🎧 Audiobooks

The stages in order — script preparation, casting, recording, editing, mastering to a technical spec, the proof-listen, then packaging and distribution — and an honest account of where the weeks go.

The case for your own voice and the case against it, argued fairly, plus the hidden cost nobody counts and a twenty-minute test that settles the question for most authors in an afternoon.

Authors hire a narrator the way they buy a service: compare rates, hear a demo reel, pick one. It is casting, not shopping. Where narrators are found, what to put in an audition, and the terms to agree first.

For the author who has decided to narrate their own book. The room matters more than the microphone, distributors reject files for echo and noise rather than for gear, and most of what fixes a room costs nothing.

What actually happens across the days of recording an audiobook, and the craft that keeps it sounding like one performance. Preparation, punch and roll, character voices, and the physical management nobody warns you about.

Turning raw recordings into files a distributor will accept. What editing and mastering each do, what the technical check measures, how audiobook files are structured and named, and the honest case for hiring this stage out.

The audio equivalent of reading a proof copy, and the step most self-published audiobooks skip. What you are listening for, how to do it so an engineer can act on your notes, and what is worth fixing.

Three shapes of audiobook distribution — direct, through an aggregator, or exclusive to one ecosystem — plus what every distributor asks you for, and the narrator agreement that can quietly decide it for you.

Audio is the one edition whose cost is settled before a copy sells. Here is the structure of it — what you pay, the three different ways the money comes back, and how to work out your own break-even.

Most advice treats the audiobook like the book with a different file attached. The listener is a different customer, the sample does the work the cover does, and the narrator is the asset almost nobody uses.