In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* On Audiobook Narration, Part 3
* Of Interest
Quote of the Day
“Never let your fear decide your future.” Unknown, via Jaime Buckley
On Audiobook Narration, Part 3
Working with an Audiobook Narrator, for Indie Authors
A guest post by Jason McGinty, an audiobook narrator
Options
ACX has two options for you to choose from for distribution: exclusive or non-exclusive.
- Exclusive means ACX has the exclusive rights to distribute your audiobook, and you are not legally allowed to publish it anywhere else.
- Non-exclusive means you do have the right to distribute it other places if you want.
The tradeoff is the percentage cut ACX takes of the purchase price. For exclusive distribution, ACX takes 50%; for non-exclusive, ACX takes 70%. That means you get 50% for exclusive or 30% for non-exclusive.
It sounds like highway robbery to me, but until recently I had thought ACX was pretty much the only game in town. It seems Voices by INaudio only takes a 20% cut, which is why it’s looking like my next project will go through them.
The other thing this decision affects is the narrator’s payment method. I’m not sure why, but ACX won’t let you do a royalty share if you go with non-exclusive distribution, so in that case an up-front PFH would be your only option to pay the narrator.
If you go exclusive with royalty share, the remaining 50% after ACX takes their cut will be split between you and the narrator based on whatever split you negotiated. Again, this may be different on different platforms.
Now for my sales pitch
Different narrators have different preferences for how they want to get paid, and how much. If you work with me, I will be very flexible with this. This is a side gig for me and I’m doing it mostly for the love of the game, because I like the idea of helping out indie authors who otherwise probably wouldn’t have their books made into audiobooks.
So I tell authors that I will accept pretty much whatever the author thinks the book is worth to them. I trust that if I do good work, and work with good people, they will pay fairly.
I’ve done anything from a 50/50 royalty split with nothing up front, to $100 PFH with no royalties, to $25 PFH with 5% royalties. I’m down for anything, really.
My only stipulations are that I won’t do smut (I am the judge of what smut is), and I have to like either you or your work (ideally both). I do have a preference for royalties, since that way if the book does well we both win, but like I said, if you’d rather do it the other way, that’s fine too.
Conclusion
I hope this helps some of you with getting your stuff recorded, whether you end up hiring me or not. If there’s anything I didn’t answer here or anything I got wrong, point it out in the comments and I’ll try to respond if I can.
Thanks to Harvey for putting my stuff out to his audience and for putting this guest post up. I’ve narrated a short story of his and apparently impressed him enough that he wants me to do all his novels now, so look for that in the coming months. I look forward to a long and fruitful partnership.
For those interested, I host two podcasts on Substack in addition to doing narration:
- The Unsung Podcast is long-form narrative history. I’ve done an 11 part, ~50 hour series on Bleeding Kansas and the Missouri guerrilla war, and I’m just now finishing up a trilogy on Xenophon’s Ten Thousand. My next thing planned is another big series on the history of the Mormons.
- Charley Horse Radio is a newer, more conversational podcast that I do with a co-host. We talk about Southern history and culture, and we’ve been going through the 12 essays in the book *I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition on Southern Agrarianism*, doing an episode on each essay. After that we have lots more ideas.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief series on audiobook narration. My thanks to Jason for writing it up for us.
Also, if you’d like to hear Jason’s narration of my short story “Wes Crowley and the Bank Robbers” click the link. The guy is really good.
Talk with you again soon.