The Do-It-Yourself Audio Book

Take it to the limit! --Glenn Frey

Thank you to everyone who read and shared my March 19 post, “Eight Years Between Book Sales.” I so appreciate your kind words about the experiences recounted in that essay.

Thank you to those who recently subscribed to this newsletter too. I’m slowly building it and enjoying the process while also wondering what the hell I’m doing half the time. I’ll be posting other personal essays in the next few weeks. Today, however, I’m sharing some practical tips on…

The DIY Audio Book

Late last summer, pre-publication optimism (and bravado) compelled me to undertake the task of recording an audio book for my forthcoming novel in memos Please Be Advised. The paperback and e-book versions were scheduled for a mid-October release, and because I had placed the book with the indie press 7.13 Books on my own, i.e. without an agent, I retained all subsidiary rights due to the publisher’s generous, author-centric policies.

This is a good position to be in, particularly if you already have connections with foreign publishers, audio book producers, e.g. Blackstone Audio or RBMedia, and book scouts/producers/actors/directors seeking intellectual property for adaptation for the big and small screen. If you’re like a lot of writers, myself included, and don’t have an extensive network of entertainment-industry contacts and foreign publishers to market your new books to, however, it can be difficult to sell these subsidiary rights.

If you are committed to finding buyers for these rights, however, you’ll need to research comps—books that resemble yours in style, tone, and subject matter—and see who’s publishing their work abroad, turning it into audio books, and adapting it for Hollywood. You then draft a query letter and start sending it out as time and energy permit.

Last summer 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.

Source: Creative Soul, Adobe stock

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 last 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 wasn’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 friend, podcaster (The Writer Shed) and 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—ACX states that one of the main reasons a DIY audiobook is rejected is if the files are 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 (her first novel/third book, You Are Here, will be published on May 2 by 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, instead of asking a long-suffering friend or book designer to help you.

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, the good news arrived 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 still resides in the double digits. But I’m very happy this version is out there.

Coda: Bookseller PBA Postcard Exhibit 2: