Audio Books

[dr_mabeuse]

Was approached by an outfit that wants to put my book(s) on tape. Minimum cost, should I opt to record the book myself, is under $200. If I want a pro to record it, then we're talking like $1,000-$1,500. They set up and produce the recording.

Okay, this isn't a scam. It's more of a scamoid, or scammish, or a quasi-scam. There's no way I'm going to pay a grand for this, and I really don't think I can read a whole book myself. (I don't like reading aloud.) They guarantee placement on Amazon and several other venues, and their bona fides seem legit.

I know that audio books are a huge business. And I could see where getting in on the ground floor of audio porn might really pay dividends. (I imagine some guy with a terribly sexy voice and a slight Oxford accent reading my stuff. It would be pretty atomic, I imagine.)

What would you do? Would you try and record your stuff yourself? (They supply you with the software so you can record it on your computer. I can imagine it at my house, with the dogs whining and doors slamming as people walk in and out.) Would you pay the grand? Or would you forget the whole thing?

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I wouldn't pay it, but I would produce my own until the time is ripe for audio books. I believe you can find a talented amateur who needs some mad money...like at a local radio station.

 

[driphoney]

There's got to be some out-of-work starving actor in Chicago you could make a deal with. It's still going to cost you more than the initial $200, but if it's quality, who knows the benefit. Maybe you could even get him to do it for a share of any profits that might come out of that book and potential for more if the first one flies.

I'm trying to imagine listening to erotica. I once listened to an entire WWII biography while stripping wallpaper and painting a bathroom. I can see myself having to interrupt work every five minutes to, um, you know . . . I listened to Janet Evanovitch on a roadtrip once. There's a thought. Roadtrips with Dr. M. . . . Airplane trips with Dr. M. . . . A new kind of Mile High Club.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

DOC

You know, you might have a hit if you hire a reader whose voice is enchanting in a sexual way.

 

[R. Richard]

I recorded my own short story, for the survivor contest. It was hard work, I think because I knew what was coming and I would get distracted. I would never try to record my own writing again.

If you want to try an audio book, I think that JBJ's suggestion of hiring your own speaker is very sensible. If I were going to try it, I would obviously record just one, best selling, book and see what the financial results were before I made a major comittment.

 

[Verdad]

Was approached by an outfit that wants to put my book(s) on tape. Minimum cost, should I opt to record the book myself, is under $200. If I want a pro to record it, then we're talking like $1,000-$1,500. They set up and produce the recording.

Okay, this isn't a scam. It's more of a scamoid, or scammish, or a quasi-scam. There's no way I'm going to pay a grand for this, and I really don't think I can read a whole book myself. (I don't like reading aloud.) They guarantee placement on Amazon and several other venues, and their bona fides seem legit.

I know that audio books are a huge business. And I could see where getting in on the ground floor of audio porn might really pay dividends. (I imagine some guy with a terribly sexy voice and a slight Oxford accent reading my stuff. It would be pretty atomic, I imagine.)

What would you do? Would you try and record your stuff yourself? (They supply you with the software so you can record it on your computer. I can imagine it at my house, with the dogs whining and doors slamming as people walk in and out.) Would you pay the grand? Or would you forget the whole thing?

Oxford accent? I've never imagined your narrators with an Oxford accent! Atomic, now that sounds more like it.

But I wonder whether you'd get this cheaper if you tried for your own arrangement. You need both a voice actor and a studio equipped to make a decent recording. Neither can be utter amateurs. My guess is they're likely to come cheaper in a package than if you tried to hunt them down separately, but it's just a guess. If I had to cut down the costs on something, I guess I'd cut them on the studio sooner than the actor, seeing that no amount of equipment can salvage a horrible reading. However, I'd be still wary of downplaying the equipment too much. Contrary to the popular wisdom that anyone can do it all at home, DIY solutions, involving cheap mikes or mikes that aren't made for voice, a recording room that isn't acoustically prepared, cheap soundcards, clueless sound technician, etc, are likely to result in a noticeably shitty recording. Hard to be wise as to where to be stingy.

I don't know the standard that's expected of audio books, though, or where these guys stand in relation to it, so I'm pretty much just popping in to say hi.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

RICHARD

Yep. Audition amateurs until you find one whose voice ices the cake. Bedroom voice!

