Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, welcome. My name is Angela. I am a full-time voiceover artist and audiobook narrator, and my channel is dedicated to those of you that are just getting started out in this wonderful world of voiceover. And through my channel, I share with you some of the techniques and tips and tricks that I use every day in my own voiceover business. In today's video, I wanted to discuss something that had come up in last week's group session. And I say group session because I have a smaller group of Platinum members through my website where we meet on a weekly basis to discuss, you know, successes and failures and questions. And we talk for about an hour or more, you know, once a week all together. And through that group session, I had a particular person who was auditioning for ACX. And I'm not going to say your name, but I hope this is okay that I talk about this. You know who you are. But he was auditioning for books on ACX, and he had somebody approach him about a book at a particular word count. And when he accepted the job, it turned out it was four books totaling over 200,000 words. And they had given him, I think, roughly a month or less to get 200,000 words done. And when we talked about it last week, I was kind of—I don't know if that's going to be enough time, especially for your first book. You know, you want to give yourself the time you need to get any book done, let alone one of a pretty good size or four books that total a pretty good size. So what I wanted to share with you today is if you are in the same position, if you are just starting out with narrating audiobooks but don't really know what kind of book or what size of book you should start with, that would be safe for you to try as your first book because—and I say safe, but what I mean by that is that you want to have enough time to be comfortable. You don't want to feel rushed and rush through. You want to be able to have ample time to perhaps even read the book prior, make some notes, come up with some ideas for characters, discuss these things with a rights holder. You know, you want to have time to do it the right way and to have enough time to be comfortable with maybe still working out some of the bugs of your formatting techniques for audiobooks. There is a lot to producing audiobooks, and you definitely don't want to feel rushed. So we're going to hop into ACX now, and I'm going to show you some of the books that I recommend would be good for a first-time audiobook narrator through ACX. So let's go. Okay, so here we are on my ACX dashboard, and to search for books, you want to go to search and for titles accepting auditions. Now the next thing we're going to do is adjust these filters over here for what kind of books that we would like to see. So the first thing we're going to do is go over to genre, and mine is set for right now to exclude erotica and sexuality because I have nothing against it. I say you do you. You do whatever you want, and there is a lot of money in that particular niche. So if that's what you want to do, then uncheck this box. But for this tutorial, I'm going to leave that checked because I don't want to be banned by YouTube or something. So we're going to leave it now as any and exclude erotica and sexuality. So apply. And then for gender, I'm going to select female and apply. And then for compensation, for your very first audio book, you could select unspecified, you could select $50 to $100 per finished hour, or you could do royalty share, royalty share plus, you could do $200 to $400 per finished hour, whatever you want to do. This is my personal opinion for you as a brand new audiobook narrator. But I would leave this as any. So you don't really cut any of your possibilities or take any opportunities off the table. So leave your compensation as any, and we'll see what we get. So we're going to apply that filter. All right. So most importantly, for this demonstration, for a brand new audiobook narrator, I would come down to project length and select a book under three hours. And we're going to apply that and see what we get. Okay, so we have 249 titles that match this criteria. So let's look through and see if we can find a book. We got Fiverr for beginners here. That would be interesting. Rapid Deep Sleep Meditation. And what I'm looking for is if this were me looking for my very first audiobook, I would choose a book that was more like a self-help or an instructional book, because there aren't any characters. There's no accents that need to be, you know, practiced and perfected before you start narrating. Pick something that is relatively easy or easier to do for you for your very first book. You want to more or less get the hang of narrating the book and then editing and formatting the book. And once you're familiar with that process, then move on to some of the more complicated books, the books with characters, or, you know, maybe there are several different accents that that is needed for that particular book. But for your very first book, I would start out with something maybe like a children's book or, like I said, a self-help guide or instructional book of some sort. So what I'm going to do is just select one of these. Let's check out Backyard Beekeeping, because that is interesting to me. And if the book is interesting to you, all the more better, because if you're interested in the subject, you're going to convey that with your voice, right? You're going to get a little bit more excited and upbeat about what you're narrating if you have an interest in what you're reading. So let's go and check out Backyard Beekeeping. Okay, so just checking out this book here, we have an estimated length of two hours. We can see that the pay type or project budget is royalty share. We can see that the word count is 18,616 words. And we can see that there's a little bit of about this title here. And again, bees and beekeeping is interesting to me, so I would enjoy this. We have English language, or language is English, male or female, adult, and American general accent, articulate, again, I think I could definitely hit all of those points. It looks like it was posted to ACX just yesterday. The original publication date was just three days ago. However, there is no Amazon sales rank or ratings, which means that the book is brand new, brand new. I don't think it has been completely published to Amazon. I could be wrong. Otherwise, there would be a sales rank, or it could be something with ACX and Amazon not speaking to each other properly at this time, but there should be a sales rank