Is ACX Royalty Share a good deal?

No start it again what's happening boot junkies Mike delgadio here back with another video on home studio setup for voiceover and one of the fellow boots jump a fellow booth junkie out there loaned me this really awesome mic so we were review coming up but I figured I'd recorded on this one see how it sounds re 27 nd thank you very much for loaning it to me alright is ACX a good deal I got a hairball on my mouth beard is shedding yeah is royalty share a good deal for ACX and i'm going to say in 99% of the cases the answer is straight-up no no it's not a good deal doesn't mean you shouldn't do it but it's not really a good deal it's not a good deal for the narrators and I also think it's not a really great deal for the authors either let me tell you why I was browsing reddit I'm on reddit a lot and in the voice-acting subreddit and really a thoughtful author came in and said I'm looking for a narrator for my out of your book what's the what's the prevailing wisdom on royalty share it's a good thing and it's really wonderful that a narrator I'm sorry that an author actually bothered to come in and ask because most of the time they don't and I responded there you're certainly welcome to read it there but I figured I just go over what sort of my rationale is what my rationale is for saying that royalty share isn't a good deal what many authors don't understand and what a lot of new voice actors don't understand is how much work recording an audio book actually is it is very much a marathon they're not easy to do and if you're untrained as a runner would you say I'm not a runner let's run a marathon tomorrow you wouldn't write so as a new voice actor narrator I'm going to record an audio book tomorrow oh but you can get hired tomorrow on a CX because many of these authors will take me to the first audition they get because there are so few auditions let's first talk about what a royalty share is so with a CX an author can submit their manuscript to the audiobook creation exchange that is owned by Amazon and makes your book appear on Amazon and on audible and there are two ways that you can pay there's the per finished hour which the narrator gets paid for the length of the final produced audiobook or they can do an oil to share and the royalty share means the author pays nothing upfront and the narrator will get a taste of every audiobook sale that is sold the share it's the royalty share itself it's pretty paltry so on every sale of an audiobook there's a I'm going to pull the screen up here what are the terms and I'll just read it right from Amazon screen you just roll T's of 40% will be played for exclusive distribution projects that means it can only be through Amazon and audible when entering a royalty share contract that 40% will be split between the rights holder the author and the producer you as the narrator each getting 20% of the sales so for every dollar you're getting 20 cents as the narrator and as the author so knowing that for every dollar of book cost you're going to get 20 cents on every audiobook sales not for every sale so it doesn't include the ebooks it doesn't include the paper books doesn't include any that it just includes the adjust the audio version and that's a that's a big deal so let's let's sort of run that out so as it as a narrator and someone on ACX the expectation is that you will be the narrator the editor the Quality Assurance Manager and the mastering engineer you have all of those roles so when you get hired to do a book for ACX the first thing you should do as a narrator is read the book you have to know especially if it's if it's a work of fiction you have to know how it ends to know how to play the beginning you just can't start reading the book because you won't act it very well so it helps to read the book in advance so that takes however long it takes if it's going to be 10 hours spoken it's probably going to take you six hours to read it six hours down then you have to actually record it so if the finished version is going to be ten hours it's going to take you not less than ten hours to read it and that's if you are perfect absolutely perfect with every sentence you won't be you're going to retake you're going to have breasts you're going to have edits you're going to either do the type of editing that I do with the clicker or you're going to do punch and roll editing but you're going to have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of retakes especially in a great big book for example I do I do lots of I don't do audiobooks but I do lots and lots of long-form narration for audible I'm marrying for audible twice a week every single week and my finished work and I'm I have really tried hard I'm a pretty fast editor typically my projects I will deliver 30 to 40 minutes of finished audio and it takes me three hours approximately to do 30 minutes of finished audio and that is without doing the mastering so somebody else is doing a QA listen and doing the mastering in order to get it to audible so I'm just responsible for the narration reading the script understanding the script interpreting the script delivering the script and doing the preliminary edit so I make sure I have no retakes in there I've got no breasts no studio noise no nothing I do the preliminary edit handed off to engineering and they go through and they do the mastering of it and it takes me using the