Speaker 1: I am a self-published author, and I create audiobooks for all of my books. In this video, I'm going to share with you how I do that. There are a ton of options out there for ways to produce audiobooks as an indie author. I am only sharing with you the one that I personally use. There are also new options that are coming out all the time. I just got an email a couple of days ago, as of March 2024, that KDP and Kindle Direct Publishing is launching a beta program for using AI to narrate audiobooks. I work with a real human narrator, and I produce my audiobooks through ACX, which is Amazon's audiobook company. There are a bunch of other ways that you can do it. You can use Findaway Voices to produce audiobooks. You can find narrators independently. I have really loved my experience with ACX. In this video, I'm just going to share with you a little bit about ACX and how I use it and what the interface looks like, and how I used it to find a narrator, how I use it to produce the audiobooks within the production process, and then how it works with royalty shares and distributions and paying your narrator and the different options they have for distributing it and selling it in different stores. So ACX stands for the Audiobook Creation Exchange, and when I click on this, it's going to take me to my homepage. It's not necessarily going to show you the actual homepage of ACX if you were to open it, but this is what it looks like when I open it. I have three audiobooks that I've already completed, so these are the first three books in my series, and I created all of them on ACX. So when I first went to go create They Stay's audiobook, I didn't really know how audiobooks worked. I didn't have a narrator, and so I launched auditions through ACX, and ACX managed all of the auditions for me. When I went to produce this audiobook, it gave me the option of whether I wanted to post auditions to find a narrator, and I said yes. So I uploaded an audition side, which was just a section of the audiobook, and ACX sent that out to a bunch of different narrators that they have within the network. And I received a bunch of auditions, yeah, like 50 auditions for this audiobook, and it was really, really cool how many people responded, and I was able to go through. Ah. I don't know why I'm getting so many error messages. It was really cool that I was able to go through and look at everybody's audition and listen to them read the same side, and I found my narrator through this audition process. She is unbelievably talented. She brings these books to life, and listening to her narrate them is just like listening to a movie play out in my head. It is so cool, and she's so talented, and I'm so glad that I was able to find her through this. But ACX was able to connect me with her. And then once we started working together, I sent her the entire book, and then she uploads every single audio file for every chapter into the ACX portal, and then when I want to go proof it, I can just play every single section, and then I can listen to her narrate it, and then once I'm happy with it, I approve it, and then I submit it, and ACX works on distributing it. I currently have the Hunts audiobook in production. My narrator has already finished working on this, but I have my brother. My brother does all of the voicing for the male characters in my series, and he's also a voice actor, and he's awesome, and I'm so grateful that he's able to work on this. It's so meaningful that he's collaborating on this with me, but he is in college full-time, and it's very busy, and so it is awesome that he's still willing to do this, but I also have to work around his schedule a little bit in order to make this happen. So we're right now waiting for his audio in order to finish producing this, and then once we have that, I will be able to publish this book. This is the production dashboard for while you're actually working on the project. Liz, my narrator for all of the Shiloh and Francesca sections, has already uploaded all of her audio files, and so that's why you can see them all here. And then these are the chapters that are waiting for my brother's audio. So once all of the audio is uploaded, I'll be able to listen to it all the way through, which is going to be a long process, but really fun, and then I'll be able to submit it to distribution. You can also find narrators directly through their network. There are tons and tons and tons of people in this network on ACX, and you can filter through all of these different types of voices in genre, language, accent, gender, age, style, anything you want, and you can reach out to them directly if you want to, or you can post auditions like I did, they make it really easy. So I'm going to see right now if I can just show you the process and the dashboard and what everything looks like using the book that I published in high school, which does not have an audiobook, and I'm not planning on making an audiobook for it ever, but I'm going to claim the title just so I can walk you through the process. So this is the dashboard, you click claim your book because you need to claim it as your own, and then you can begin the audiobook process. You search for yourself, the title of the book, and scroll down until you find it. So let's see if this even comes up. I wonder if it will, that would be weird if it doesn't come up. I sell it on Amazon. Yes, here we go, excellent, okay. So once your book comes up, you click this is my book, and then you say choose how you prefer to produce your audiobook, you can say I'm looking for someone to narrate and produce my audiobook, or I already have audio files for