I want to thank my good friend Peter Reilly for allowing me space on Your Tax Matters Partner to talk about the growing popularity of audiobooks. Even though Peter tells me I don’t have to, I’m going to try to keep this post focus on the financial aspects of audiobooks.
I’m an independent author, which means that I write and publish my own work. Long gone are the days when an indie author had to buy a book run from a vanity publisher, and ended up with a garage full of books they couldn’t sell. The advent of Print on Demand and Amazon made being an indie author a viable proposition.
Natalie McMasters—a detective for the new millennium.
I finished my first Natalie McMasters novel, Stripper! when I was 65, and after a year of querying agents with no takers, I decided to publish it on Amazon myself, on April 2018. Since then, I’ve released two more novels, Revenge! and Trafficked!, and I’ve just finished writing the first draft of the fourth book, Venom! No way I could have had such a rapid production schedule if I had to deal with an agent and a publisher. The Natalie McMasters Mysteries have done fairly well, with about 11,000 copies in circulation world-wide.
In her first book, Stripper!, Nattie is twenty, short and blonde (OK, it’s bleached!), way cute, and a pre-law student at State. She’s also straight, or at least she thinks so., She’s moonlighting as a private detective trainee at her uncle Amos Murdoch’s 3M Detective Agency to help with living expense while in school. The job’s not very exciting—she stakes out people who’ve claimed workers’ compensation to be sure they’re hurt as badly as they say. It’s the perfect gig for a college student, because she can study on the job. But one day she directly confronts a subject on a stakeout, and Amos fires her. Then she meets another student who bears an uncanny resemblance to her, and everything in her life changes. When her new best friend is brutally murdered and Amos is critically injured, Nattie immerses herself in the seamy world of web cams and strip clubs to hunt the killer. Her investigation forces her to reassess many of the ideas that she’s lived by her whole life and do things she’s never considered before – strip on a stage, question her sexuality, and rediscover the meaning of love itself. Nattie eventually exposes a drug ring, police corruption, and an assassin-for-hire online. Then she stumbles upon the true face of evil, and her encounter does not leave her unscathed…
Now I’ve decided to enter the audiobook market with Stripper! Audiobooks are currently the fastest growing segment of the publishing industry. IbisWorld puts audiobook revenues at 3 billion dollars in 2018, with an annual growth rate of nearly 15% since 2013. According to one study, 50% of Americans 12 and older listened to an audiobook in 2019. Digital audiobooks are available as downloads and some also as CDs, but by and large, it’s the digital version driving the market. The annual consumer survey by the Audiobook Publishers Association (APA) indicates that 56 percent of audiobook listeners say that they budget time to listen, and are buying more and more books. Edison Research also found that audiobook listeners read or listened to an average of 15 books in the last year.
Part of this popularity stems from the fact that downloaded files can be played on multiple devices and in different places—at home, in the car, at lunch—without losing your place. Some Audible books (Amazon) also have the Whispersync feature, which lets you alternately listen and read your book on Kindle, and updates either the audio or the print file as you switch devices.
It takes at least two people to produce an audiobook—the author and a narrator (aka producer). ACX (https://www.acx.com/) is Audible’s publishing platform. It allows you to sell your book on Audible, Amazon and iTunes. After you register on the website (https://www.acx.com/), you make your title available for auditions. Narrators can review available titles and contact you. However, I found it much more effective to survey potential producers myself and invite those I liked to audition by reading an audition script I provided. You can narrow the list of over 100, 000 producers by gender, voice style, accent and other parameters. The Natalie McMasters books are written in first person, so I wanted a female narrator with a youthful, hip voice with a slight Southern accent.
You can pay your producer three different ways—by royalty share, a royalty share plus a one-time payment, or with a straight payment. The amount of the payment is determined according to the finished length in hours (PFH) of the audiobook (not how long the producer takes to produce it), which ACX estimates for you according to the word count. For Stripper at 93K words, the audio length estimate was 10 hours.
A royalty share agreement lasts for seven years, during which time the author and the producer split a 40% royalty. Many established producers, some of whom who are also professional voice actors, prefer either royalty share plus or straight payment. Rates run from $50 – $400 PFH. Producers post their payment preferences, so the author doesn’t have to waste time negotiating with someone who wants a different deal than the one that author is offering. For a royalty share, the author must commit to sell the audiobook on ACX only. For a payment deal, the royalty percentage is 25%, and the author keeps all of it. To get my royalty share deal, I contacted over a hundred potential producers and got about ten replies.
The author and narrator agree on delivery dates for the first 15 minutes of the recording and for the final version. The author has to approve the first 15 minutes for the project to proceed, and the contract can be canceled without penalty if it is unacceptable. After that, the contract can only be cancelled by mutual agreement, and with ACX’s permission.
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Thomas A. Burns, Jr. is the author of the Natalie McMasters Mysteries. He was born and grew up in New Jersey, attended Xavier High School in Manhattan, earned B.S degrees in Zoology and Microbiology at Michigan State University and a M.S. in Microbiology at North Carolina State University. He currently resides in Wendell, North Carolina. As a kid, Tom started reading mysteries with the Hardy Boys, Ken Holt and Rick Brant, and graduated to the classic stories by authors such as A. Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout, to name a few. Tom has written fiction as a hobby all of his life, starting with Man from U.N.C.L.E. stories in marble-backed copybooks in grade school. He built a career as technical, science and medical writer and editor for nearly thirty years in industry and government. Now that he’s truly on his own as a novelist, he’s excited to publish his own mystery series, as well as to contribute stories about his second most favorite detective to the MX Books of New Sherlock Holmes Stories.
The audio version of Stripper is narrated by the talented Lisa S. Ware, of Voices from LSWare. It will be available from Audible Amazon and iTunes in mid-November. The Kindle version of Stripper! is available from Amazon.