Because the show is comprised of bite-sized spoken word pieces, my first thought was to put it out as an album on streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and Google Play. There are many players in this game but two of the bigger ones are Tunecore and CDBaby. The merits of each are another topic but one thing I learned in my album search is that 94% of songs on iTunes sell less than a hundred copies and each time a track is streamed on a streaming service, the artist is paid around £0.005. Which is boll*cks. In the end, seeing as the audiobook section of the publishing industry is booming — the Association of American Publishers reported that net audiobook revenue surged 29.5 percent in 2017 — I decided to turn the whole shebang, plus other bits, into an audiobook.
The book is highly personal — similar to a stand-up routine, I guess — and I wanted to retain full control. For this reason, I didn’t seek traditional avenues of publishing, audiobook or otherwise. I wondered if there was a viable alternative to Audible which is owned by our kindly overlords at Amazon. However, while the exact numbers are hard to nail down, I was told by a professional audiobook producer — at a Byte The Book event, no less — that Audible accounts for between 80-90% of all audiobook sales. If you’re a self-published author narrating your own book, you must submit to Audible through a company called ACX. Through ACX, Audible offer royalties of 40% of your cover price (which you don’t get to choose btw — they assign a price based on the length of your title. Mine ended up being £6.39). If you go non-exclusive it’s 25%. There is also the AL or allocation factor where, to quote the ACX website:
the royalty payment for a member (*of Audible) sale tends to be about one-half of the royalty payment for the regular price of the books sold. So, for example, the sale of a book to a member with a regular price of $30 and a royalty rate of 40%, multiplied by the Allocation Factor, would yield about $6.00. The Allocation Factor allows us to share all the revenue generated by members in a fair manner: for a given royalty rate, a book with a $30 regular price earns twice the royalty as a book with a regular $15 price.
ACX will also put your title on Amazon and iTunes. Seeing as this was pretty much the only game in town, I figured I’d give it a go. My budget was £500 all in. My aim was to, at the very least, recoup the cost of production. Best case scenario would be to dominate the audiobook market if not the entire planet with my octophilic, mythopoetic nonsense. A mollusc can dream.
Next up: cover design
To keep down costs, after some hard googling I found the following image on on a stock image website. Cheap as chips. I slapped on a title and: bish, bang, Bob’s your uncle! Right?
“Wow, that’s awful,” said the lovely graphic designer couple who live upstairs and whose flat I’d looked after for a month while they were in Australia. “We can take a crack if you’d like…”
Ever wonder out-loud what graphic designers do, or rubbished them for not being proper artists? Now is the time to grovel and beg forgiveness. And learn what vectors are…
Though I would now be watering the upstairs neighbors’ plants for years to come I was still on budget (and very happy with the cover). It was time for sound. If you don’t want to pay anything for your production, you can offer your book to ACX’s network of narrators and “studio professionals” and split the proceeds if one of them is interested. Otherwise you can find a narrator and studio you like, pay a one-time production fee and maintain all rights. The average cost of this is around £150 per finished hour (most audiobooks are around 10 hours long). But this octopus wanted to do it himself. So, after skimming an article entitled,
"Yes, You Can Record Your Own Audiobook. Here’s How”…
“You’re off to a great start,” they said,
“…but there are improvements needed before we'd consider you ready for audiobook production. Below are the issues to address:
“The mastering levels of this file are outside of our requirements. This file's RMS level is -27.3 dB RMS. The peak level of this file is -0.2 dB. ACX requires that submitted files measure at an RMS level between -23dB and -18dB, with a maximum peak level of -3dB….”
At which point I had a little cry. This was not my wheelhouse.
A couple weeks later, I went to the London Book Fair (my entry ticket courtesy of, You guessed it, Byte The Book)
Unfortunately, we then started talking Brexit and, Both Ideologically and geographically, he chose to leave, while I chose to remain. What to do?
Determined to find a middle ground, I googled “east london recording studio” and found The Recording Studio London based in West Ham, not far from me. Music-orientated, they had never done an audiobook before but seemed unfazed by ACX’s specs. I’m pretty sure other music studios would be up for the challenge. Recording Studio London charged a very reasonable £45/hour which included both an engineer and assurance that my book would be accepted by ACX. I rehearsed my various voices a few days then off I went to the studio.
One of the major lessons I’ve learned at Byte is that, when going independent, if you’re not a PR person, hire/consult a PR person. If you’re not an editor, hire/consult an editor. And, if you’re not a sound engineer…
Another thing I learned from the mainstream audiobook producer is to record in two-hour blocks and no more than four hours per day. This saves your voice from getting (and sounding) tired. Sam and I recorded over the course of two days. I asked Sam about editing out the sound of my inhales but he said breathing makes the production sound more natural. I think he’s right. If I could have done anything different it would have been for Sam to e-mail me the finished MP3 files to upload to ACX from home, as this took over an hour of my total studio time.
A week later ACX sent me a personal email saying,
“Congratulations on a great production!”
ACX put my title on Audible, Amazon (on my Kindle/paperback page) and, a few days later, iTunes. They also gave me some promo codes for free copies, 8 of which I’m making available to Byte members. Time to promote.
In other words, they turn you into a shill for Audible.
“Hey, check out my audiobook, I think you’d really like it. What, you don’t have an Audible account? Well for just £7.99 a month you too can have access to all these great titles. Plus, if you use this here URL…”
This part I am not so keen on. It turns out most of my friends and family are not on Audible, nor are many people in the industry (or members of Byte The Book!) However, I am getting more traction in the States where people spend more time on long car journeys. According to Byte The Book’s own audiobook event, in 2016 “The US audiobook market turned over $1.7 billion (the UK figure is estimated to be somewhere around £100 million).” Seeing as I came in under budget I decided to run a trial-balloon advertising campaign with one of the world’s biggest advertisers: Facebook. I’m also contacting various bloggers, vloggers and influencer-types, and running a Google adwords campaign. As most of you know, it’s a hard slog. Still, I believe I have a great product, the sound quality is rock solid, and so far the reviews and response have been great.
I hope you have enjoyed my audiobook journey! For more of my cephalopodic nonsense, please click around this website and hit the contact button at the top right corner of the page for a promo code. Supplies are limited! I’m also happy to answer any and all questions concerning the experience. And don’t forget: