Narrate Audiobooks today!
Contents
- Your voice could be your money maker
- What you need to know
- The industry of convenience
- You need these skills
- The art of narrating
- Stay in your lane
- 4 ways to book your first
- The auditions
- Tools needed to start
- Getting started
- Getting paid
- And finally
Your Voice Could Be Your Money Maker
Has anyone ever told you how great of a reader you are or how amazing your voice sounds when you speak? I mean it only makes sense to capitalize off it, right? But, if you are like most of the population, you never considered it as a way to make more money in your quest to building increased wealth. Well, audiobooks are becoming more and more popular and narrating them can make you money!
What you need to know
How to prepare
Whether you are an author or even a professional voice actor. It is always beneficial to read your book aloud before you start recording to get very familiar with the content. The author, of course, is familiar with their book. But the pre-reading will help in many ways that will make the recording process very quick and the final product more better.
How do you prepare?
- Time yourself reading to know if you can come close to 155 words per minute. Some authors have the tendency to be excited about their book and rush their reading. The goal here is to keep things flowing conversationally.
- Find in pronouncing, it should say hard to pronounce. Practice these thoroughly before going into the studio.
- Learn to read from a tablet or laptop. Don’t record while you read from paper books, because the mic will certainly pick up the noise of pages rustling.
Recording in the studio
There are a lot things that might cause background noise or changes in your vocal tone, that you might not notice until you listen to your recording during the editing. Practice these tips to reduce your editing hours and equally improve the quality of your recording.
- Sit still. Movement might cause noise. A simple shift in your chair can cause your headphone cord to swing and hit something.
- Stay the same distance from the microphone during the recording time. Moving your head away from the microphone will not only change your volume, but change your tone as well. Tone changes may not be fixed in editing and thus lowers the quality of your narration.
- Learn to read from an electronic device to minimize page noise.
- Learn to read at a natural, conversational pace.
Time required for recording
When you record your audiobook, the amount of time that will be spent in studio will be greater than the hours of finished audio. Studio time will include setup time between chapters, rerecord mistakes, discussing difficult areas of the book, or stop for quick breaks. For an author who is not experienced in studio recording. Should plan on 1.8 hours of studio time per hour of finished audio. Some authors record faster, but it is always good to be a bit conservative in scheduling time to be sure you finish the project.
Generally, all narrators, even professional voice actors, do get tired and start to make mistakes after 2.5 to 3 hours of recording. Additionally, voices will get tired and lose expression over time equally. In order to keep editing to a minimum and voice quality consistent, just limit your recording sessions to 2.5-3 hours per day.
Cost for producing an author narrated audiobook
Some authors do believe that they can save money be doing their own recording instead to pay a narrator. Well, this is not really true. First, people who don’t have the experience in studio work do take longer time to record books than professional narrators. Second, all narrators, even the professionals, make mistakes. But the number of mistakes authors will make is substantially bigger than professionals.
For these reasons, the cost to narrate your book yourself is roughly the same if down by a professional. The cost of producing an author-narrated audiobook will depend on the total word count of the book. With the target read rate of 155 words per minute, or 9,300 words per hour. The total number of finished hours of the audio will be the word count divided by 9,300. The total production cost for an audiobook is basically around $350 per finished hour of audio.
You can record for people as a freelancer, even without knowing them. Everything will done online, certainly is one of the ways to sell online.
The Industry of Convenience
In its simplest version, an audio book is similar to a music album. But instead of lyrics to a song, there are words to a book. Each track is separated by chapter with a vocal recording reading the book to you. Unlike E-Books which remain in print, audiobooks can be heard from any location, while driving, running etc. This is what makes them so popular, plus there is the added benefit of feeling like a story is being told to you. Posted on thousands of websites, audiobooks are easy to stream or download, and a convenient way to stay entertained, educated and informed.
You need these skills
Articulation
This will involve to enunciate words and phrases correctly, clearly, and cleanly. Try to avoid over or under articulation unless it’s a character. Avoid sibilance or whistling, that’s commonly heard on the letter S or soft C or lisping, and little to no mouth noise.
Breathing
You need to have enough breath so you won’t run out of air at the end of sentences. Or even gasp for breath between or inside sentences. Try to avoid fading, swallowing, or gulping. Breath control equally involves controlling plosives, that’s popping P’s or hard consonants. This will help to keep your volume consistent, and projecting very appropriate. It also involves managing your mouth noise and throat clearing. Subsequently, audiobook companies won’t hire a talent who require too much of post-production attention.
Delivery
This is the ability to tell a story compellingly is what will constitute solid delivery. Your delivery need to be appropriate to the spirit of the text and the author’s intent as well. Understand that you need to be consistent throughout the narration. As you’ll likely be narrating over different days, your voice need to match itself , both in pitch and energy.
Timing and pacing are two additional elements of professional delivery and need to be appropriate to the text in question. Repetitive cadence and pitch patterns need to be avoided at all cost. Each sentence should slightly be varied so as not to become predictable. Listeners might not know what you will say next. But when you constantly start and end sentences the same way. They’ll know how you’re going to say the next sentence.
Eye brain mouth control
This skill will involve reading the script accurately, not omitting, adding, or even changing words and phrases. Narrators need to strive to reduce the number of mistakes and corrections in their delivery. To scan ahead is important because the more mistakes you make, the longer it will take you to narrate a book. Meaning the less money you’ll earn per finished hour. The ability to be able to lift words off the page effortlessly is a skill that will take a lot of practice.
Consistency
Energy, pitch control, articulation, breath control, and characterization are the areas where solid consistency will get you hired repeatedly. Because audiobook publishers will count on you to deliver.
Analysis
This will require to understand the story arc and the characters (if it’s a fiction). To discern your listening audience, and employ the appropriate delivery. It will involve understanding concepts and equally making them understandable to your listener.
Characterization
The ability to bring life to your characters is extremely important. They will be distinct from each other and be consistent in their attitude, tone, age, and accent. Their voices need to match their given character descriptions (that’s if there are any).
Separation
This skill will requires no spillover or bleeding between narrator and character. Make sure the narrator says phrases like he said or she said before or after a character speaks. This should done in the narrator’s voice, not the character’s. This is essential in audiobook narration.
Stamina
An audiobook narrator will spend approximately four to six hours behind a microphone, daily. This will require unflagging energy. As well as the ability to sound as strong at the end just the same way at the beginning. Narrators who are physically fit and emotionally stable are able to muster the necessary stamina to sustain a professional narration.
Investment
All successful narrations demand that the reader be invested in and emotionally connected to what they describe. Vocally painting a picture, as opposed to reading the words is what makes a great narration. Being interested truly in the subject matter, even when it’s boring, draws the listener in. As well as to garner great reviews, and will motivate an audiobook publisher to hire a talent repeatedly.
With the above skills, you will be a sought after talent. So, to afford conflict in choosing who to work with, then you need to create a personal plan!
The Art of Narrating
Like any other business venture or new career before just jumping in, make sure you know what you are jumping into. Take time to learn proper technique to voice recording for audiobooks. Often it’s said that actors and theater arts majors make the best recorders for audio books simply because they are trained.They have already learned how to represent multiple characters at any given time.
This is highly necessary for fictional books as you must be able to give a different voice to each character so that the reader can differentiate one character from the other. They want to feel as though they are hearing from that character when they speak. Even for nonfiction books, learning to animate the narration can make a great difference with keeping the listener engaged and interested. Bottom line, if the book you record for does not sale…
“Practice makes perfect” well… practice the craft you wish to master!
Stay in Your Lane
Just because you have the chance doesn’t mean you should take it. Discover a niche for your narrating skills. If you get bored with non-fiction reading, it may not be the best for you to be the one recording it. Your audience feels the vibe of the book through you. If blood, murders, and crime make you sick, maybe mystery or crime solving novels aren’t right for you either. Know what you are and are not capable of reading with pleasure. Take the time to learn various genres and learn your voice as well.
4 ways to book your first job to narrate audiobooks
Let’s look into the four ways you can break into the audiobook market to narrate audiobooks and make reasonable income from it. To be able too start living your dream or to pursue that side business of yours too!
Workshops
Remember that the production houses we just mentioned above. Some of them do offer workshops! This is a perfect alternative way for you to join their roster in a direct submission. If nothing else, taking a class like this is great to build or hone your skill and come away with some quality demo material. If they’re impressed by your work, they might even ask you to join their database! Win win. The Deyan Institute is one of those places in Los Angeles.
There’s always a huge learning curve that is involved with audiobooks. And you will invariably find out that you will be a much better narrator at the end of each book than when you started it. So never be scared to go for it. A lot of helpful advice is available online to assist you figure out the technicalities of audiobook recording. And probably you are a native speaker of another language, be sure to make the most of that market. It might be another way for wealth creation, too!
Audiobook production houses
I’m sure you’re quite familiar with the concept of a commercial production house or movie production companies. You should understand that audiobook production houses exist, too! Many of them operate on a roster basis. They have a roster of many narrators on their books that their clients might choose from to narrate their projects. Often this roster is presented in an online database, so that a client might browse through. Well, it is understood that the production house has set fees they pay the narrator. Here you can decide to work as part of a team at a production house:
Either you remotely send your files to several team members for them to proofread, edit, and master after record. As well as to actually go in-house to record at the studio there. So how the do you join a roster like that? Pretty sample, look for any submission instructions on their website. In many cases, it will be as simple as to send them some recording samples. Together with a description of your skills, such as a reference languages, genres, accents. And knowledge of medical jargon and of your own recording equipment!
Equally, a little gem few people know about, but how then can you become SAG eligible to do audiobooks! Many production houses do have a contract with SAG-AFTRA. That will result in you automatically being eligible after you do an audiobook through them. Nothing like vouchers or Taft-Hartley needed.
Casting sites
Never you forget about casting sites! You will likely signed up to those already anyway. Some of them, like Backstage, normally do have casting calls for audiobooks. The projects casted on these sites are often perfect for beginners like you to throw their hat into the ring. Don’t forget this that the entertainment business is all about relationships. Audiobooks aren’t excluded from this list. So don’t joke with them! This means that the first gig you will find on Backstage can well turn into the springboard you have been looking for. Remember to make use of every opportunity that comes your way!
Audiobook creation exchange (ACX)
ACX is a great and perfect place to get into the game. This is owned by Audible, it’s a virtual marketplace that brings authors and narrators together. Nowadays, the book market is saturated with self published indie authors and short nonfiction is working. Many of these authors choose to have their book turned into an audio form, as an additional income stream. Many of these self starter authors always turn to ACX in order to find the right person to do the job! What does this mean to you? An abundance of a very low price tag projects looking for affordable, very low price tag narrators. This could be you when you first started out! You can decide to build your experience and your materials here. Also you might be found by authors. Who are interested in you for some higher quality and high price tag projects.
The Auditions
Yes, you read that right. You might have to audition to. Know that the listener is relying solely on you to paint the picture. By rights, the producers want to be sure that you can do just that. Avoid taking breaks when reading and separate your audio by chapters just as you would in the audio book. Take time to prepare remembering that you are entering the world of voice acting.
There are several places that produce audio books but the top 2 and most commonly used are Amazon Audible and Google Audiobooks. Like all things Amazon, Audible is the biggest and most popular audiobook seller and producer around. Known as the capital of audiobooks, Audible is only available to those with Amazon account. Want to try it out? Great thing about Amazon Audible is you can take advantage of their 30 day trial.
Try it out here: Audible
The clear rival to Audible, Audiobooks stands apart since Google allows you to purchase books individually versus carrying a monthly subscription. Available through the Google Playstore, with thousands of titles as options; their reach is still not as high as Amazon Audible but definitely a contender. There are more books than narrators, so there are many companies that are contracted out to acquire your voice. ACX and Listen Up Audiobooks are a few.
Tools Needed to Start
If you seriously believe this is for you, there are a few minor pieces of equipment I suggest you invest in. Laptop or PC is a must, using such to track submissions, save larger files of recording and more. A Smartphone is definitely needed and who doesn’t have one now days. A Smartphone will enable you utilize a variety of apps and recording tools as well. Having a voice over microphone will help to cut out the natural outside noises and give clarity to your vocals.
Speakers, headphones and editing software are ideal as well. But to attain high-quality sound with continuous and regular vibrations you also may want to prepare a silent area. Some have reported that this is as basic as their closet, laundry room or garage space. Google can show you tons of methods to doing this but I often think of the movie scenes, creating a blanket fort and calling that my version of a high-end isolation booth to start. Or if you really want to invest in yourself studio time is the fastest form but most costly and you don’t have to own any of the equipment.
Getting Started
Audible, remember them? The capital and king of audio books. Their program between voice narrators and book rights owners is ACX, Audiobook Creation Exchange. ACX is the game changer in this sector as it gives entry to tons of thousands talented audiobook producers, and voice recorders whom are open for hire. ACX not only works with Audible but it also gives and provides choices for disposition to the main retailers of audiobooks: Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes and their global partners. By selecting the right books, entering submissions for the higher grade and high-quality auditions, along with giving time and effort a beginner can discover that within a short period of time they can have a production contract.
Getting Paid
In the world of audiobooks, there are 2 main forms of payments. Royalty share, and Flat rate payments. Flat rate payments is exactly what it says. Earn a one time rate for providing a one time service. The butter and bread though lies in the royalty payments.
Let’s take the below scenario.
Ivori works with ACX and she has an earnings that entitles her to 50% of whatever the author makes for her payments of royalty.
So if this particular author earns $10 on every audiobook that sells, Ivori would now earn $5 for each book that sells. May seem like very little but this is huge if the audiobook does indeed sale.
Let’s imagine that the audiobook sells only 200 books across the entire country. That one recording would earn Ivori $1000 a month and according to simple math, that’s an additional 12,000 a year in income.
So if sweet Ivori narrated 12 books per year (one each month) at this same agreed upon rate, her annual income would be on average $144,000! Wow, Right! $144,000 in passive income.
Now we know not every single audiobook will sell as much but most would be happy to take even half of such to better their future legacy for wealth.
And Finally
Audiobooks are definitely not a get rich quick scheme. It requires hard work but if you are committed and willing to put in the work it can be a lucrative form of passive income. If you have not tried listening to an audiobook I would encourage you to do so first. Take the tips from here and evaluate whether this passive form of income is right for you. Highly entertaining yet also soothing, Audiobooks could just be the next best thing to help you gain that extra push into great wealth.