I’ve just approved the 15 minute sample of the audiobook for The Spy who Sank the Armada. I hadn’t initially thought about audiobooks, but my friend John Holland has a bad eye and wanted to read my books. There must be millions of blind and partially sighted people who enjoy audiobooks, so it seemed like the right thing to do.
The audiobook market is growing at an amazing rate. According to Grand View Research the global audiobook market is expected to grow at 26.4% per year from 2022 to 2030. In Writers and Artists Yearbook I discovered another interesting fact about audiobooks. Apparently 60% of audiobook buyers are classed as light readers, i.e. they read less that five books a year. So an audiobook sale probably doesn’t replace a physical or ebook sale. It adds to them.
I’ll admit that I found the idea of publishing an audiobook daunting. Would I have to narrate it myself? That wouldn’t work. How do you go about finding a Stephen Fry or David Tennant if you’re not signed up to a big publishing house? How could I be so dumb? I am signed up to the biggest publishing house on the planet, Amazon!
Amazon have an audiobook site called ACX. Here’s what they say about it “ACX is a marketplace where authors, literary agents, publishers, and other Rights Holders can connect with narrators, engineers, recording studios, and other Producers capable of producing a finished audiobook. The result: More audiobooks will be made.” It is exactly that. The process is pretty simple, but could be a little more seamless, in my opinion. You set up an account. It does carry over a lot of the detail from your KDP / Amazon account, but not all of it. Perhaps that’s a requirement of tax authorities. You search for your book that you want to assert rights for. The search field says that you can search by author or title. For The Spy who Sank the Armada, that was easy to find. I tried to assert my rights for Fire and Earth and The Suggested Assassin yesterday, and couldn’t find them. Beside the search field it gave a contact option. It said that if you couldn’t find your book contact ACX and give them your ASIN. I was about to do that when I wondered if putting the ASIN as the search term would work. It did. Hurrah!
After claiming your title there are a few boxes where you describe your book, and select the language, gender of the narrator, type of voice, etc. You then upload a sample of your book as an audition manuscript. I selected scenes with different characters to get a feel of how the narrator was going to cope. You press another button or two, sit back and wait. Within an hour I had eight auditions to listen to. They were all very good. The first one was the one which impressed me the most. Then you make an offer. There are a few options to choose from. You can keep all the royalties and pay the producer a one off fee, share the royalties, or share the royalties and pay a smaller fee. It’s all pretty straightforward. The only thing that I thought could be more seamless is that there could be a link directly into ACX from the KDP bookshelf. When you’re in KDP you have the options of publishing an ebook, paperback, or hardback. I had to type “audiobook” into KDP help to find out about ACX. I wonder why audiobook couldn’t have been one of the options on KDP?