techniques that you've seen in other other videos if you watch my other videos it takes me about three hours to deliver 30 to 40 minutes of finished audio I've done this a lot I'm pretty good at it not spectacular at it I'm pretty good at it if you're new and you don't have the editing process sort of in you you're not practiced at it you're not going to do 30 minutes in three hours you're going to do 30 minutes in five hours six hours so they give you an estimate and I'll show you an estimate I just pick a book at random I just searched for books at random so just pick the first one that comes up so this book is 8,500 words they're expecting one hour so for a novice person to produce but it's pretty good so for a novice narrator one hour of finished audio is probably going to take you five to six maybe even eight hours especially if you're not really good at editing or you've got a high noise floor or something that you need that you need to work on so a tiny book like this 9 1-hour 8,500 words is going to take you a full workday let's pick another one this is your the courtesan I've never heard of this 186 thousand words this one is going to be estimated nine point two hours finished call it ten hours when it's done that will take somebody experienced like me that would be not less than a week's work to do all of that stuff probably more if you're a novice narrator it's probably going to take you two weeks working eight hours a day it's going to take you two weeks and chances are your voice isn't going to hold off for eight hours a day so it could take you as much as a month to get this down and that means all of that time that you're recording this book you're not getting paid for any other work right you're going to be working exclusively for this now okay so it takes you a month well I'll just make it up in sales I mean that's only it's only a week or twos work I can you know make some sales the challenge is is for this book its sales rank is quite low it's the 351 thousands most popular book so if we take this book and I have no idea I seriously just pick this at random so let's search Amazon for this book and let's see seventeen dollar book so you're gonna make a buck fifty on every sale is that right no that's yeah I mean you're going to make you're going to make just a couple of bucks but is it selling that's the question it's been out for a while it's ranked really low there's no reviews for it so how many is this going to sell none right so you're not going to make this back up so you're going to work for two weeks and you have to rely on this author or you to do enough marketing which also is not free enough marketing to recover not only the two weeks work that you're putting putting in on creating the audiobook but then whatever you spend on marketing standing up a website doing tweeting or whatever it is ours that you will spend trying to promote this book in order to recover your costs it doesn't feel like a great deal right it doesn't feel like a great deal for the author it doesn't feel like a great deal for the narrator why doesn't it feel like a good deal for the author they're getting the work for free well somebody like me who's an experienced narrator would look at that and go there's no way there's no way I'm picking that book but a novice narrator we go oh sure I can I can do that it's only nine hours I can do that and then they get into it and it turns out that it's a lot more work in it and it shows their inexperience they don't know the mechanics of their of their job very well they don't know the mechanics of their the earnings very well so you're going to get the a novice narrator nothing wrong with a novice narrator buddy has to learn but for the author they want a good finished product one that's actually going to sell but the more inexperienced the narrator is the lower I mean just by nature the lower quality the products going to be and it's not a slight to new narrators we're all new narrators at one point it's just that your work is not going to be as good as somebody who's been doing this for a long time it's just the way it works so for the author you're going to get a lower quality book because you're not willing to pay so if you're not willing to pay then people aren't going to be willing to work so the the challenge is if you want a good products you have to be willing to pay for it if you want to develop a good product you have to be willing to put into work but you should also expect to be compensated for that work and you're not going to do it on a risk so the only time royalty Shearer actually becomes worthwhile is if you think you can recover that money in royalties net 20% at 20 cents per dollar two dollars for ten and every ten dollars so this is going to be a three dollar and fifty cent whatever it is you'd have to sell you'd have to sell quite a few copies in order to recover the potentially a few thousand dollars that you should expect to get paid in a couple of weeks work and so the mechanics of it just they don't really work out and I think I personally think that Amazon is taking advantage of novice narrators who are willing to do that job just so they can get books out there and I don't think it serves the narrator very well I don't think it serves the author very well I don't think it serves ACX very well because I think the the product that they get is not great so if you're now here's what I'll say