P.J. Murphy's Writer Site

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a few writing projects on the go at the moment. The two closest to fruition are the publication of Yesterday’s Shadow (dusting off a novel I finished before starting Dead Letters) and the production of an audiobook version of Dead Letters. I’ll talk more about Yesterday’s Shadow very soon – I’m just waiting for a cover image to share with you. Today, I’m going to tell you about the wonderful world of audiobooks.

First things first: they’re a big thing. People listen to audiobooks while exercising, commuting, doing the housework or walking the dog. The advice is that if you don’t produce an audiobook version of your novel, you’re missing a key audience. I’ve had several people ask me whether I’ll release an audio version of Dead Letters. They would prefer to listen, rather than read, due to their level of ease with the written language; their time availability and all sorts of other reasons.

I thought for a while about recording Dead Letters myself. A few things stopped me. First was the time commitment. By all accounts, this is a time-consuming business. I calculated that my novel would be about 9.5 hours in length when recorded. To get to that stage, you have to multiply that time by three or four to account for preparation, editing time, re-recording sections that need corrections, etc. All that would take me away from other projects.

Secondly, purchasing the recording and editing equipment is a cost in itself. And I’ve never had much interest in learning how to edit video or audio.

Thirdly, and most decisively, I hate hearing my voice played back to me. Doing this would have been torture.

So, I explored the different options available to me on ACX. ACX is an audiobook exchange for indie authors and publishers linked with Amazon Audible, but which also shares with iTunes. Not only do they offer an option for you to upload your own audiobook, but they operate a marketplace where you can put an extract out there and have people audition as your narrator. Now, the fun begins!

I chose a couple of pages from the first chapter of Dead Letters, when Amy gives Chris her copy of the manuscript. It was a good mixture of dialogue between the two main characters, and Chris’ internal voice. I figured this would give me an insight into how a narrator might tackle key components of the book. I put it out there one evening and I waited…

… for not very long. By the time I woke up the following morning, I had received two auditions, and within a day, 22. Sorting through them was going to be more of a task than I had anticipated. I hadn’t helped myself by specifying a price range I was willing to pay. You see, you have a couple of options about how you are going to pay your narrator (or producer, as ACX calls them). One is royalty share, whereby a portion of the royalty for sales goes to the producer. I didn’t opt for that because I wanted to keep hold of the rights, plus I wondered how attractive it would be to the best narrators, given that we are unlikely to be rolling in money from sales. I chose instead to pay per finished hour, which entails agreeing a rate per hour of completed audiobook – keeping in mind that it takes many more hours of preparation behind all that. I wanted to cast the net wide, so I didn’t specify a rate.

The problem was that not a lot of the narrators specified a rate, either, which made it harder to exclude people – and set us up for haggling over a price. I find all that embarrassing and to be avoided at all costs. Fortunately, in the event, that experience was less painful than I had anticipated.

Anyway, back to the auditions. There were some brilliant ones and some terrible ones. I had given some direction about what I was looking for (British English, male, articulate), but evidently, some people hadn’t bothered to look at that. It’s the strangest thing to hear your words read out by somebody else, especially if they do it badly and in a deep American accent. But the good ones were really good. They really brought the words to life, and brought out some of the nuance. It was really impressive. I also took it as a license to laugh at my own jokes. Admittedly, I don’t need much of an excuse to do that at the best of times, but if they’re read out by someone else, it’s not really as if they’re yours, is it?

Listening through, I favourited eight auditions, and there I will leave part 1 of this blog. At this point, I was feeling confident that I had made the right choice in doing this, and that it would really help to do justice to the novel. But how would I narrow the list to one?

TO BE CONTINUED!