With the huge increase in audiobook sales the number of would- be narrators has also increased with many people thinking that audiobook narration sounds like easy money. Afterall, how hard can it be to read a book out loud?

Well, perhaps a lot harder than you and many would be narrators may think. And it certainly takes an awful lot longer too.
In fact each hour of finished audio takes a minimum of 5 hours to produce and that doesn’t take into account that many books contain pronunciations that need checking, characters that need to be understood and even foreign words and names that have to be researched.

The basic steps a narrator has to go through are

• Read the book at least once and take notes about all the characters. Any particular accent they have, their relationships with the others, age, etc. Any narrator who does not read the book in its entirety is not doing their job.
• Record the book. How long this takes depends on their experience and the complexity of the language used. For example a medical book would have long technical words to get their tongue round, and often fantasy stories contain unusual names. And even with a relatively straight forward narrative it’s impossible for even the most experienced narrator to read aloud perfectly in one take.
• Edit the files. This means listening to all the recordings and noting any mistakes in the words, inflections, spacing, tone as well as correcting any unwanted noises.
• Master to industry standards This means checking the volume of the noise floor ( silence between the words) as well as the overall sound. Some narrators pay to have their work mastered but obviously they need to be paid enough for the book in order to afford to do this.
• Send the finished files.

So a five hour book is going to take at least twenty five hours to produce and far more likely to take thirty to thirty five.
And that’s with an experienced narrator. Who will probably charge more.

And that brings us to the ‘m’ word. Money and how much are you going to have to part with to see, or more precisely hear, your creation.
Narrators usually charge at a Per Finished Hour rate(PFH) and this can vary enormously from $50 PFH to $400/500 PFH but an average is $200 to $400.

So your five hour book could cost from $250 to $2,000.

Or alternatively some publishing platforms such as ACX https://www.acx.com have Royalty Share deals which means that the author and the narrator share the 40% (on ACX) profit equally for a seven year period being paid monthly.

This option may sound ideal as there is no money to be found upfront but bear a few things in mind before going down this route

To a narrator an author looking for a royalty share deal can look as if they don’t have confidence that their audiobook will sell enough copies to earn the true cost of production. The author is making money from the other formats that the book is published in but the narrator has to take the risk that the audiobook will sell.
If you are a first time author, your sales history may not be very good (unless you have penned the next Fifty Shades) and so the chances of finding an experienced narrator to risk their time and effort on your budding new title are small.
Inexperienced narrators are more likely to go with Royalty Share deals with a new author but on the other hand, we all have to start somewhere and they might prove to be very good.I did my first audiobook as a Royalty Share as I was approached by a South American author to narrate her soap making book. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soap-Making-Business-Startup-Start-Successful/dp/B077VV6J8L/ref=sr_1_21?dchild=1&keywords=soap+making&qid=1586858395&refinements=p_n_binding_browse-bin%3A308724031&rnid=492562011&s=books&sr=1-21 * . It took me more hours that I care to remember but I managed it in the end. It has sold steadily over the last four years but I doubt it has made me anything like the minimum wage.
If your book does sell well you will be sharing the profits for seven years, making 20% rather than 40%.

How do you envisage your narrator to sound?

Does gender matter? If the book has a male POV then the choice may be simple or if the cast is mainly men then it would probably be best to go with a male narrator. But if it doesn’t matter then look for either sex. You may be surprised that a narrator of the opposite sex to you gives a new feel to your words.