Audiobooks: Behind the Scenes

I’ve been seeing a lot of audiobook discourse recently (like authors, including myself, getting asked why they don’t turn more of their books into audio, how the sales that Audible offers to listeners impact an author’s royalties, is it better for the author when you buy with a subscription credit or not, and more), so I thought I’d take some time to dust off and update my old audiobook blog.

I’ll say upfront that this is based on my personal experience and the data that I possess, and this is for informational purposes only. It’s my way of trying to explain some of what goes on behind the scenes of audiobook production as someone who has both had a contract with a production company and produced my own audiobooks. I hope this helps readers/listeners and authors alike (who might be considering doing this themselves) to understand a little more about the process, the numbers (which my wife helped me with here because she’s the numbers person in this house), and the impact. This is very long, so grab some popcorn!

I’ll begin by updating you on my audiobook journey to offer some context.

The Journey:

I had no plans to make audiobooks back when I first started publishing. I had a day job that took up much of my time and energy, and my wife was too busy running the business and putting out new books. When an audiobook agent reached out to me asking to represent me, I thought that would be a good compromise because we wouldn’t have to learn the whole sub-industry, and the agent would do most of the work. Months later, we had no takers, which felt odd because I’d seen other authors in my genre getting picked up, and I wondered if maybe she had too many clients or if something was just wrong with my books. I asked her, and she confirmed that there were no takers but that she’d been pushing. The process wasn’t moving along, though, so I decided to end my contract with her to be able to pursue audio on my own when I was ready.

Literally the next day (and that’s not hyperbole), I heard from Tantor. I have no idea why it worked out that way, but they wanted to produce ALL THE LOVE SONGS. Something to keep in mind here is that when you get a company to make the audiobook for you, they produce it from start to finish, and there’s very little control for the author. ALL THE LOVE SONGS was released, and I had a book in audio. I thought that would be my only for a while, but I ended up writing NO AFTER YOU as a prequel, and I offered it to them to produce it, too, which they did. Later, they reached out again and asked for REALITY CHECK, which was an odd choice, I thought, since I now had a lot of other books out and available for them to choose from, including the rest of books in the Celebrities Series, since they now owned the audio rights to the first two, but I agreed and asked if they wanted ALWAYS MORE, since that was the beginning of a series, and I’d hoped they’d want to pick up all of them. They said yes to ALWAYS MORE as well, but they weren’t interested in picking up any more of my books. I don’t know why for sure. I can guess that, like everything else, the sales just weren’t there for them, which I understand, but that’s how I ended up with two unfinished series: the CELEBRITIES SERIES, which I later finished producing on my own, and the SPORTS SERIES, which is still unfinished.

Here’s what you should know, if you don’t, about companies like Tantor: production companies will often issue you a small advance of around $500 as their standard, and they will then take a large portion of your royalties. Audiobooks are not all that profitable. I consider them a loss leader more than anything, and they take a while – if ever – to make any real money. This is largely due to everyone taking their cut. With an advance, you won’t get paid anything else until you’ve “paid off” that advance. It’s not free money. It’s them saying to you, “We know you’ll make us at least $500, so we’ll give that to you now.” If your book turns out to be a hit, you’re in business, but it might take some time to even earn that money back for them, and you get nothing else royalties-wise until if and when that happens.

Now, your royalties might vary based on the sale type. For example, you might have a different percentage for library downloads than for retail purchases. This means that it can take a while for you to “pay them back” that $500 advance, because you might only make 20% of what the production company will make after the platforms take their cut. These production companies are rarely exclusive to one platform, and non-exclusive distribution gets them 25% royalties on Audible. The platform takes 75%.

Here’s what that math looks like in practice if the audiobook is priced at $20 for the listener. (The authors, with or without the production company, don’t get to set the price. Audible does based on the audio length):

Note that this is an example and may not apply to all audiobook platforms.

$20 (audiobook retail price) * 25% = $5 is what the production company makes.