 

[Sir Victor]

You want to look for a voice over artist who can provide samples of their work, so that you can pick one with the right voice, and who can produce their own work since studio time is expensive. Someone new to the business who is willing to work out a deal with you would probably be best. Book reading work is not generally high paying in that field so if you combine that with a newbie you should be able to get it at a good rate.

Voice over work is not something you just do, unless you've already had voice training, say for theater. If the outfit asked for you to do it they probably meant get your own voice over artist, not for you to do it yourself.

You want to make sure that the outfit you are doing it for is legit of course, as I think you have done. This might be a scam just to get voice over work for people and for them to take a big cut of course. How will they promote your work, ask them, and get it in writing.

 

[Epmd607]

You write quality stories, Dr. But audio is too passive a medium for erotica. I don't think that someone reading to me could put me in the shoes of the characters. Listening to a story is one thing, but a lot of people read porn/erotica to be active/wanking participants.

 

[lance gt]

I'd be willing to check out a tape ot two of professional quality, at the library or book store first and see what it actually sounds like. Then I'd look at finding a half decent soundmixing board and some good mics and have some friends over to take parts and a narrator read my story. Could be an interesting twist to having only one speaker.

 

[amicus]

Noticing audio books being advertised in several places, I am led to the question of a single 'reader'. Perhaps if the characters were limited to, two, then a male and female voice might work, but a single reader for dialog between two people?

Perhaps Selena, should she wander by, might have considered the feasiblity of audio books for Excessica?

Amicus

 

[Edward Teach]

Zoot, I may be mistaken, but I thought books had to be rewritten for audio publication because the ear and eye digest differently.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

Noticing audio books being advertised in several places, I am led to the question of a single 'reader'. Perhaps if the characters were limited to, two, then a male and female voice might work, but a single reader for dialog between two people?

Perhaps Selena, should she wander by, might have considered the feasiblity of audio books for Excessica?

Amicus

The "outfit" has approached eXcessica, actually, and because I agreed to pass their info onto to eXcessica authors (via our yahoo group) I had the fees waived for my books (because they were chomping at the bit to get their paws on all our authors' works, I imagine...) and they agreed to give a "deal" to eXcessica authors.

I don't like their fees. I think they're outrageous ($250 to enter metadata?? WTH? I enter metadata every week for our books and it's nothing, a bit of data entry. If I was making $250 for entering metadata, I'd be rolling in cash...) and I wouldn't pay them.

What you're paying for is the "in" to Audible/Amazon and iTunes. Those are tough markets and I have tried, several different ways, to get into them myself and haven't found one. This was a way, so I took it, at no cost to me personally.

However, since I had some leverage (passing on their offer to eXcessica authors) I'm not sure how much they'd be willing to negotiate with others.

But there's no harm in trying. If you really want to try to make a deal, negotiate that $250 fee down and then make sure they take whatever you agree to pay (I think even $100 is outrageous) out of your ROYALTIES and not as an up front cost. Also make sure that, if you do not make that much in royalties, you don't owe them. This would be similar, then, to Fictionwise charging a $15 formatting fee, taking it out of your initial royalties, and not charging you if you never make that much in the first place.

As for recording, I did my own audio. I was actually contacted a year or so ago by someone who did voice-over work who said, for an amateur, I'd done a really good job For some reason, people who read my stuff like to hear me read it. *shrug* But that may say more about a female-writer/male-audience projection thing than it does about my ability to read.

As for finding someone to read your stuff, I MAY have a lead on that... someone else at eXcessica is negotiating a deal with some voice-over talent at the moment, and if the price is right, maybe he'll give us a deal if he knows he has some work coming his way. I'll let you know!


ETA: The royalties for this are abysmal, btw. Audible pays 10%. Yeah, 10%. It's nuts. And this company takes a 70/30 split (you're on the good end of that - you get 70%). But that means you're getting 70% of 10% of the sticker price of your work. That just SUCKS. I'm doing it as an experiment... can't make any less than I was already making on my audio work, I figure... we'll see if quantity (i.e. the larger audience) makes up for the scant royalties.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

There truly are 'voices' that will sell your material regardless of what it is. Hitler had whatever 'it' is. Hillary doesnt.

 

[amicus]

Thank you Selena, for the information, most interesting. Being a radio announcer for a good many years, I have a trained voice that the ladies seem to appreciate.

