Publish your own audiobooks: How to win at indie publishing

as the Indie author scene gets more and more saturated authors are looking for a way to help themselves stand out to find new readers without shelling out a lot of money on Advertising fair enough but as Indie authors are getting more sophisticated it's also getting more difficult to find ways to stand out because everybody's kind of a pro now that's a good thing especially for readers one way to stand out is to tap into the market of people who absolutely will not read your book unless it is available on audio the reason they're like this is not to be difficult obviously but they're busy they're in the car all the time they're doing other things while they want to read if they had to sit down with an actual book or an ebook they would just never read I know this because I used to be one of those people that's right the nonsense free editor whose job is reading other people's stuff was an audio first reader this was when I worked at a physical office I was in the car all the time and when I did have down time it was kind of frowned upon to whip out a book at your desk there are a lot of people like this so how do you cater to these people well obviously you make an audiobook I've heard that is expensive Kristen I am not made of money that is true except when it's not and I know this because I just made my own audiobooks using find a way voices one of several vendors that will make your book available wherever audiobooks are sold how did I do this and more specifically how did I do it for free [Music] hello Shameless writers I'm Kristen mctiernan the nonsense free editor here for your somewhat regular dose of writing editing and Publishing wisdom in addition to being the nonsense free editor I am also an author myself specifically of paranormal and time travel fiction while my writing has slowed to a crawl apologies everyone I am trying to find new avenues to find new readers and the First Avenue that I'm trying is audio the first two books in my Blackmagic series blackmagic's prey and Blackmagic Shadow are now available for purchase in audio format through find a way voices find a way voices is a wide distributor which means that if you use them your audiobook will be available pretty much wherever they're sold as opposed to a place like ACX which caters almost exclusively to Amazon's platform audible so you might be wondering how did I accomplish this feat how much money did it cost me etc etc I am here to take you through step by step step one obviously is you have to record the audiobook this can be done in one of two ways you can do the expensive route and that is hire a narrator find a way voices offers you the ability to hire a narrator directly off the platform you don't need to go to Fiverr or some other site you can find one right there on findaway voices including a sample pricing and what kind of accents they can do for someone like me who generally has a multicultural cast that's very helpful prices tend to vary so if you have someone who is new to the game they might charge you Thirty to fifty dollars per finished hour which means that you're not paying them for every moment they spend in front of the microphone you're paying them for the amount of time that's finished this makes it a little bit more reasonable once you get up into say Kate reading territory they get a lot more expensive and there's a good reason for that Kate reading is a jewel and every book that I have ever listened to that she did just makes me happy including the lady Sherlock series Link in description this this series is my crack you guys the second way you can get your audiobook narrated is what I did and that's you can record it yourself now as you can hear for yourself I do have somewhat of a dulcet toned voice I've been presenting in one form or another since I was a kid so I felt up to doing my own audiobook the way that I did this is I downloaded a free program called audacity just because it's free does not mean that it's not good there are many many professional voice artists who use audacity because it's all you really need it is fantastic however that being said just for user friendliness purposes full disclosure for book three of my Blackmagic series I will be using the same program that I use to create my YouTube videos which is dscript it's a little easier to edit and frankly I just like the interface better dscript does cost money and so do a lot of other say Adobe based programs but everything that you will need to create your audiobook is available on Audacity truly you won't be sacrificing anything the next thing you're going to need is hold on a microphone this is the ever present Blue Yeti microphone you've probably seen a lot of YouTubers using it there's a reason for that it's a good microphone depending on the software you're using and what your tools are like you might also want to get a pop filter to go over your microphone I used one for the first two and that's because I had a different microphone it was the Blue Snowball which was a slightly less of a clean sound um so the pop filter really helped additionally I also recorded in my husband's closet why my husband's closet and not mine because he has more clothes than I do for your recording environment you will want to go someplace that is quiet however with a good microphone a good stereo you don't need to go the full recording studio route a closet works fine a room works fine you don't want any Echoes and you definitely don't want the sound of sirens going by as you're recording I would also recommend that you read from an ebook do not try to flip pages of a paper manuscript or from your paperback for all that is Holy either read off of a laptop if you can scroll or just from your Kindle it's not mandatory but I also recommend you create a separate recorded file for each chapter or section this makes it easier for you at the back end regardless of which platform you upload to you will also have to have beginning credits which is basically like book title author and narrated by end credits which can be just as simple as the end and also a sample generally you make the sample last you've recorded the whole audiobook you're done you have all of your chapter files and then you go through and you decide which two to five minutes would be really riveting for a prospective buyer to look for and say well yeah I like the way that sounds I'm gonna buy this be careful not to include any spoilers though so I recommend between the first and the second chapter once you've recorded everything you have kind of two options here and it depends on what you want to pay for you can send the raw audio files to a sound engineer and they will clean up absolutely everything they'll take out all your mouth noises they'll take out all your little you know bad cuts or whatever and they'll make it clean that's more time intensive so I don't do that what I do first is I go through and I make sure I get rid of all of the pauses all of the ums if I have any bad takes I remove those and bad takes are gonna happen and that's okay so just keep it rolling and just keep recording until the chapter is done then I go back and I get rid of everything that I don't want in the book you will however need a sound engineer but the good news is they're actually very inexpensive I used mine I think it was about 180 I got him off of Fiverr and they will go through and make sure that your audio is beautiful it will sound like it was recorded in a studio all of those weird like lip smacking things that everybody has don't think that you don't have them and don't think that those Pro audiobook narrators don't have them either yes they do they just have a sound engineer and so will you there are also specific requirements for these platforms especially ACX they're pretty nitpicky about the decibel range that your audio can be in your sound engineer will make sure that that works too this is a vital step because once you get onto your platform whether it's find away voices or ACX you really kind of want to upload it and be done with it you do not want to get that error message saying no I'm sorry your files aren't going to work for us that's a mess and it's annoying and if you're not a techie person you might not know exactly what the problem is so save yourself some hassle spend 180 bucks and get you a sound engineer once you have your MP3s ready for all of your chapters guess what that means that's right it's time to upload your audiobook so that's how you do it pretty easy right now it does take a couple of days to go through it for find a way voices to say that yes you've passed quality checks and then start rolling it out to vendors some vendors appear quicker than others I'm still waiting on ACX to post book one it's been more than 30 days it's really annoying at the end of the day if you decide that you just can't narrate the books yourself fair enough and you really need to hire somebody make sure that you save up in advance there are some narrators who will do a profit share but if you're a new author even if you already have one or two books under your belts and they did okay it doesn't matter narrators will not want to take the risk they want to be paid up front just like every other service provider profit shares generally only accepted if you can show the receipts that you make bank and in that case you can afford to pay them up front anyway so that's the process of creating an audio book as you can see it's probably not as difficult as you may have been thinking it was and given the world that we're living in where everybody is so busy and we want to make it easier for people to ingest our content audiobooks might be something you want to consider so that's all I have for today if you enjoy reading paranormal Mysteries you can find a link to my audiobooks in the description and until next time take care and write well

Channel: The Nonsense-Free Editor

Views: 324

Keywords: publishing audiobooks on audible, publishing audiobooks, findaway voices, publish your own audiobook, acx audiobook publishing, Publish your own audiobooks: How to win at indie publishing

Id: PUs_zLgKmeE

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023