$5 * 20% = $1 is what the author makes on that sale.

To pay off the $500 advance, you’d have to sell 500 books. Then and only then, you’d start getting your royalties paid on subsequent purchases. Also, these numbers are before taxes. The author would really get less than $1 in this example, if you account for that.

There are things I didn’t like about this overall process, and it’s no one’s fault. I knew so little about audiobooks back then. I went in mostly blind, and I didn’t like the lack of control. Thankfully, I had it included in my contract that I got to pick my narrator, which is not standard, but I had a very specific voice in mind for ALL THE LOVE SONGS (and later NO AFTER YOU), and I got lucky that I was able to get that because for the other two books, I had to go through a limited selection Tantor had provided me with and couldn’t pick anyone else. I’m not sure if this has changed since I went through this process or not, though. I didn’t like that I couldn’t control when the book was released or that I got no communication unless I reached out first. They also do NO marketing for you, which is something I knew beforehand, but since marketing is not my forte, I’m sure my sales weren’t as good as those of more well-known and established authors with a better social media presence. There also wasn’t a chance for me to approve any audio first. I received some auditions with my actual script, but that was it. There was no check-in and no real opportunity to give feedback to the narrator, and when it got released to you, listeners, that’s when I heard it all for the first time, which isn’t what I would prefer.

I didn’t get involved further in audio for a while because it felt like such a beast, and I didn’t have the time (or, quite frankly, the money). I still worked a day job, and I wrote in the evenings and on the weekends, while my wife ran the business side of publishing, including editing all the books and making covers. Taking on one more thing just seemed too hard during covid and the pending war in Ukraine, where her family is still directly impacted, but eventually, we sat down and decided to see how easy/hard it would be.

At the time, ACX was the only audiobook production platform I’d heard of, and I knew they were owned by Amazon, so we decided to give them a try. I should mention here that it was really only because I had a day job that we could do this. Some of the money I made there helped to fund my audiobook production, and without that, I still might not have had many books in audio.

Getting started in their system is easy, but everything after that is time-consuming and expensive (at least, if you do it how I do it). The first part of the process (which I’ve shortened here for brevity) is uploading your script for narrators. For my first self-produced book, I had no narrator in mind, and I set up THE SHOW MUST GO ON for auditions. I received several within a couple of days and had to sit and listen to each audition; some, several times. Auditions are about 10 minutes long, and you can ask people to audition again if need be, but my wife and I then had to:

• talk about the auditions,

• decide on a narrator (producer, as ACX calls them),

• reach out to that producer,

• talk about the timing, logistics, and the price,

• upload the manuscript,

• make the cover for the audio version,

• listen to their check-in, which is about 15 minutes,

• offer feedback if needed,

• listen again,

• then, wait.

When the book is done, you have to listen to the whole thing (which is a pain for me, personally – I can read and reread my words, but listening, for some reason, drives me crazy; nothing to do with narrators). If anything is wrong, you let the narrator know, and you only get so many “revisions.”

In the past, this was when I would also pick out a retail sample, but authors are no longer able to choose their own samples. Unless the first 5 minutes of the book is an explicit scene, authors now MUST use the first five minutes of the book. This is because Audible wants the listener to sample, buy, and then listen further without interruption, which is not a bad concept on its own, but in practice, it means that the author can’t choose a sample to help them “sell” their book. It’s one less thing that we can control. (I’m sure you’re noticing by now that that’s a theme).

After the production, revisions, payment, and all the approving steps on both sides are done, you wait some more, because ACX quality check takes somewhere between almost right away and 10 business days for the book to be released, so you don’t know exactly when it will come out. I’ve had an audiobook go live the morning after entering QA, and it’s also taken a full 10 business days, but unlike the e-book version or paperback, I can’t set my release day easily myself. You can ask for a pre-order or release date, yes, but that requires emailing their support team, and that process has additional rules when it comes to timeline, which sometimes, they don’t even know about. You should see the email template I use whenever I need to request a specific date. I have to cite their own support article or a previous chat that I’ve had with a different rep, because if not, they’ll sometimes tell me that I can’t do it. Oh, and doing that still doesn’t guarantee anything. I’ve had THE SWEET ESCAPE audio pushed live months before the e-book was even scheduled to be released, so there’s that added stress and time to get things worked out. Recently, I haven’t had the time or energy to handle this, so the audiobooks have been released as soon as they’re ready, and that’s been… fun. Makes it very difficult to plan releases.

Back to The Process:

Each book is hours upon hours of time, but it’s also very costly. There are options in ACX production. Let’s break it down.

Option 1: Pay for production (my preferred).

This one means I would pay the narrator a fixed cost per finished hour of audio based on the agreed-upon rate (PFH). That’s a full payment for production when the audio is done, and I get to keep the royalties minus platform cut and taxes in the future.

40% royalty rate if you’re exclusive with ACX/Audible, and 25% if you’re not. More math on this later.

Generally, the top-quality narrators work on a PFH basis, and some work for unions, which means they need to make $250/PFH minimum at the moment. The actual range is closer to $250 – 400.

Option 2: Royalty Share

20% of retail sales to the author, 20% to the narrator, and exclusive distribution is not optional but required.

Option 3: Royalty Share Plus

This is a flat fee to the narrator plus the same 20/20 and exclusivity deal from above.

I have not used options 2 or 3 personally, so I may not be aware of all the nuances.

Here’s some math for you:

I have more than 70 published books currently, ranging anywhere from 40k words to 150k. Over half of them are already in audio, but about 34 titles are not as of this writing. Let’s say I wanted to make one of them in audio, and it’s about 90k in length.

90,000 / 9,300 (around how many words is in a finished hour of audio according to ACX) = 9.677 hours would be the length of the audio.

At $250 to $400 PFH, the cost of one book is anywhere between $2,420 and $3,870. To be honest with you, that’s rent money.

Let’s say I release a 12-book series in one year (like my NEW ORLEANS SERIES).

Multiply the numbers above by 12.

We are looking at $29,040 to $46,440 upfront expense for me to be able to do that.

If we extrapolate that to all 34 titles currently not in audio, that amounts to 2,871,600 words, roughly 85k for each book. Using ACX’s own metric of 9,300 words per finished hour, all of those books would total up to 308.77 hours, give or take, depending on the narrator’s pace.

Below, you’ll see the potential total cost of that endeavor based on the cost PFH (per finished hour of recorded audio). In other words, if a narrator is $250/PFH, it would cost one amount. At $300/PFH, it’s another, and so on. Just to give you an idea what that would look like:

At $250/PFH = 308.77 * 250 = $77,194

At $300/PFH = 308.77 * 300 = $92,632

At $350/PFH = 308.77 * 350 = $108,071

At $400/PFH = 308.77 * 400 = $123,510

That’s just to catch up on my existing e-book releases…

Yes, I do choose to pay upfront to get a narrator who’s at a minimum $250/PFH, but I do this because I want the highest quality audiobooks, and working with a professional producer makes all the difference in the world, too. They know what they’re doing. They’re communicative. Their equipment is top-notch, and they get things done on time. This is a huge stress relief on my end. I also chose to be exclusive to Audible. That means I receive 40% instead of 25% to be non-exclusive, and I do this because making that 40% would allow me to produce books faster. These are my decisions, and other authors might choose otherwise, which is absolutely their call, but this is what works for my family and my business.

I recognize that I am able to write fast, and my wife helps me get my books out there as fast as she can, too, but there’s no way we can keep up producing audiobooks at the same pace I publish, especially when the audio versions take years to pay off the initial upfront cost. We’ve been making audiobooks ourselves since 2022. Four years later, there are books from 2022 onward that have not made the initial cost back yet.

I recently got a question: Is it better for you if I buy the audiobook or use a credit?

The answer is that it depends. I’m going to simplify because there are other questions to consider. (I.e., Do you have a plan or not? If so, what kind? What country? Is there a sale going on when you bought the book? Etc.) Below, I’ve listed the scenarios from most royalties paid to an author to least (based on my data/experience).

Let’s use a $20 audiobook for our example.

Scenario 1: As a non-member, you bought the book outright (not on sale)

If you paid the full, non-sale price for the book, the author made $20 * 40% = $8.

That’s the highest amount of royalties the author could make based on this audio price example, and it’s worth noting that these purchases are rare.

Scenario 2: As a member, you purchased the book (not with a credit)

You have a lower start price because you’re a member. Let’s say you get 30% off the list price of $20 in our example:

$20 * 30% = $14 (is your price)

$14 * 40% = $5.60 (to the author)

Scenario 3: You used a credit

Because there are several plan types, the easiest thing to do is for you to divide your subscription cost by the number of credits you get, which gives you the cost per credit. Authors get 40% of that number, which generally amounts to less money than in scenario 2 because you get a discount on your credits.

Let’s say your plan is for 12 credits/year. The current price of this plan is $149.50.

$149.50 / 12 = $12.45 (per credit)

$12.45 * 40% = $4.98 (to the author)

NOTE: There are some exceptions where scenario 3 may provide more royalties than scenario 2 based on the length of the book and membership plan, but that gets more complicated, and I’m trying to keep things simple.

Scenario 4: You used a credit DURING a sale

The credit usually means more in royalties because we get our percentage based on the total price you pay for our work, and a sale of any kind can lower that amount down significantly.

Scenario 5: You already own an e-book

This scenario may be common if you prefer multiple formats or the audio is not available right away so you buy the e-book first before you get the audiobook. Audible gives you a discount on that audiobook.

I can illustrate the numbers with my newest audiobook, LET GO, Boston Series Book 1. Audible prices the audio at $19.95 based on its length, but the discount price on it is $7.47 if you own the e-book.

$7.47 * 40% = $2.98

Scenario 6: You bought the audiobook on sale

This does depend on the exact discount rate, but simply put, this is the lowest amount of royalties an author can make.

$20 * 85% OFF for a site-wide sale = $3 (is your price)

$3 * 40% = $1.20 (to the author)

FUN FACT! On average, aggregated over the past four-plus years, if someone buys my entire audio catalog released before March of 2026, I would have made $145.60 from that person for the nearly 40 audiobooks I had out. That’s about $3.92 per book, varied by how long the audio is and what prices the books sold for.

I think there’s some confusion about why authors get “hurt by sales.” While it’s good for us that more people could pick up our books and possibly discover us for the first time, even getting more books later when they’re not on sale, it does mean we take a hit with royalties. We do not know when these sales are going to occur before readers do – I find out when I login to my own Audible account as a listener that a sale is happening – which means that authors can’t plan our new releases around it. I happened to release a very important book to me in audio right before a site-wide sale. As a consumer, I understand taking advantage of every sale you can, especially now, but it did hurt because that book was expensive to make, and now, it will take even longer for it to pay off, which will make it even harder to then produce the next one. That’s just the simple, unfortunate truth (math).

The Journey Continued:

When an audiobook production company acquires the audio rights to your book, they last for a certain period of time before you either renew them or not. In my case, I decided to reacquire my audio rights to the initial four titles that Tantor produced for me. I did this for a few reasons. One of them is that I want to own all the rights to my books (including audio format), and now, I do.

Getting the rights back doesn’t mean I own the audio files produced by them. It means that I got the rights to the books. I had to essentially pay an ETF (early termination fee) to them just to reacquire. Had I chosen to buy the audio files the narrators originally recorded, that would have cost me even more. Re-recording them also costs money, of course. I chose to pay that money to the narrators instead and re-produce these audiobooks on my own. It was important for me to do it, but it also meant losing all of the original reviews on the 4 books when the re-recorded versions replaced the original ones. Sometimes, that’s the additional price of owning the rights to all of my creations.

As for my other books that are not yet in audio, I do get questions regularly about which ones and when. I would ask for patience in general as well. I am producing these books on my own, and I will never use virtual voice (AI). That means paying talented narrators to voice my characters, which is an incredibly expensive thing to do when you have as many books as I do. I am still making my way through some of my back-catalog books while also trying to do some new releases. This is a long process, and I don’t announce my audiobooks until they have been produced and are either on pre-order or available for purchase to make sure that I don’t overpromise and underdeliver. I am quite literally going as fast as I can, and it can feel like I’m not doing enough when I get questions about when someone’s favorite book will be in audio. I think this hits me harder than it might for an author who doesn’t publish as much as I do. Because I put out so many books, I get the questions a lot more frequently than someone who might publish a book a year. It would also be easier for me to produce that one book a year financially and otherwise than it is to catch up, like I’m doing now and will pretty much always be doing because of the rate I publish books.

So, please understand that while I appreciate how much you love a certain book and want to listen to it, or how you only listen to audio so you often have to wait for titles to become available (I get that because I only listen to books, too), it can feel a bit overwhelming for me. I tell you all of this not to dissuade you from asking the question about when a certain book will be in audio, but to give you the whole picture from my perspective. I would love to have all of my books in audio (other than ONCE A MONTH - this is because the characters in that book do not have names and the book was written as a serial, so that would not translate well to the audio format), and the long-term plan is that I will do that, but it will take years to get there.

The reality is that the faster a book pays for itself, the sooner I can make another one, so I try to balance which books get put into audio and when. I hope that gives a little more clarity around why, now that I have ALWAYS MORE re-produced, it’s still going to take time to get to the rest of the SPORTS SERIES out.

Audiobook returns hurt as well. Talk about taking a hit to an author’s morale. You can see when someone returns your audiobook, which is another thing that authors have no control over. The policy is Audible’s/Amazon’s. If someone returns a book that I not only put my blood, sweat, and tears into to write and then did the same to make it available in audio (along with paying for production), it does hurt. I understand people return books for a variety of reasons, but with audio, there’s a sample where a listener can hear the narrator and a piece of the story as well. I always encourage people to listen to that because if my style isn’t for you, or the narrator isn’t your cup of tea, you can then just not get the audiobook. Not only is that a hit to the old morale, but it does hit our royalties as well, and there are people who will listen to the entire book and return it within Audible’s policy, which means they consumed the art, got it for free, and the author loses out. I get it, I chose this business; most of it is on me. But an author’s/narrator’s ability to survive out there will affect the readers/listeners ability to have more of that art in the future.

I like to equate this to going to a grocery store. People don’t walk into a store, fill their carts with their weekly groceries, and expect to get all of it for free. They also don’t expect to walk into a museum, consume the exhibits and art, and not pay (assuming the museum isn’t free, of course). And yet, when it comes to books, there are some people who think they should get them for free and that it doesn’t hurt anyone. That’s just not true. In the end, it hurts both the producer and the consumer.

Then, there’s the support we need. Yes, we need you to buy the books however you can (credits or buying outright), but we also need your ratings and reviews. You’ve heard me talk about this over the years, so I’ll keep this brief, but ratings and reviews are so incredibly important in the age of the algorithm and AI slop. So, if you listen to a book and enjoy it, please, please, PLEASE consider leaving at least a rating if not a quick review. This goes for e-books as well. If you like an author’s book, post about it wherever you post, tell your reader friends, do whatever you can do to help them. The more people buy the books, whichever format you prefer, the more writers can write, publish, and produce in audio later.

In closing, producing audiobooks on your own is something that I had to learn how to do and then, experience as I go. That’s how I learned what I’ve shared with you today. I know it can be vague. Help articles and blogs don’t often explain things clearly or in one place, so I’ve attempted to do that here. I hope it helps lift the veil a bit on most of the aspects of audio production and why it might take someone like me, who publishes books as often as I do, a while to get my books in audio.

Sincerely,

A writer.