There are a lot of narrators who can narrate your book but not all of them have a good quality of voice. Let me tell you where to find a professional narrator with the lowest rate possible.
Before I get to the question, I want to let you know there are three answers to this question. The third one deals with the correct pricing for a narrator that will save you a lot of money in the long run.
So, let's get right on into it. Today's question that was sent to me is, where to find a professional narrator? Now, this is a very common question.
Because once you have decided and you've got to the point where you have published your book. Maybe you might have the paper version and the Kindle version out. But you realized, "wait for a second, I think I may be losing money on not having an audio version of my book".
Then you'll say, "okay, isn't that going to be difficult?". It seems like to me the audiobook version would be the most difficult of them all.
But where exactly are you going to find that narrator? What price should you pay?
There are all sorts of questions. How do I upload the files? How exactly do we do this thing here?
So, there is an awful lot of questions and confusion that makes a lot of writers decide, "maybe I don't want to publish and put it into an audio format".
Check out my Checklist of Secrets that you will want to download for free. It will tell you some of the basic steps in self-publishing that maybe you are doing and maybe you are not. So go ahead and check that out.
When I first get started, I didn't even think about audiobooks. Because after all, it seems so difficult. So I start with Kindle then moved on to the paperback ones.
But when I saw my friends making plenty of money off of their audiobooks, that made it completely clear to me that I needed to start getting my books out as audiobooks.
Check out this related article: How To Get Your Audiobooks Produced On ACX
But like everything that I teach, you want to keep it very simple. And the simplest way to go about doing it is to have people audition through ACX.
You can put your audiobooks up for audition so people can compete to let them narrate your books. But the only problem is, of course, is that you have to split the price.
It brings us into today's answers because here's exactly what I ended up finding out. The first thing is you can do it for free. This is probably what you should start with.
Because sometimes, when you are dealing with independent narrators, the quality of the work they do can be a little bit poor. You don't fully know what exactly to expect.
Also, the standard of quality because we want our listeners to give us 5 stars or no negative stars at any rate when they listen to our books. We want to deliver on the value that they're expecting when they buy our audiobooks.
Downside Of Narrators From Fiverr
The downside of doing the free route with the narrator's on ACX is that you are going to split all revenues. The royalty is not coming or 40%.
If you have to split them 50/50 with your narrator, that means you're giving away 20% of the royalty. Actually half or 50% of the royalties. So you'll only get 20% on every sale of your book.
You could be making 40% if you own the rights to the book. But then the question is, how much does it cost? If you want to find somebody to do it.
That brings us to point number two. So you can make more money of course if you find a narrator yourself.
You can do it on Fiverr, you can do it on Upwork. And Upwork is the place that I started with and I would highly suggest it.
You simply put out a job posting. You look at other job postings that look similar to this whether looking for narrators to narrate their books. And set a price and things like and they'll have the text.
You don't make up everything yourself. You already going to have a basic idea of what kind of narrator you're looking for. Maybe someone that has already done narration for ACX and understands the process.
Check out this related article: Should I Publish My Kindle eBooks On ACX And CreateSpace?
On the first step, the narrators themselves, with your ACX, actually upload the files. They do it directly for you.
But on the second one, you're going to have to upload the files. And then they go to a quality check. Currently, it's been around a month waiting for ACX to get the books through the pipeline.
And then maybe they find a mistake, they send it back to you then you're going to have to contact the narrator again. This is the reason in the contract, you want to make sure it's very clear that you owned the rights to the entire book.
They will get paid for their narration but they will continue making adjustments until the submission is accepted. I have seen people get incredibly frustrated. Especially when using some of the narrators on Fiverr to do this process.
Where you go back and forth and back and forth. They've said they may have done this before but they haven't. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right narrator.
When you do find a professional narrator or the right narrator on Upwork when you post that job, you need to stick with them. Because when you bundle your books together there's an expectation. That the same person will narrate the different books you have as you bundle them together.
And it's in the bundles where you save a lot of money. Because, when you bundle to audiobooks together you don't have to pay any more money to the narrator. They just have to do an opening and
an ending.
So this is one of those little tips, I didn't mention this one. This wasn't the secret tip of the day. But if you look at the
secret tip of the day, that's another key issue here.
It is going to save you money as I promised. And that is that you should start with a very low bid on Upwork.
Good Voice Behind Lowest Rate
You'll see the other jobs that people are posting out there. And you'll see people who say they can do the narration.
We want to start to the absolute lowest rate possible. That is in terms of the finished per minute, that is the rate per finished minute. That would be how much you're paying per minute.
Now I'm not going to tell you what rate I pay or what rate you should pay. I would just say look at the rates that they're posting and post something really low.
The reason being is because sometimes the top-level payment, people who pay the most to, really don't produce as high of a quality piece of work. And I started with some who was just getting started.
They didn't fully know the process. So they were okay with accepting a lower rate. But their voice needs to sound very professional and they need to be able to put it together.
And they would go back and forth until they're able to get it. So we need to be patient through this entire process. Now the reason you may be wondering, why would we want to shoot so low in the rate side?
And that is very simple, it's because we're going to be doing a lot of books like this. And for every dollar we spend on the narration, that's taking a dollar away.
That we would have normally, for if we earn that dollar, if we get that dollar for that 40% that we keep of the royalties, well now we have to earn all that money back before we can start making a profit on our audiobooks.
Check out this related article: How To Convert Your Amazon Book To Audio Book?
This is something you will not want to pay a lot of attention to. So, start at a low rate. Get people to submit samples of what their audio sounds like.
Find the voice that is right for your book. And if you can't find it at the lowest rate, then slowly increment it upwards. Remember, it is more important to find a person who matches and has a good voice for your book.
And it is going to take you 5 years to earn your money back. I like to earn my money back in maybe a couple of months. Then after that, all the money all 40% is yours.
Now, remember if you do go for that first option I mentioned using ACX to do this, you will have the rights. I believe, the last time I checked, I think it was 7 years after the book comes out, then you'll own all the rights including everything.
You don't have to split it at that point. But 7 years for goodness sake, that's a very long time. And ACX is a game that involves freezing accounts and all sorts of stuff.
Of course, they don't tell you what the reason is. That would not be strategic for them. But I can say that on the ACX front, you're going to find it on Upwork.
Go for the lowest price you can do. And slowly raise the rates until you find someone who's right for you.
Well, what have you found? Have you found a better place to find a professional narrator for your books? Do you prefer to go where you get 40% of the royalties?
Let me know below in the comments. And check out my other blogs and videos, you will find more answers to questions just like this one.