Will cogitate on the whole thing for a while.



ami

 

[Trinique_Fire]

Rebecca Wells records her own work. Don't know how or where she does it, but it might be worth the inquiry.

 

[DeeZire]

I was just recording some book audio the other day. The process requires a microphone that flatters the talent's voice, and a relatively dead room, or at least a room big enough so that if the mic is in the center of the room, the mic is not hearing much of the sound of the room.

VO talent is expensive, and they'd crap themselves if they had to read a whole book. You'd be better off finding an amateur and giving them a nominal fee plus a percentage of the miniscule royalties. Or just do it yourself.

Recording studios can be had for as little $20 per hour these days, since so many musicians and musician wannabes have a computer recording setup at home. (A mic that flatters the talent is another story, but sometimes you get lucky, depending on the quality of the voice.)

The recordist (or you) would need the ability to add markers on the fly, (recording onto a computer) so that when the reader flubs a word, he/she can back up a sentence and repeat. It's important to let the reader get into a flow and not stop them, other than to let them back up and repeat, which the reader will do on his/her own. When the reader is finished, the recordist jumps to each marker and deletes the flubbed word or section, snipping it out so that it's replaced by the repaired section.

It takes approximately as long as the program material to repair and edit a piece. In other words, if the piece is one hour long, the reading may take two hours, counting starts and stops and such, and the editing may take another hour.

Shuffling papers sound really bad on a recording, so the reader must be prepared with page breaks at the end of a sentence, so the reader can finish a sentence, pause, and then turn the page. Then the recordist edits out the empty space where the page is turned, (identified with the previously mentioned markers.) Reading off of a laptop instead of paper could work, but even then, the recordist would need to be aware of keystroke clacking, and hard drive spinning, which would probably get picked up by the mic.

CDs hold a little over an hour of program material, DVDs hold considerably more, depending on how they're authored.

The suggestion to check out a few audio books is a good one. Many authors, Garrison Keillor and Stephen King to name a few, read their own work without the addition of a second voice.

There are CD duplication houses that automatically place your work on Amazon and iTunes, Oasis Duplication being one of the bigger national places. But they're dealing with music, so it may be a different process with audio books. They provide that service when you order 1000 copies or more. Your cost is around $1 per CD, compared to maybe $2 per CD if you only oder in lots of 50 or 100. Small runs are burned, runs of 1000 are stamped in a pressing plant. The CDs from a pressing plant are the same as the ones you get at Best Buy. The burned CDs are the ones that, when you stick them in your car player, they may skip, or not play at all, depending on the brand of media used and the burn speed. Burning at a slow speed (4X) is recommended for better reliability, and Taiyo Yuden is the preferred brand for burning. (Guitar Center sells Taiyo Yuden, if you want to burn your own, or you can get them off the internet.) CDbaby.com is another place where DIY'ers get the work up on the internet, and I think they also place the work with iTunes, but the site was just sold, so I'm not sure what's going on over there these days.

 

[ishtat]

Find a Welshman Doc, almost anyone with a Welsh accent will do, examples being Anthony hopkins and Richard Burton. The Welsh voice can do smooth and threatening simultaneously.

 

[Verdad]

I was just recording some book audio the other day. The process requires a microphone that flatters the talent's voice, and a relatively dead room, or at least a room big enough so that if the mic is in the center of the room, the mic is not hearing much of the sound of the room.

VO talent is expensive, and they'd crap themselves if they had to read a whole book. You'd be better off finding an amateur and giving them a nominal fee plus a percentage of the miniscule royalties. Or just do it yourself.

Recording studios can be had for as little $20 per hour these days, since so many musicians and musician wannabes have a computer recording setup at home. (A mic that flatters the talent is another story, but sometimes you get lucky, depending on the quality of the voice.)

The recordist (or you) would need the ability to add markers on the fly, (recording onto a computer) so that when the reader flubs a word, he/she can back up a sentence and repeat. It's important to let the reader get into a flow and not stop them, other than to let them back up and repeat, which the reader will do on his/her own. When the reader is finished, the recordist jumps to each marker and deletes the flubbed word or section, snipping it out so that it's replaced by the repaired section.

It takes approximately as long as the program material to repair and edit a piece. In other words, if the piece is one hour long, the reading may take two hours, counting starts and stops and such, and the editing may take another hour.