this book and I want to sell it. In our case we would say I'm looking for someone to narrate and produce my audiobook, so you'd find a producer, create a title, and advertise it, you'd get auditions, and then you can continue producing from there. This option, I've never done this option before, but if you did produce it on your own, you can still upload it to ACX and then sell it through their platform, but you'd have to have certain audio files that meet all of the specifications, and also are all individual chapter size, so you can still upload them. I've never done that, but I have never had to do that because my amazing audiobook narrator deals with all of that for me, and she knows exactly what to do. So we'll click continue up here. So this is the ACX book posting agreement. It's very long. So we're going to click I agree, and hit agree and continue. Excellent. So the first thing that you have to do is you describe your book for your retail page. That's you put in the blurb and you put in your sales blurb for the page. They automatically put in the blurb that you have on your Amazon sales page, so that's what's automatically going in there. You put in your copyright information, so who holds the audiobook copyright for the print if you're self-published like me. I hold all copyright to everything that I write and everything that I publish, so this is super easy. I can just put in my name, and gosh, I think this is 2015, and put in my name, because I will hold the copyright to everything. My book is fiction, thankfully, for now. The best category for my book is teen and young adult. Do I want to receive auditions for this project? If you already have a narrator that you work with, like I do for my series, I always just select no, I already selected my narrator, because then I can just make her the offer directly because obviously I'm going to keep working with her for all the books in the series. Or if it's yes, if you haven't found a narrator yet, you would click yes. For the auditions, you want to describe your ideal narrator's voice. You can say female, English, accent, you can get really specific, let's say Boston, age, elderly, vocal style, brooding. You can put in, I think we'll say hip. You can describe what you want for the audition, and this will go on your audition description. You can put in some comments to talk about what your project is like, and people who audition will see the comments. And then you can put in, or not what the audition is like, but what the book is like, and what it's about, and what you're looking for. And then you can upload an audition script, so typically this is pretty short. I put in a very short scene, it was maybe half a page long, but all of the people who auditioned read out that audition side, and I listened to all of them read the same side, and then it was easy for me to differentiate between them and choose who I wanted out of all the people who auditioned. So over here it says you should also provide your marketing plans for the audiobook edition, selling points, bestseller status, blah blah blah blah blah. ACX does a thing where they allow you to either pay up front for your narrator, and they'll charge maybe $200 per finished hour, or $150 per finished hour of audio, so if an audiobook is 10 hours long, it would be $150 for each of those 10 hours, and that would be the final cost, and then you would pay that all up front, and then have full rights to the audiobook. You can do whatever you want with it, it's yours, the contract between the two of you is done. Or they allow you to have a royalty share, and this is a contract between you and the audiobook narrator, where instead of paying your audiobook narrator, you share the royalties for the audiobook over a period of time. So this is not necessarily as lucrative for the audiobook narrator as being paid up front, it is only more lucrative if the book is extremely successful. So this is a huge gamble for a lot of people, and they might not want to take on the project if they don't think that it has the opportunity to sell that well and sell that much. So this is here if you're planning on doing a royalty share, and you're like, I have 50,000 mailing list subscribers, I have a movie deal from Universal, and this book is going to be a giant major success, that's where you would put it in the additional comments, where you can say you're going to be fine if we do a royalty share, you're going to get enough money to take on this project and everything is fine. But yeah, that's what they mean when they say you should provide your marketing plans. Because if you're going to pay the person up front, they don't really need to do your marketing plans, it doesn't really matter. Okay, so let's see if they'll let us continue. I don't know if they will, yeah, they might not. But I'm going to have to write something in here for this. I don't want this to accidentally go out, so let me just see if I can write something in here just so we can go on to the next page. Okay, cool, so this is the next page that we would reach after submitting the audition and everything. So what you do now is that you insert your chapter name, so I don't know if any of you listen to audiobooks, but when you listen to audiobooks, there are chapter names in kind of a menu that drops down as you're browsing through the audiobook. Like if you want to listen to chapter 3, you can go to the menu and then you can click chapter 3 and it'll take you to chapter 3. This is where you put in all of that information. So they give you a couple of tips for how to format your chapters to look nice and professional. This is ugly, this is