Those of you who have been following my career progress know that making my work accessible has been important to me. I’ve done a lot of research over the past year for how I can do that, and right now, though my books are mostly only available on Amazon as e-books and paperbacks, I’ve made some huge strides.
Rutherford has been on major effort: currently, four of the eight books are now available as ebooks wherever ebooks are sold, and I’m working on video editions of them all as well.
Starting next year, Land of Szornyek will be available wherever ebooks are sold (not only on Amazon) and I’m working on taking my paperbacks wide as well (meaning they will be available in more locations than just Amazon, including available for wholesale purchase for bookstores and through the platforms libraries use to purchase their books).
I’ve also made a lot of progress on audiobooks.
For those of you who don’t know how the process works, there are two major challenges with having books turned into audiobooks: the cost and the process.
The cost is of course the most prohibitive part. A good narrator costs at least $200/hour of finished audio. So, a ten-hour audiobook minimally costs $2,000 for production. And that’s fair—cheap even. The process for the narrator requires reading, editing the audio, and fixing any mistakes that they made. It’s a significant time investment on the part of the narrator, and they deserve to be paid for their time.
There are, of course, other options—like royalty share, where you split the royalties 50/50 with the narrator, or an in-between option where you pay them a lower per hour cost, and also split royalties.
But all of these options are complicated and require contracts. And what if the narrator disappears halfway through a series and you have to switch? Or what if after doing a book or two together, you find out that you really don’t like working with each other?
The decisions are difficult, and with that amount of money at stake, it’s extremely draining. It’s a time-consuming and challenging process.
And I have 12 novels and novellas already published which means that’s a minimum of $24k of investment. Not counting the money I’ll have to spend on the design of the audiobook cover image and marketing of the books. And the cost of the upcoming books I currently have in production.
That said, I still think audio is worth it, so I’ve hired one narrator for one series, and have been looking into other options as well, including doing my own recordings for the shorter manuscripts.
And more recently, I experimented with a platform called Descript, which allowed me to record a sample of my voice, which I could then use to read my work. The sample I provided (for my 7-day free trial) was low quality, but the results were still really cool.
I have a lot of thoughts about what I’m going to do moving forward and haven’t made any decisions yet, but I thought I would share the short low-quality sample with you for novelty’s sake.
And if you’re interested in financially supporting my quest to make audiobooks, joining my Patreon is the best way to do that.
At any rate, check out Robot Ariele’s debut recording here! This segment is from the beginning of Ghost Below, a short story companion to the Rove City series, which you can get for free by signing up for my book release newsletter.