Shuffling papers sound really bad on a recording, so the reader must be prepared with page breaks at the end of a sentence, so the reader can finish a sentence, pause, and then turn the page. Then the recordist edits out the empty space where the page is turned, (identified with the previously mentioned markers.) Reading off of a laptop instead of paper could work, but even then, the recordist would need to be aware of keystroke clacking, and hard drive spinning, which would probably get picked up by the mic.

CDs hold a little over an hour of program material, DVDs hold considerably more, depending on how they're authored.

The suggestion to check out a few audio books is a good one. Many authors, Garrison Keillor and Stephen King to name a few, read their own work without the addition of a second voice.

There are CD duplication houses that automatically place your work on Amazon and iTunes, Oasis Duplication being one of the bigger national places. But they're dealing with music, so it may be a different process with audio books. They provide that service when you order 1000 copies or more. Your cost is around $1 per CD, compared to maybe $2 per CD if you only oder in lots of 50 or 100. Small runs are burned, runs of 1000 are stamped in a pressing plant. The CDs from a pressing plant are the same as the ones you get at Best Buy. The burned CDs are the ones that, when you stick them in your car player, they may skip, or not play at all, depending on the brand of media used and the burn speed. Burning at a slow speed (4X) is recommended for better reliability, and Taiyo Yuden is the preferred brand for burning. (Guitar Center sells Taiyo Yuden, if you want to burn your own, or you can get them off the internet.) CDbaby.com is another place where DIY'ers get the work up on the internet, and I think they also place the work with iTunes, but the site was just sold, so I'm not sure what's going on over there these days.

That's a very informative post, DeeZire; I agree with almost everything you said.

The part I'm skeptical about is a complete amateur's ability to read decently. There's a widespread belief it's all about the voice and its god-given properties, yet I've seen quite a number of people convinced of their aural sexiness utterly unable of doing a radio ad, let alone an entire book. Skill is required, not merely a lucky draw.

As for studio, I too didn't mean a million dollar studio with a twelve-meter mixer. There are indeed plenty of affordable home set-ups. They're still not what everyone has at home, though—from a dead room to a soundcard that's at least a bit better than what comes with your average laptop, there's plenty that a person who doesn't need it doesn't have or doesn't know, and that wouldn't make sense buying for a one-time deal.

That said, I really don't know the situation with audio books—the demands of that market—so I might be complicating too much. I do know there's a certain naiveté around recording, though, like, "oh just stick the mic in your laptop, put on your bedroom voice, and off you go!" so I wanted to point out it's not quite like that. Recording engineers always say speaking voice is a biggest challenge.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

In typical VERDAD style she misses the boat when she discounts amateurs with natural talent, popular vocalists are the most obvious example of natural talent, and Elvis & Frank Sinatra are proof of my claim. Some folks are born with sex appeal you cant buy at the Perfesser Store.

 

[Verdad]

Yeah, I just have some years of work on the radio, and I'm just married to a sound producer. Other than that, talking out of my ass, as usual.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Yeah, I just have some years of work on the radio, and I'm just married to a sound producer. Other than that, talking out of my ass, as usual.

Wrong is wrong regardless of the form it takes.

One of my teachers once asked me this: IF YOU WERE LOST IN THE EVERGLADES WOULD YOU WANT A SEMINOLE INDIAN TO HELP YOU OR A PROFESSIONAL SOUND PRODUCER?

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Yeah, I just have some years of work on the radio, and I'm just married to a sound producer. Other than that, talking out of my ass, as usual.

Wrong is wrong regardless of the form it takes.

One of my teachers once asked me this: IF YOU WERE LOST IN THE EVERGLADES WOULD YOU WANT A SEMINOLE INDIAN TO HELP YOU OR A PROFESSIONAL SOUND PRODUCER? Actually the other choice was SOMEONE WHO KNOWS GOBS ABOUT SEMINOLE INDIANS (a perfesser).

 

[NoJo]

(I imagine some guy with a terribly sexy voice and a slight Oxford accent reading my stuff.

I have an incredibly sexy voice with a slight Mr Bean accent, and I'll read it for you for free

 

[Selena_Kitt]

I have an incredibly sexy voice with a slight Mr Bean accent, and I'll read it for you for free

Ooooo can I take you up on that offer, too???