pretty, moving on. And you go in and you put in all of your chapter names in this little text box here. So you would literally write chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, and go all the way down. And it will turn each of these separate lines into a different box that your narrator can upload a file into. If your chapters have names, you can put the names, like the trees can see us, like it's chapter 1, the trees can smell us, it's chapter 2, the trees can taste us, it's chapter 3. You can put in your names there if you want to. If you have found text, you can describe the found text like, uh, obituary there, and then say like chapter 4, the trees will mourn us. You can have everything that you want in there and all the different names. So once you have all of those, you can save and continue. And then it will move on to distribution. So you'll say like how many words are in your book. I think Imperfect maybe was like 101,000 or something. So it will estimate how long your audiobook will be. You have to put in what territory rights you own, so I own all rights to Imperfect. Go me. Save and continue. And then this is your general profile for your book. So it puts in, it pulls all the information from Amazon, so it can put you, like create a profile for the title, and then it allows you up here to make an offer to a producer. So this is what you would see if you already had a producer in mind that you wanted to make an offer to. If you've talked to somebody, if they know that they're going to do the project, you click make offer, and then you have to choose your producer. So this is the amazing audiobook narrator I work with for the They Stay series, but she doesn't want to take on this project. Trust me Liz, you don't want it. Then here you get to choose, obviously, the project, and then your distribution. So this is important. So this is what I wanted to talk about. This is what I wanted to come to this page for. ACX gives you an option, kind of like with Kindle Unlimited, where you can be exclusive to Audible and iTunes and Amazon with your audiobook, and they'll give you a higher royalty cut, or you can be wide and you can post your audiobook anywhere, but you get a smaller royalty. So you get 25% royalty when you have world distribution, or you have 40% royalty when you are exclusive. So this is a strategy decision, this is a marketing decision. There are a million and one things you can do with an audiobook. I need to sit down and figure out what I'm going to do with mine because right now I'm in non-exclusive distribution. You can start your books in exclusive and pull them out of exclusive and have them be wide if you want to, but only if you don't do royalty share. If you decide down here to do your royalty share, you have to be exclusive to ACX and you don't have the same control. You can't decide that you want to pull them out and, say, put your audiobooks on YouTube and monetize them. You can't do that. So you have to make that call. It's up to you and your business and what your general business strategy is, but those are the options that you're given. And then you put in your project schedule and then how long your offer is good for. But if you have a person that you already know you're going to work with, this doesn't really matter as much. So yeah, that's the general overview of how ACX works. And then you can communicate with your producer over email, you can text them, you can talk to them off of this platform if they need to know the pronunciation for something. If something's confusing, they can just text you or they can email you. You don't need to use the ACX messaging or anything, but it's pretty helpful. It manages all payment. If you are going to pay them, you can pay them and record it through ACX and everything and it'll send email reminders and it'll make sure it'll send things back and forth. You have to approve it and then they have to approve it and you have to approve it and do all of that mediation. You pay them separately, like I pay through PayPal, but then record it in ACX and she approves that she's gotten it through ACX and so it manages everything for you, which is very nice. I have had a great experience producing my audiobooks on ACX. I recommend it. I think it's great. If you're exclusive, it will distribute your books to Amazon, to Audible, and to iTunes. And if you are not exclusive, you have to do a little bit more of the legwork and upload your audiobook in the other places that you want it to be, but those are self-publishing realities. You have to hustle when you're self-published in order to get your book where you want it to be. I hope this video was helpful to you. If it was, I'd be super grateful if you could like it and also subscribe to my channel for more content like this. I make videos sharing actionable writing tips that helped me make my own writing better, along with different reviews of writing courses, writing resources, and behind-the-scenes looks at writing tools and software that I use as a self-published author. I am the author of the They Stay series, a five-book paranormal thriller series that has ghosts and mystery and some elements of horror. This book just won the grand prize at the Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards of 2023, so that's very exciting and I'm very proud of my little book baby. If you have any questions about ACX or uploading audiobooks to different places or producing audiobooks as an indie author, please don't hesitate to comment below and I will do my best to answer them to the best of my capabilities. I hope you have a fantastic week, and as always, happy writing.