The Joy of an Audiobook

Some things I learned when producing my last four audiobooks and why I'm getting such great results from having them around

More news from my writing world: My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, released in October, was favorably reviewed in Blueline, the literary journal dedicated to the spirit of the Adirondacks. It was also chosen for Literary Aviatrix book club as the feature for August, and became a finalist for both the 18th National Indie Excellent Awards and the Ann Bannon Popular Choice Award. I worked very hard on that book and I’m so glad it’s getting recognition. My newest novel, Last Bets, is out now, and it was a bestseller on Amazon. “Readers will get lost in Moore's beautiful prose, her impeccable plotting, and her outstandingly relatable and multi-layered characters. Beautifully wrought story of two women artists outrunning their demons,” said Booklife/Publisher’s Weekly who made it an Editor’s Pick.

Photo by Joyce Busola on Unsplash

Should you advocate for (or produce yourself) an audiobook for your book? Even if your book is already published, does it make sense? Is there enough benefit to the author? Will it open your book to a wider readership? If it’s part of your publicity budget from your publisher, is it worth allocating funds? If you are indie, should you produce an audiobook yourself? Will sales ever pay back the costs? And how do you go about it, exactly?

These good questions have come my way from readers of this newsletter, and they spurred me on to both research and production of audiobooks for four of my own books to date. I’ve learned a lot! What not to do, what to spend, where to find all the parts that make an excellent production. And how to evaluate the expense and the benefit.

First, the good news: In the eleven months since my second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was released, its audiobook royalties have been a small, steady stream of income each month. Not huge, but I rarely expect that. I’m happy to watch the sales and receive the small percentage I get as author; I believe it’ll more than pay back my costs over the next few years.

But even better is the boost to my confidence. I’ve made a good decision and listeners are responding with regular downloads.

Do you have any say?

Many authors don’t have a choice about an audiobook. In the years I published traditionally, my books were mostly midlist. I’d inquire about an audiobook but always got a no.

This was before the pandemic, and audiobooks hadn’t yet hit their stride. Sales of audiobooks weren’t impressive enough to warrant the expense, in my editors’ view. Despite my publicity budget.

Indie authors have complete control over this. When I decided to publish my first indie book, back in 2011, a writing-craft book called Your Book Starts Here, sales were surprisingly good and the book even won an award. (It’s a series of lessons based on my years of teaching book structure at writing schools around the U.S.) Encouraged, I decided to explore making an audiobook.

A friend recommended the no-cost approach of ACX’s profit sharing platform via Amazon, which allows authors and narrators to share the risk of production and split the profits. I auditioned quite a few narrators, but I didn’t know much about how to judge voices or pacing or tone. I chose one, she did a decent job, but I realize there was a lot more to learn if I wanted to try this again. I also learned that broader distribution systems exist, much bigger than ACX offers, which allow an audiobook to be everywhere, not just on Amazon.

A fine choice for my first try. The audiobook continues to sell well. But when I was preparing my first novel for re-release, I knew I had to work harder to find the right narrator.

Finding a narrator

My first novel was accepted by a small press and although I petitioned, even offered to cover the production costs, the publisher was not interested in an audiobook. So I waited. After ten years and a good run, I asked for the rights back. They were gracious and said yes, I rereleased the book with new blurbs and a better interior, and I set about finding a narrator I loved.

Some authors want to narrate their own books, and if you have a super smooth voice, go for it. That novel’s main character is a teenager in trouble; I knew my voice would never be Molly Fisher. Authors who take the self-narration route are facing work, as well: studio time, often a producer, and the sheer effort of reading well aloud.

I decided to gamble again, this time with money. I would find a narrator who could make me fall in love with the story again, ten years later.

Good narrators can do this. The best ones are well respected for their work at revealing even more about a character via the sound they create, the pacing and rhythm of their reading. One favorite for my work commutes long ago was Robert Bathurst, famous for narrating the voice of Inspector Armand Gamache in Louise Penny’s cozy mysteries about Three Pines. Bathurst discusses his experience in this interview from Lit Hub (totally worth a read if you’re geeking on this subject like I have been).

Or consider Meryl Streep brilliantly narrating Ann Patchett’s novel, Tom Lake. Streep is unsurpassed in her range of voice skills, her tones, accent, and pacing, and they shine in this production.

