The audiobook market is one of the fastest growing sectors in publishing. Simon Whaley explores the different ways self-published authors can access this market.
Last year, the publishing industry valued the UK audiobook market at over £209 million. Eight per cent of all book purchases were audiobooks. But that’s not the entire picture, because in 2023 Amazon’s Audible subsidiary reported that it alone saw sales of £242 million.
Thanks to smartphones, we can take and listen to audiobooks whenever we have our devices with us.
Recent technological developments have made creating audiobooks much easier, which means audiobook production for self-published authors has become much more accessible.
However, just because we can create an audiobook doesn’t mean we should. Children’s books, reference books, or books with a high visual content do not always transfer well in this format.
Genres that excel in audiobook format include most fiction, with crime, thriller, romance, Sci-Fi, historical, and young adult genres selling particularly well. Self-help and business books are hugely popular in audio format, with audiobooks taking twelve per cent of all non-fiction book sales. More readers are also listening to memoir, narrative non-fiction, and historical genres, too.
Creating an audiobook requires some effort, but because the retail price is higher, the royalty per sale is typically higher than an ebook or print book.
Essentially, there are four ways self-publishers can create an audiobook:
- hire a production company to do all the work,
- hire a studio and narrate the book ourselves,
- use a royalty-share service like Amazon’s ACX,
- use an AI service.
Studio Standard
Hiring an audiobook production company, or a human narrator with their own studio facility, will produce a high quality, human-narrated audiobook we can distribute via various channels in the same way we sell our eBooks and paperbacks. It will also give us a large invoice. Costs vary, but typically range from £200 to £1,000+ per finished hour. A finished hour is a complete hour of the audiobook’s total listening length.
As a guide, my The Positively Productive Writer is a 73,000-word manuscript, and it produced an eight-hour audiobook. This could have cost me between £1,600 and £8,000+ to create this had I used this route to production. (I didn’t, more of which later.)
DIY Development
A slightly cheaper option is do-it-yourself narration. This may require hiring a studio with a suitable sound-proofed recording booth and high-quality recording equipment if you don’t already have these at home. There’s also the time cost in narrating the book. Remember, human book narration is a specialised skill, and not every writer has that.
Costs for studio hire and someone to carry out the production process of turning your recording into a seamless audiobook file can start from £150 per finished hour.
Both options are costly. But they will produce a high-quality product. The other benefit is that distributing human-narrated audiobooks offers a far wider choice of marketplaces.
The following audiobook creation options are cheaper, but they all restrict where we can sell our audiobook files.
ACX Audio
Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) is an Amazon subsidiary that offers three options. Their premium Pay-for-Production service costs between $100 and $400 per finished hour. For that, we can hire one of their many human narrators to record our book, and their production staff create the audiobook files.
However, ACX will only distribute audiobook files to Amazon’s Audible platform and Apple Books. In the UK, these are the two largest audiobook suppliers, with estimates suggesting they have around 70% of the market.
Users of this Pay-for-Production service then have two further options. We can either accept a 50% royalty rate of all audiobook sales from these two platforms if we sign an exclusivity deal with ACX for seven years. Or, if we opt for a lower 25% royalty rate, we can then share our audiobook files with other distribution services.
A 50% royalty rate may help us recover these still significant production costs quickly, but only if the audiobook sells. Fifty per cent of nothing is still nothing. Think carefully. What’s right for one author won’t be right for another. Seven years exclusivity is a long time if it’s not the right decision.
An alternative is ACX’s Royalty-Share option. This has no upfront costs, making it much more accessible. However, this option insists on exclusivity with ACX for seven years, which means the audiobook will only be available via Amazon and Apple. No upfront costs mean a reduced royalty rate, since Amazon splits the exclusive 50% royalty rate between the narrator and the author, resulting in a 25% royalty for us.
This Royalty-Share service also means the narrator is taking a risk too. They only get paid if the audiobook sells, and not all narrators will take this risk. Therefore, there are fewer narrators to choose from for the Royalty-Share option.
To get around this, there is a third option: Royalty-Share Plus. This hybrid option provides an upfront payment to the narrator, who also receives half of the 50% royalty. The author and narrator negotiate the size of the upfront payment. While this is a more expensive option for the author, it broadens the choice of narrator, because the narrator is taking a smaller risk than with the Royalty-Share option. The seven-year exclusivity still applies.
AI Alternatives
Now to the elephant in the room. Artificial Intelligence has grown exponentially, and digital narration, as some platforms call it, is one area where it excels. It is controversial. Many think it will put human narrators out of a job. It may well do.
