Speaker 1: Hello, Writer, and welcome back to my life. It's Writer Wednesday, the day where I give you my best tips and advice on the art and the business of writing and tell you how I do what I do as an indie author. As per usual, today we're answering a question from one of my $5 patrons on Patreon, and today's question comes to us from Lars Leonard, who asks, You might want to cover the do's and don'ts of hiring an audio narrator for those of us not ready or able to narrate our own. Thanks for the question, Lars. I do happen to have some particular insight on this one, seeing as how I am an actual, like, trained voice narrator myself, have done voiceover work in the past, and am currently narrating my own audiobooks. And I have also worked with other narrators, so here is all my advice on what you should and shouldn't do when you are considering hiring a narrator for your audiobook. So the first thing to know is that if you're literally just starting out and you've never produced audiobooks before, make sure to hire your narrator through a good, reputable service. The two biggest services out there right now, at least for indie authors, are ACX, which pretty much limits your reach to Audible, and then Findaway Voices, which allows you to distribute your audiobook everywhere. Both of these services have methods for authors to contact narrators and arrange a business deal between the author and the narrator, basically. Use a service like this. All of the terms and conditions will be very clear, and they have systems in place to ensure that you achieve some minimum level of quality, and that if you don't achieve some minimum level of quality, you don't get hosed in terms of paying thousands of dollars for a product that isn't actually very good. Like, you might have seen me talk recently on the channel about how I went looking for audiobook narrators, like trying to hire my own, going to people that I knew who I thought could maybe, like, do the project. I only did that because I have my own professional experience as a narrator and I've worked with lots of actors in film and everything like that. Like, I am a special case. If you're just starting out and you don't have extensive training, history, and background in acting and voice acting in particular, don't go, like, looking for your own narrator. Do it through a good, reputable service, one of the two big ones, ACX or Findaway Voices. And just as a quick note, because a lot of people like to ask, should you use ACX or Findaway Voices? That is a very personal decision and it's based on a lot of factors. For me, I didn't want to go through ACX because I didn't want to be restricted to the Audible platform for the length of time they require. Because ACX exclusivity requires you to be exclusive with them for seven years. And that's just too long. There's no reason for me to think or to assume that Audible is still going to be king of the mountain in seven years. As opposed to my stance on Kindle Unlimited and Amazon exclusivity when it comes to ebooks, they only ask for 90 days at a time and you can opt out whenever you want. 90 days? Yes, absolutely. Seven years? No. On the other hand, ACX does, right now, currently give you far and away the best royalty rate and people who are making a lot of money on audiobooks are usually doing it through ACX. Alright, back to actually selecting your narrator. Be very wary if you find an actor or somebody in your life who has a very good voice but very limited professional acting experience. Because there is more to narrating an audiobook than just having a nice voice. Just like there is more to, let's say, modeling than just looking pretty. It is a skill and, frankly, it is a very hard job and professional narrators are professionals who should be respected. Obviously, every actor needs a first project to work on and if you really have a good feeling about somebody who's never done it before, I mean, I guess go with it. Just be aware. There is more to it than just having the voice. When it comes to selecting your narrator and what type of narrator you want, things like gender, accent, all that sort of stuff, genre should play a very heavy role. And you can probably already think with some of the basics of this. Like, young adults should generally have a younger narrator. Fantasy does tend to lend itself well to British accents. For reasons. Spend some time researching what the norms are for audiobooks in your genre and realize that you can buck trends, right? Like I have actually avoided British accents in my audiobooks. But make sure you do something like that with full knowledge of what you're doing and why. In general, if you don't have a very good reason to abandon a trend, then you should probably follow it. When it comes to the actual skill of your narrator, being able to do a bunch of different voices is, yes, very important, especially the larger the cast of characters in your book. But there is something that is even more important. And that is the general, overall emotional tone of your entire work. If your narrator can't nail that, your book is just—it's not gonna do super well and you and probably your audience won't really be able to pinpoint why. For example, if you, as the author, write with a very emotionally invested voice, just in general, where things, you know, are a certain way and you have strong emotional themes running throughout your work, a narrator who is sort of a dry reader or, like, has a more subdued delivery, it's probably not going to work with your writing style. For this reason, when you are auditioning various narrators, you should, one, keep this in mind of what you actually want the narrator to achieve, and two, you should see how easy the narrator is to work with. How easy someone is to work with and how well they take direction is as important, if not more important, than their actual raw level of skill. Because somebody might be a really, really good narrator, but if they aren't delivering what you need and want in your audiobook, then they're not actually that good for you. And this is one of those cases where it's not necessarily your fault if you can't work with someone, it's not necessarily their fault. Two really good people can just not be compatible as work partners, and that's okay. So just make sure that when you're scoping out your narrator that they do take direction. Like, you can obviously have a conversation about changes that you need to ask for and everything like that, but if they don't take direction at all or if they try to over-argue you or something like that, you should be wary of working with them. One quick point here, and I feel like this one goes without saying, don't switch your narrator mid-stream in a book series. Keep the same narrator for a whole series. Don't. Don't do that. Nobody likes that. Again, you probably wouldn't have done that. I don't know why anyone would do that, but some people do that, so don't. Alright, now let's get into a couple of personal opinions of mine. These are personal opinions, not what I would say hard and fast rules. These are the ways that I think you should conduct your audiobook business with your narrator. I believe that you should partner with your narrator more than just hire them. That does require a bit of extra work in terms of seeing whether your narrator is someone that you want to partner with. But if they are, both you and your narrator will both do much better if you are collaborating on your audiobook rather than just issuing orders and following orders. And the same is true after the audiobook is done. Narrators can help promote audiobooks they've narrated, and audiobook producers, i.e. you, the author, can help promote the awesome narrator of your book. That is just going to create a better relationship that's going to be better for both of you in the long run. Speaking of the long run, again, personal opinion, I believe that you should always, if possible, seek out a business deal that gives the audiobook narrator a share of the back end of your sales. This is a personal belief of mine, a personal preference. It is what I tried to set up when we were looking to hire an external narrator for the Underrealm audiobooks before I decided to do it myself. And in the future, when we do use other narrators and when we have multicast productions, they will always, always, always get a share of the back end. That just seems fair to me. And while, yes, there are lots of narrators out there who will just work for a stiff upfront fee and none of the back end, I think that that might change in the future, and legitimately I think that it should change. Which is not to say that you should do away with upfront payments either. Like people need to eat right now, but then also if they produce a very good, high quality audiobook that makes a ton of money in the future, like you're not the only person who put creative work into that. That's all I'm saying. So there you go. Personal opinion. Take it or leave it. And that is all the answer I have for Lars' question today. Thank you so much for the question, Lars. I hope that you and others found the answer helpful. A reminder to the rest of you that my $5 patrons on Patreon, like Lars, are the only ones who can ask questions for me to answer in these videos, and they get these videos two weeks ahead of everybody else. If you want to be one of those awesome and incredibly attractive individuals, check out my Patreon link in the description below. You can also buy the Writer Wednesday t-shirt. It tells people you're a writer, so you don't have to. Thanks so much for watching, keep on writing, and I will see you next Wednesday. Bye.