lots of auditions and be very careful to choose the right, professional artist for the work. As well as hearing his/her voice, the reader's hearing yours, too.
Yet another example of why self-publishing has taken off. No publisher cares as much about our work as we do - unless we are earning them millions of pounds. The more control authors have of every aspect of the process the safer they are.
Andrew
have access to a studio. Narrators know that for a long novel particularly, the outlay is considerable and might be open to persuasion if they love a book or it has great ratings and reviews,and an author with a solid reputation and great marketing skills especially if there is,the possibility of a stipend with RS deal. Give it another try Lydia