I'll say this to new narrators go ahead and do one if you're looking for real life experience I have books on a CX that are there that you'll never find because they're not great titles they don't sell anything but a CX at the last stage allows you to pick a pseudonym mmm so you don't have to put your narration out under your name so if you want to learn the process if you want to pick a book and narrate it and go through the editing and the mastering and learn all of that stuff and use this as a training ground and hey maybe you'll make five dollars a year on it but it's a learning experience then go for it because you can use a pseudonym at the end and he don't have to attach it to your real name I did it and it's not a name that I will ever ever utter in real life you'll never hear me say the name because it's I don't really want it associated with my career but it was good training experience for me take that for what it's worth but it helped me learn and understand the process for AC accent help me get hired to work for audible every single week it was a good training experience and yeah have I made like $30 in the 18 months that the book was out out I mean yeah I made like literally $30 on each of these books I mean it was like nothing so that's that I'm not a big fan of royalties here and that's why I don't really participate in ACX that much I have done I ended up doing one audio book to love them as a marathon I'd ended up doing one audio book that ended up being a perfect hour and it turns out to be a pretty good deal unless you're in the Union you might get a hundred and fifteen a hundred and fifty dollars per finished hour so a 10 hour book you'll get 1500 bucks and you have to decide if that is worth a week of your life to do it now some of the other pitfalls that new authors new narrators get into is one they don't understand the mechanics of ACX before they get to delivery of it so they'll record the whole thing and then they'll send it off and they'll go your noise floors too high and you go oh my what I don't know how to do that or your RMS is too high or your RMS is too low and you go I don't know how to fix that or there's breaths or there's edits or you're not meeting the technical requirements and the last thing you want to do is get all the way to the end and realize you haven't met the technical requirements and you got to do / what No and you also have to be aware that that authors have a lot of pride in their book and it's there for many of them it's their baby and they want it too they want that narration to be just right and they have a notion of how that book sounds in their head there's nothing wrong with that when we read we all hear the narrator in our head the hard part is when the authors in head narrator sounds different than you as the real-life narrator sounds in delivering their work and so they'll say well that's not the way the character Johnny was supposed to sound this because you redo that section or that wasn't that line doesn't sound like it's going to be foreshadowing enough for this other thing could you redo that line and all of a sudden if you get a sugar load of retakes more and more and more and more and more work and I see that all the time on the narrator's groups where authors will have strong opinions about the way the audiobook is delivered and it ends up creating a huge amount of work for the narrator and many times the author is not very helpful because they're not narrators in the beginning so if you ask for direction or feedback on the way something should be delivered they'll go I'll use your best instinct and then once they have the strawman then they'll cause the strawman version they'll come and try and tear it all down and the narrator says no no no no I took my artistic license and my artistic knowledge in order to deliver this and you're going to and you're going to take it and then there's back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and it gets really really difficult so royalty share for a poor selling book or an unknown author or an author that doesn't have a marketing plan for their book I don't think is I don't think it's great option I really don't and I say that respectfully to the narrators and I say that respectfully to the authors because it's just it's a hard way for anybody to make money and to deliver a satisfactory product so I hope that helps new narrators new voice actors pick up a book and try it record one of your own books off your shelf record it do a full production just don't submit it anywhere if you're going to work for free do it for yourself with a book you want to enjoy reading but give it a try it is a marathon it is a very difficult thing to do it takes practice don't screw up some authors book because of your naivete and authors be prepared for inexperienced narrators if you're not willing to pay that's all I have for you so now go practice your audio book narration if that's something you think you want to do authors be willing to pay and go record something amazing thank you

Channel: Booth Junkie

Views: 121,693

Keywords: vo, va, voice over, voice acting, voiceover, voiceacting, voice work, voicework, vocal booth, home studio, microphone, acoustic treatment, soundproofing, reaper, cad, cad microphones, tlm-103, e100s, mhk416, mkh 416, 416, neumann, sennheiser

Id: u3E2hdwYmIo

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Sat May 06 2017