Some think digital narration broadens the market. Some listeners will listen to any audiobook narrated by Stephen Fry or Julia Whelan and pay any price for it. Human-narrated audiobooks may become a premium product, in the same way a hardback book is a premium product to a paperback or eBook.
Digital Narration enables self-published authors who can’t afford the upfront costs to create audiobook versions of their works. This means books that wouldn’t have been financially viable in audiobook format can now enter that market. And because digital narration is cheaper, authors can price these audiobooks cheaper, too, making them accessible to listeners who couldn’t normally afford to buy human-narrated audiobooks. This expansion in the market is why many believe the growth in audiobook sales may explode in the coming years.
So what are our options with digital narration?
At present, Amazon (Virtual Voice), Apple, and GooglePlay Books offer self-published authors the opportunity to convert their eBook files into audiobooks for free. Part of this is because they want the content on their platforms to sell to listeners.
I used the GooglePlay Books digital narration service to create the audiobook version of The Positively Productive Writer. While it didn’t cost me any money upfront, it cost me a considerable amount of time.
Production Ponderings
To create an audiobook using a digital narration service from Amazon, Apple, or GooglePlay Books, we must already have an eBook file uploaded on their system. However, we can’t just click a button and convert the text into audio and then hit publish. We must listen to what the AI has created, because it doesn’t get everything right the first time.
For example, how should it pronounce the word read? Should the AI narrate it as red or as reed? What about your character or place names? Has the AI pronounced them correctly?
The only way to check is to listen to the entire book. This will take several hours, and that’s before we make any amendments.
These services create a copy of the text, which we can listen to, typically on a chapter-by-chapter basis. The easiest way to correct errors is to change the text and spell a word phonetically. For things like character or place names, it’s also possible to instruct the AI to pronounce such words the same way whenever it comes across that word or phrase. Once we’ve made the textual change and clicked on Save, the AI uses that text to create the audio files. This audiobook text version is completely separate from the eBook file. Changes made here do not affect the eBook file.
To ensure the AI has correctly amended everything, we should listen to the entire audiobook file again.
Should we later discover we’ve missed something after we’ve hit Publish, we can still go back into the audiobook files, make the correction, and hit Publish again, just as we might when updating an eBook or paperback file.
Many platforms won’t accept digitally narrated files created on competitor platforms. We can’t upload our GooglePlay Books AI audio files onto Apple or Amazon. We can’t upload our Amazon-created AI audiobook files to Apple or GooglePlay Books.
However, Kobo, YouTube, and Bookfunnel will accept AI-created audio files created by any service.
That’s why my GooglePlay Books AI-narrated The Positively Productive Writer is also available on the Kobo platform.
Third Party AI
Another option is to use a third-party AI tool to create a digitally narrated audiobook file and then distribute that to different platforms. One popular service is ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech service. ElevenLabs works on a monthly subscription fee. Higher subscription tiers buy credits to create more audio time. The Pro Plan costs $99 per month and allows subscribers to create up to 500 minutes of text-to-speech audio per month. This is enough for an eight-hour audiobook.
Authors with an average-length 75,000-word manuscript could create an audiobook from it with just one month’s subscription cost.
Audio Distribution
In the same way we can use Draft2Digital to distribute our eBooks to a variety of platforms, INaudio (which used to be known as Findaway Voices) will distribute audiobook files to a variety of platforms. Once uploaded, INaudio will distribute our files to audio platforms like Google, Apple, Kobo, Scribd, Baker & Taylor, Amazon’s Audible platform, and even library services. For this, they take 20% of the royalty payment these platforms pay.
Because Spotify owns INaudio, they pay all income generated on the Spotify platform in full. INaudio does not take a 20% slice of Spotify payments.
Since Spotify launched audiobooks on their platform in 2023, some 25% of their premium subscribers have listened to audiobooks.
This is why the audiobook market is so interesting. How and where listeners can engage with audiobooks is changing all the time, which means the market is constantly developing and growing.
The question isn’t can we turn our self-published book into an audiobook, but which option will we use to do it? There is now a way of creating audiobooks to suit all author budgets. Which one will you choose?
Business Directory
Audiobook Production Companies
Indie Author Book Productions: www.indieaudiobookproductions.co.uk
Raconteurs Audio: raconteurs.co.uk
Bengo Media: bengomedia.com/our-services/audiobooks/
ACX Audio
www.acx.com
eBook to Audiobook Services
GooglePlay Books: play.google.com/books/publish/autonarrated/
Amazon Virtual Voice: kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GMPQGZAZJH6FF456
Apple Books: authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-audiobooks
AI Text-to-Speech Services
ElevenLabs: elevenlabs.io/
Murf AI: murf.ai/
Speechify: speechify.com/