What do narrators cost?

I called a friend who runs a company in the Twin Cities that specializes in voiceover narration. He met with me on Zoom to educate me about union rates, how actors charge for a project, and where to look for lower-price but still excellent voice I could audition.

I learned that voiceover narrators charge by PFH, or per finished hour. Union rate hovers around $250 per finished hour, and the average number of hours to record, edit, and revise (if needed) an 80,000 word novel came to 8-10. Each of my published novels, and I now had three to consider for audiobooks, would cost between $1500 and $2000 to produce.

More than I expected. I sat with this new information for a few days. Big bucks for me—how badly did I want this? (I could only imagine what uber-pros like Streep or Bathurst charged!) With that kind of pricing, no wonder many publishers I’d worked with in the past declined any requests for an audiobook.

But it wasn’t for the stats, the marketing benefits, that I couldn’t let go of the idea of an audiobook for each of these novels. It was that extra electricity I’d experienced as a listener on my commutes, engaging with a story in a new way.

What did I most want?

So I made a list. What did I require if I were to go ahead with this project? What would make the risk worthwhile, financially and otherwise?

I knew there was a good chance, if the audiobook was excellent, that I could pay myself back and then some. My list looked like this:

1. The narrator would be female and age appropriate to my characters; although there are male characters, women run my stories.

2. The narrator would have to be versatile, since a good twelve voices, between the major and minor players, appear onstage in the three books. Not to mention the accented English of a few of them.

3. I dislike overly dramatic voice narration. I didn’t want a narrator in love with her own sound, every adjective inflected and dramatized. I wanted the story itself to shine forth.

4. Secretly, I wanted a narrator who loved the stories—genuinely so. I would be able to tell from our correspondence and the sample auditions. I wanted someone would bring heart and passion into the narration, making it come alive in a new way with her voice. Was this too much to wish for?

My voiceover friend recommended I check out Fiverr. Fiverr is a wonderful resource for anything you need to hire out, and often the results are excellent too. Fiverr offers scores of audiobook narrators for hire, both male and female. Each specializes in a certain type of story: kidlit, sci-fi or fantasy, mysteries and crime, business and other nonfiction book, memoir.

To use Fiverr well takes time and vetting. Each narrator offers a short video of their credentials, a sample of their voice.

My friend advised narrators who were Top Rated Sellers or Level 2 Sellers to weed out beginners and those with bad reviews. Also, he advised, read the reviews carefully—did the narrator deliver on time? were they easy to work with?

Hours later, I had six to audition.

Get a sample

I messaged each of them, asked if they’d record a sample of the second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue. I felt this would be the hardest of the tests.

Most said yes—i learned it was standard practice in the industry. Only one refused and was off the list. For the yesses, I prepared three chapters from the early chapters, one for each of the point-of-view characters in my book, Red Nelson, Kate Fisher, and Kate’s daughter Molly Fisher, and sent each narrator the first chapter in Red’s voice, the opening of the story. Molly also appears as narrator in my first novel, so I knew if that voice was spot-on, I’d be comfortable with this narrator across the board.

This first chapter is a plane crash—Red’s Piper is caught in crosswinds before a storm and she has to make an emergency landing in a mountain gorge far from the sanctuary she’s running to. A good test. I felt the written chapter contained plenty of drama; I wanted to see if the narrator would also recognize this and leave it alone, not push the intensity more than was necessary. Red’s a hard-living musician, her life and voice is gravelly, so I wanted that edge.

My first reply was from a narrator in Europe, a native-speaker of English, who mostly records young adult books. A great voice but she couldn’t resist adding on even more. Plus a faster pace than the chapter required. I’m proud of the quality of the writing in my novel, I’ve worked hard to get there, and my endorsement from Caroline Leavitt, author of the recent Days of Wonder and a New York Times bestseller, called it “gorgeously written,” so I wanted the language to be savored by the listener, not raced through. Overly picky, less than humble, yes, but that’s the artist in me coming out and taking a stand.

Three other samples came in; also good contenders until I noticed my inability to slip into the story itself. The person behind the voice took precedence. Wearying at best, annoying at worst.

I’d just about given up when a narrator in California sent me her sample. Good voice, not overly dramatic. She trusted the words, the language, and let it stand for itself. Pace was a bit fast, but when she revised, it worked beautifully. I sent her the other two chapters, to see how she’d vary the two other character voices, and I loved the result. I had my narrator.

How to work with your narrator

Alex Furness was also incredibly easy to work with, a true professional. She sent me finished chapters every few days, our goal to complete the project by August 11, 2023, to upload to Findaway, the audiobook distributor. And we made it.

An amazing thing happened as I listened to my book read out loud for the first time: I heard things in the story I’d never noticed. I always knew that pacing was best “heard” from reading aloud—most writers do this, at some point in revision, just to catch things their eye never noticed. But the emotion that Alex was able to bring in, via subtle changes in her voice as she read each scene, touched me deeply.

At one point, I found myself in tears. Alex was reading my favorite chapter in the story, a culmination point of the three women's journeys to freedom and how they finally become family to each other. Somehow, combining the visual, the light, of words on a page, which had touched me as a writer, with the audible, the sound of the words being spoken aloud, was a thousand times more powerful than I expected. It was as if I’d never encountered the story before and it was a wonderful surprise.

Here’s a sample of the finished audiobook, read by Alex. Enjoy!

Why an audiobook?

More “readers” have become listeners, as our lives got busier and we traveled more. Along with podcasts, audiobooks were a prime avenue for readers wanting to listen on walks or runs, on commutes, even at work.

When I listen to an audiobook, I feel an uplift in my brain and nervous system. Not surprising that this was confirmed by science in 2018: an article in Psychology Today discussed the stress-relieving aspect of audiobooks. How they harken back to being read aloud to, perhaps in childhood. They can relax and soothe our brains, even replacing negative thoughts (more in this article from libro.fm’s blog).

So many of us rediscovered audiobooks when the pandemic hit—as evidenced by the huge rise in sales.

Audiobook sales today

Audiobooks were actually the fastest growing format in publishing during the pandemic (according to this Writer’s Digest magazine article). Future forecasters, like this article in Good E Reader, predict even more astonishing growth by 2027.

There’s always a risk when you’re investing in a creative project, be it an investment of time, money, creative energy, reputation, or self-regard. You’re going to spend something whenever you step off that ledge of safety into the unknown, or so it has been for me.

I can’t promise you’ll recoup what you spend if you go for an audiobook. I only know that my own risk has paid off, in so many ways. Not just the future promise of sales to cover costs and beyond. But the new relationship I gained with my own story by hearing it read aloud.

Just like those books I listened to over the years, as I commuted from home to work or traveled, I was honestly transported by my own story when I heard Alex read it.

I went on to hire her for two more of my books, one where the original publisher had said no to an audiobook. I loved what Alex did with each of them.

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Your Weekly Writing Exercise

This week, learn about the dramatic intensity of your own book (published or in process) by using a voiceover recording tool and your listening ears. I always learn so much when I hear my own story read aloud, rather than just reading it on the page.

1. First, listen to the audio above, to enjoy chapter 1 from A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, but also to hear a professional voiceover artist. Notice how Alex backs off to let the story itself shine, while not losing any of the drama of the plane crash, explosion, and escape. Share your thoughts here. What did you learn, notice, like, experience?

1. If you’d like to try narrating a chapter or scene or a few pages from your own published book or work-in-progress, check out Voice Record Pro, a voiceover software I’ve used for podcast recording on my iPhone. Amazing quality for a free app. See how much you can let your own words shine without overly dramatizing them.

If the language doesn’t wow you as you listen back, ask yourself where you might upgrade it, raise the natural drama of the scene, or tone the action down to let the character emotion shine through.

Share your thoughts!

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Shout Out!

A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community.

(If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Jim Hight, Moon Over Humboldt (Black Rose Writing), August release

Darrell J. Pedersen, Who Will Carry the Fire? More Reflections from a North Woods Lake (River Place Press), August release

Jan Skogstrom, The Light Shines in the Darkness—A Spiritual Journey (Itasca Books), August release

Megan Lindhal Goodrich, Beyond Terminal: Processing Childhood Trauma to Reclaim Self (Wise Ink), September release

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, The Release: Creativity and Freedom after the Writing Is Done (Skinner House), October release

Morgan Baylog Finn, The Gathering: Poems (Finishing Line Press), November release

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I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.

I’m also the author of 15 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), was published in October 2023 also and became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.