They listen to it while driving, cooking, walking. That is not a lesser way to read: it is simply the format a growing share of your readership uses, and your book is currently not available in it.
Finding an uninterrupted hour to read has become harder, which is most of why audiobooks have grown the way they have. A listener can take your book in while doing something else, and the phone already in their pocket is a better audiobook player than anything that existed twenty years ago.
That creates a straightforward gap. If your book exists only as text, a reader who would have finished it in audio never starts it. Production closes that gap: the same book, narrated properly, mastered to the standard the retail platforms require, and available where those listeners already are.
A thriller and a children's book are not read aloud the same way. Casting, pace and direction are chosen for the book rather than applied to it.
- 01
Action and adventure
Fast-paced work narrated to hold momentum, the pace of the reading doing as much as the pace of the writing.
- 02
Children and young adult
A different narration style entirely, because the audience is. Classic children's writing, fantasy, science fiction and adventure, read at a pace a child can follow.
- 03
Drama
Multiple voice actors, or a single narrator, with dialogue, narration and sound design used to build something closer to a performance than a reading.
- 04
Mystery and crime
Detective stories, crime thrillers and espionage, narrated so the withholding of information survives the change of medium.
- 05
Romance
Classic, historical, contemporary and fantasy romance, cast for a voice readers will want to spend ten hours with.
- 06
Non-fiction and memoir
Clarity over performance. Structure is harder to hear than to see, so a non-fiction narration is directed to make the argument's shape audible.
Four things that determine whether an audiobook is finished or merely recorded.
- 01
Priced to the book
Professional production without the studio mark-up that keeps most independent authors out of the format entirely. The quote reflects the length and the complexity of your book.
- 02
A format worth entering
Audio reaches listeners who will never buy the print edition. It is an additional readership rather than a redistribution of the one you have.
- 03
Qualified people and real equipment
Experienced producers working to the technical standards the audiobook retailers actually enforce, which is where most independently produced audiobooks fail before anyone has heard them.
- 04
Research before recording
Names, places, dialect and pronunciation are researched before the narrator sits down. Getting a character's name wrong for nine hours is not fixable in the mix.
Eight steps from the manuscript to a mastered file, and you hear the narrator before the recording starts.
Consultation
A conversation about the book and what you want the audio edition to be, so the right kind of production is chosen before anything is quoted.
Order details
The specifics gathered, length, format, delivery targets, and which platforms the finished audiobook needs to satisfy.
Script preparation
The manuscript prepared for reading aloud, with particular attention to dialect, pronunciation and place names. This is the step that separates a professional audiobook from a home recording.
Text adjustment
Passages that read well and listen badly are flagged to you. Nothing is changed without your approval, but a footnote read aloud is a problem worth solving before recording.
Audition
Voice actors read for your book and you hear them. The narrator whose tone and style suit the project is chosen with you, not assigned to you.
Recording and sound direction
The recording is directed rather than merely captured, so the performance stays consistent across sessions that may be weeks apart.
Editing and mastering
Engineers clean the recording of noise and distortion and master it to the technical specification the retail platforms require.
Voice proofing
A proofreader listens to the finished audio against the text, start to finish. It is the only way to catch the errors that a waveform cannot show you.
A few of the people the house has worked with, in their own words.
I had eleven years of notes and no book. What I got back read like me on a good day, my turns of phrase, my arguments, and none of the padding I would have added myself. The first chapter arrived and I stopped worrying.
Marianne ElleryIndependent author The structural edit was not comfortable reading. It told me the second half started in the wrong place, which I had suspected for a year and nobody had said out loud. Moving three chapters fixed a problem I had been trying to solve with better sentences.
Devon AlukoIndependent author What sold me was being told I did not need half of what I had asked for. I came in wanting the full package and left with a cover, a proofread and an honest explanation of why the rest would not have helped yet.
Priya RaghunathanIndependent author Three cover directions, all of them plausible, none of them the thing I had described. The one I picked worked at the size that actually matters, I could recognise it in a list of forty other books, which is more than I can say for my first attempt.
Tobias HearnIndependent author I own the book outright and that was written down before I paid anything. After two years of being quoted percentages by people who would not put them in writing, that was the whole reason I stayed.
Cecile MarchandIndependent author The audiobook took longer than I expected and they told me why each time rather than going quiet. The narrator they cast got my grandmother's accent right, which I had assumed would be the thing I had to let go of.
Nathan BoakyeIndependent author
What authors ask before turning a book into audio.
It reaches readers who would not otherwise finish your book, commuters, walkers, people who read with their hands busy, and readers for whom print is difficult or impossible. It is a different audience rather than the same one in another format, which is why it tends to add sales rather than move them.
It varies considerably with the length of the book, whether it needs one narrator or a cast, and how much sound design is involved. Audio is priced by the finished hour in most of the industry, so a long book genuinely is a larger undertaking. Tell us the word count and what you have in mind and you will get a real figure.
Yes. Voice actors audition with passages from your book and you hear them before anything is committed to. A narrator you are not convinced by is the single most expensive mistake available in this format, so the choice sits with you.
Yes, a finished manuscript is all that is needed, wherever it was written. The production side of the house works on books it had no hand in writing all the time.
The finished files are mastered to the technical standards the major audiobook retailers require, and the house can handle distribution to them or hand you the files to distribute yourself. Which retailers accept a given title is their decision rather than ours, and nobody can promise you otherwise.
You do, completely. The author holds 100% of the rights to their work, in every format, for its whole life. The house is paid for the work it does, not with a share of the book. That is the arrangement the house reopened in 2008 to offer, and it does not change with the tier, the price or the point at which you come to us.
Yes. Your name is on the cover and in the record. Everyone who works on the book (writer, editor, designer) works on your book, and none of them is credited on it unless you ask for them to be.
Yes. Your story is yours, and nothing about the project leaves the house. We will sign your NDA before you send anything, or supply ours if you would rather use one.
No. Six disciplines are available and you take the ones you need. Authors arrive here at every stage (with an idea, a half-draft, or a finished manuscript that only needs a cover and a shelf) and the work starts where you actually are.
It depends on the work: length, how much research is involved, how much of the book already exists, and which disciplines you need. There is no list price for a book, and any firm who gives you one before reading your material is quoting something other than your book. Tell us where you are and we will price the actual job.
Move the marker. You do not need to know what to call it: you only need to know where you are.
Tell us where your manuscript is, where you want it to go, and we'll show you what's possible.