The DIY Audio Book Redux
How to create your own audio book
Addendum: L.A. friends and fellow writers, the great Steve Almond will be teaching a 90-minute class on plot at the Village Well in Culver City this Thursday, March 27!! It's a bargain too - more info and registration here!
Today’s post is an update of a how-to I wrote shortly after starting Bookish in March 2023. Its first incarnation reached a small audience, and like the update of the writer and artist residencies list I published earlier this year, this newer version is likely to reach more writers it might prove useful for.
First, three events this week:
- If you’re in Los Angeles for the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference: tomorrow, Wednesday, March 26, 7 PM, I’ll be taking part in a reading to benefit the tutoring center 826 LA/Time Travel Mart in Echo Park, 1714 W. Sunset Blvd. Tickets ($10) available here. Readers include
, Laura Warrell, J. Ryan Stradal, Gina Tron, Kurt Baumeister, Jon Chaiim McConnell, Aatif Rashid, Leah Angstman.- AWP Panel: Only Connect! Innovative and Effective Online Teaching - Thursday, March 27, 9 AM, at the L.A. Convention Center, Rm 502A, Level 2.
- Also on Thursday, March 27, 12 PM: Prose + Poetry in L.A. reading (cohosted by JackLeg Press, Sunday Reading Series, and Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies’ MFA program), 831 W. Venice Blvd, Ste. 102. Readers include
, Simone Muench, Kenyatta Rogers, Paula Carter, Ananda Lima. Free event. Refreshments, words + words.—
Creating Your Own Audio Book
In August of 2022, pre-publication optimism compelled me to undertake the task of recording an audio book for my novel in memos Please Be Advised. The paperback and e-book versions were scheduled for a mid-October 2022 release, and because I had placed the book on my own with the indie press 7.13 Books, I retained subsidiary rights.
Before I decided to I produce my own audio book of Please Be Advised, however, I wrote to Tantor Audio, the company that produced an audio book of one of my previous novels, Paris, He Said, to ask if they’d be interested in creating an audio version of Please Be Advised, but I didn’t receive a reply.
Around the same time, I was also querying agents in the UK in the hope one might be interested in selling Please Be Advised to a press in Britain or another Commonwealth country. My preceding book, The Virginity of Famous Men (Bloomsbury, 2016), had been favorably reviewed in The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, Irish Times, Daily Mail, and a few other overseas newspapers, but I didn’t receive replies to these queries either. (The non-reply, I’ve been told, is the new no. My reply to this: #*%$!)
As if I weren’t pestering enough people in the publishing and bookselling worlds already, I was also flinging galleys of Please Be Advised and promotional postcards at unsuspecting bookstores across the U.S. while alternating between feelings of new-book enthusiasm and gray futility.
A month or so passed, and I realized at minimum, I could likely figure out how to produce my own audio book with Audible’s ACX platform.
If you’ve had any interest in creating an audio version of one of your books, it’s not as difficult to do as you’d think. Here’s how I did it:
1) After I filled out the short, necessary form on ACX to make it clear I had the audio rights to Please Be Advised, I was able to begin. Your publisher can help you with this if necessary—you send them a link and they can quickly confirm you have the audio rights. My sense is that most small presses would be happy to allow authors to make their own audio books because it’s yet another way to deliver your book to readers and potentially to sell e-book and hard copy versions too.
2) Using a podcast-grade microphone which I plugged into a USB port on my iMac, I chose QuikTime to create small audio clips of each memo. You can use GarageBand too if you have a Mac, but the files are bigger and I wasn’t sure how to compress them, and since QuikTime worked well, it was easiest for me to stick with it.
3) Over a period of about a month I recorded one memo after another, usually 5-12 a day, numbering each file in order. I had to make sure my partner was out of the apartment or asleep when I recorded them because almost any sound he made outside my small study would be picked up by the mic. (That apartment was also three blocks from the 210 freeway, and if someone blasted by on a motorcycle or in a muscle car, the memo I was recording would have to be tossed out.)
4) Once all the files had been recorded satisfactorily, I took fellow writer David Berner’s (
) advice and hired an audio technician on Fiverr to group the memos into files (five memos per file, in most cases, to avoid uploading 130 individual short files—one of the main reasons ACX might reject a DIY audio book is file length, i.e. they’re too long or too short).5) The Fiverr technician also made sure the sound quality met ACX standards and returned each set of files to me within a few days. All told, I spent about $120 for his help, and this was my only out-of-pocket expense because the podcast mic was my partner’s and already lived in a cupboard in our apartment.
6) Writer and artist Gigi Little, who designed Please Be Advised’s cover, and my friend Karin Lin-Greenberg (most recent book, You Are Here, Counterpoint) helped me with the square-sized graphic required for the book jacket upload to ACX too. If you have some facility with Photoshop, you can do the graphic on your own from a jpeg of your book jacket.
7) After uploading the jacket graphic and the audio files (and giving them chapter titles), all that remained was to wait to see if ACX would accept the files.
8) Fifteen days later, I was notified that my files had been accepted and Please Be Advised was now an audio book and available for purchase from iTunes, Audible, and one or two other platforms.
9) How many audio books have I sold so far? Full disclosure: not very many – the sales figure is in the double digits. I’m nonetheless happy this version is out there.
Thanks for the great post, Christine. This information is timely and useful. I'm thinking of an audiobook for my new novel.