here. There is zero ratings, but again, this book is brand new, so there might not have been any ratings coming through just yet, but hopefully there will be. But there is a comment from the rights holder saying that he has a fairly large following on social media, so that would be a great way for him to market this book. And if I had seen this book on Amazon, and I actually had a backyard, because I live in a townhouse, I don't actually have a yard, but if I had a yard and some acreage, maybe, I would definitely look into beekeeping. I think it's really interesting, and plus, honey, right? And that could be another profitable side business if that was something that you wanted to do. So for me, I would totally buy this book or the audiobook version for myself. So I can see how this could be personal opinion. This could be a book that would earn you some royalties. So what we're going to do is check out this book on Amazon and see if we can find out a little bit more information about this book. Okay, so here is this book on Amazon. It looks like it is, paperback is $13.99. And let's see, okay, so that's a discount for Kindle Unlimited. Okay, so if the paperback is going to be $13.99, the audiobook version, Audible bases their book prices on the overall length of the book. So a book this size, and I'm not 100% sure, so don't quote me, but this audiobook could be a few dollars, right? So 20% of that for your royalty share would be, you know, a dollar or less. Roughly. But if this book sold well, that could be a nice little, you know, little income stream for you in royalties. And again, the idea behind royalty share in audiobooks is if you narrated, think about it for a second, just hang out there with me. If you narrated a hundred of these smaller sized audiobooks, and let's just say roughly you made a dollar on each one, that's an additional hundred dollars or so every month, right? And if you narrated more of these, and I'm not saying do it all in one month, but I mean, they add up, right? The more of these that you narrate for royalty share, those royalties all add up every month. And that's only if you sold one, right? If you narrated a hundred books for a dollar each, and only one of them sold every month, that's an extra hundred dollars a month. Now if they sold more than that, then you would make more. So definitely don't scoff at the smaller sized books on ACX, because they all add up. So for me, this one would be a good one to start with. Let's see what else we can find. Okay, I had to click on the Fiverr for Beginners. I'm not sure just looking at this page, what is going on here. But this book was published six years ago. So I'm not sure how accurate this information is. Not only that, but it says estimated length is zero hours, and the word count is 100. So I'm not really sure what's going on with this particular title. So we're just going to keep looking. Okay, this book here, Nightshade Forest, looks really interesting. However, I do see that the character age is tween, and the accent is American Midwest. If you can pull off these voice tones and accents, then definitely this would be one to look at. I do see that this book was originally published in 2020. It was posted to ACX, it looks like, four days ago. The sales rank is two million, however, there are 27 ratings at a 4.8 average. So as a brand new audiobook narrator, this would be another one that I would look at. The estimated length is 2.4 finished hours, with a word count of 22,000, and royalty share. So being a little bit larger than that last book that we looked at, it might even be in the next range, price-wise, but it would still be just a few dollars, I would believe, for Audible. But again, they all add up, and children's books do really, really well, because children, if you think about it, we're in an age where everything is electronic for the little ones. Parents can read a book to them, but if they're in the car, or it's getting close to nap time, they want to wind down, they might be given an audiobook to listen to. Children's books do very well on Audible. So this would be one I would definitely look at. Royalty share again, they all add up. So I hope this video gives you an idea of what kind of books to look at if you're a brand new audiobook narrator. And again, you want to give yourself time to narrate the book, time to edit the book, time to format the book, extra time, more time than you would need as you get more and more experienced. Because in the beginning, it's going to take you longer to do everything. That's just the way that it is. It's going to take you longer to get into the habit of narrating long paragraphs. You know, you're going to want to take more breaks, drink more water, and then it's going to take you a little bit longer to edit the book because, you know, you're deciding what breaths to take out and how much pauses to leave between the paragraphs and the sentences. Does this sound right? No. Then you ask your husband or your wife, does this sound right? You know what I mean? It's going to take you longer in the very beginning until you find your groove, right? It's just going to take you longer. So I would give yourself the ample time to get these books done. A month is generally what I ask for now just because I usually have two or three books in queue all the time. But in the very beginning, I did the same thing. I asked for a month on every single book. But if you have nothing else going on, you know, if you don't have a full-time job and you want something to focus on every day, then, you know, leave the completion time up to you. But I generally ask for a month even on a book as small as 18,000 words just so in the beginning because that way you'll have the time to get everything done and perfected. You can play with the different settings for your formatting. But I feel like a darn broken record. But I wanted to impress upon you that take the time you need. Look for a smaller book to start with, one that does not have a bunch of crazy accents or a bunch of different characters to keep track of. Do yourself that favor. So I hope this video was helpful. If you did find it helpful, please hit the like and subscribe buttons. I really appreciate it. And if you have any questions or comments, Pete, please feel free to leave them down below. And if you'd like to know more about me, my work, or how I can help you get started in voiceover, or if you need a voiceover artist, please check out my website at voiceoverangela.com. Thank you so much for your time. Have a great day, and I'll see you on the next one. Bye.