Is This Thing On?

One of the most informative sessions we attended at the Independent Authors Conference was the one on audiobooks. Among the things we learned:

1. they’re expensive
2. producing them costs a lot of money
3. they ain’t cheap

Audio is the fastest-growing publishing segment [citation needed], and it’s not just a “millennial thing.” More than one of Kent’s coworkers where he dayjobs has asked when the works of Rune Skelley will become available in audio format, because they utilize their lengthy commute times to consume books. (These are people whose kids are millennials. But yeah, the younger crowd likes to consume content that way, too.)

The duration guestimate is around 9500 words an hour, so if your book is 95,000 words then it will be roughly ten hours. While there are different ways the billing can be structured, professional audiobook production basically runs several hundred dollars per finished hour. Given the scale of our novels, we experienced major sticker shock. The question that logically occurred to us was, “What about doing it ourselves?” We do everything ourselves. How hard can it be? Kent reads all the manuscripts aloud multiple times anyway in the course of our standard process, and we often say we ought to be recording.

Well. Short answer: yes, you can DIY your audiobooks. But it’s a lot of work, and requires adequate setup and preparation.

• Needless to say, the manuscript needs to be final. So, our scheme to capture the audio on-the-fly during our writing process isn’t really sound. (Drat!)
• If you flub anything, you need to do it again. Even if you said all the correct words in the correct order, you might not be pleased with your cadence or inflection. You’ll end up needing to record much of the text twice, or more, to get a top-notch end product.
• All those takes need to be edited together. This is time-consuming, probably double or triple the finished hours of the audiobook. (And that’s assuming you already know how to drive the editing software.)
• The narrator’s delivery must be even and distinct. This requires considerable concentration and holding a consisten posture, which can become exhausting over periods of hours. And, across multiple sessions. If you catch a cold, you might not be able to record until your congestion clears up.
• Good narration is a form of acting. The book’s tone needs to come through, and each character’s voice should be distinguishable. Can you do the accents? Male and female roles? Remember, the listener is counting on you to bring the story to life.
• The recording environment has be free of background noise, reverb, and interruptions. You need a space where you can’t hear traffic or opening and closing of doors, and so on. If there are other people or pets in the house, and you don’t have a soundproofed room, they’ll have to be unreasonably still or they’ll spoil your takes.
• It’s critical to have someone do QA (quality assurance) on your output. This is a big job, and doing it well requires a good ear and the ability to deliver honest criticism. It might be hard to find someone willing to donate the hours whose relationship to you doesn’t interfere with their objectivity.

We’re still flirting with the idea of trying it, despite all these obstacles. It’s not impossible, but there’s a reason that the pros charge serious money to do it. Perhaps we’ll have an update in the future, whether it’s a sample recording or, “Yikes, that didn’t go well.”