Is Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX:) JUST ANOTHER WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING?

Carolyn Howard-Johnson shares writers’ resources on her award-winning blog Sharing with Writers

IS ACX (Audio Book Creation Exchange) JUST ANOTHER WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING?

My friends and fellow authors kept telling me, “You have such a pleasant speaking voice, why don’t you try making an audio version of one of your Tales2Inspire books. So during Covid, while isolating a lot and feeling a bit bored, I decided to give it a try.

Well first, of course, I had to purchase the proper equipment. You know, without getting too extravagant, I spent about $100 for a decent microphone and pop filter. (The latter is used to screen out some of those extraneous popping sounds caused by recording certain words, especially those starting with the letters p, t, k, b, d, g.  Try it yourself. Put a hand up over your mouth as you say words such as pain, kid, bag and you’ll feel the air that pops out of your mouth.) 

And that’s for a professional producer – so if you’re a novice, narrating and producing your own audiobook, you can expect it to take a lot longer than that. Perhaps I recorded 3-5 finished pages per hour, and trust me that is a conservative estimate.  I was constantly listening, cutting, and rerecording. So let’s do a bit of math.Tales2Inspire ~ The Diamond Collection – Series V totals 238 pages. Listening time for this recording would total 5 hours, 3 minutes and 15 seconds, so let’s just round it off to 5 hours. Multiply that by the 6.2 hours it takes to produce each hour of finished product: (5 times 6.2 ) equals 31 hours of recording time to create this audio book. My guess is it took me a lot longer than that.Next I had to upload my files to ACX (acx.com). The ACX wheels spin as you upload each chapter individually. When you first upload your chapters,  some of them might be rejected = because the volume is too low, or perhaps because of extraneous noise as a ticking clock you fogot to remove from the room. When that happens, you will have to fine tune those audio files. (Luckily I have a  grandson who is tech savvy, so he did that work for me.)

The payoff must be in royalties, I thought.  Here’s the rub:  If I agree to an exclusive, I receive a 40% royalty, which totals $5.88 per audio book sale. (A non-exclusive yields even less – only 25%, a grand total of $2.99 per sale.)(Just as a side note, you should know that that’s well below the industry standard of 70% for other digital products like games or apps.)Authors are given a special link to promote their audio books so that if others order using that link, the author is rewarded. But in their own words, here is how:

TALES2INSPIRE® DIAMOND COLLECTION DOUBLE BOOKSWINNERS OF AWARD FROMNATIONAL  INDIE EXCELLENCE & READERS FAVORITE

Lois is an associate of TheNewBookReview, working with a passion to help other authors strengthen their visibility on this blog and elsewhere. Through her annual Tales2Inspire contest, a labor of love that has received worldwide recognition, she accepts entries from talented newbies and accomplished authors alike and continues to feature her winning authors on an ongoing basis. True to her ‘Authors Helping Authors’ philosophy, she charges no submission fee for folks to enter her contest. She receives no remuneration for any of her services, but hopes those who benefit from them will express their appreciation by purchasing Tales2Inspire anthologies and writing reviews. In her continuing spirit of “Authors Helping Authors,” Lois provides several tips on how authors can help promote themselves while writing honest reviews for others. To read her article, Be a Hero: Make Some Magic for Yourself. CLICK HERE.

All details for submitting stories to her annual Tales2Inspire anthologies are detailed  HERE. To date, winning authors whose stories are published in Tales2Inspire anthologies come from across the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom.