Editing, mastering and hitting the spec
A finished recording is not a finished audiobook. Between the two sit two separate jobs, done in order, and a technical check that does not care how good the performance was.
This is the least creative stage of making an audiobook and the one that generates almost all the rejections.
Two jobs, not one
Editing is removing things. Mistakes and the false starts before them, the takes you replaced, long gaps where you turned a page, breaths that pull attention, and the room noise that sits between phrases. Editing is done chapter by chapter, listening to all of it, and it takes far longer than the recording did.
Mastering is making the whole thing sit at a consistent, correct level. It comes after the edit, works across whole files, and is where the recording is brought in line with what the distributor measures. It cannot repair a bad edit, and it will happily make a noisy recording louder, noise and all.
Cut first. Level afterward.
What the technical check measures
Every audiobook distributor publishes a specification, and the check on upload is automated and binary. The things it measures are consistent across the industry, even though the numbers are not:
- Overall loudness. How loud the file is on average across its whole length, not at its loudest moment.
- Peak level. The single loudest instant in the file, and how much headroom must remain above it.
- Noise floor. How quiet the silence is. This is the one that fails recordings that sound fine on a laptop — a fridge compressor, traffic, a computer fan, the hum of the room itself.
- Room tone at the head and tail. Most distributors require a specific amount of silence at the start and end of every file — and it must be the room's own silence, recorded, not a digital nothing pasted in.
- File format and sample rate, which your recording program sets once and you then leave alone.
Read the current numbers from your own distributor, on the day you are delivering. They differ between distributors and they change. A figure copied from a guide, a forum post or a video is the most common reason a file that was built carefully still comes back rejected.
The file structure is what surprises people
An audiobook is not one long file. It is delivered as one audio file per chapter, in order, plus an opening credits file and a closing credits file that read the title, author and narrator to a set form.
The naming convention is prescribed by the distributor, and the order the files play in is taken from those names rather than from your intentions. A file named slightly differently from the rest lands in the wrong place in the book, and a listener who reaches chapter twelve and hears chapter two is a refund and a review.
Get the naming rule from the spec sheet, apply it to every file including the credits, then check the list end to end as a list, separately from listening.
In the Cover Maker. The audio edition still needs artwork, and that file has a spec of its own — square, and checked on upload like the audio is. Design the wrap once and keep the title and author as live vector text, so the square version comes out of the same project rather than a squashed crop of the paperback. See Audiobook cover art is a square, and that changes everything. Start your book → · about the Cover Maker
Why files come back
Too much room noise. The commonest cause by a distance, and not fixable by turning things down. It is fixed by treating the space and re-recording, or by an engineer, within limits — which is the argument Where to record, and what you need makes for spending on the room before the microphone.
Inconsistent volume between chapters. Different days, different distances from the microphone, different energy — the drift The recording session exists to prevent. Each chapter can pass on its own while the book is obviously uneven to a listener moving through it.
Clipping. A passage recorded too hot, where the peaks have been squared off. There is no undo for this. The audio that was above the ceiling was never recorded.
Missing, misnamed or misordered files. Including a forgotten credits file, which is a whole rejection for something that takes a minute to record.
Silence at the head or tail that is wrong, or that is digital silence rather than room tone.
Rejections are usually specific and name the file. Fix that file, re-check every other file for the same fault, and resubmit the lot.
The honest advice about doing it yourself
Editing is learnable. It is also slow, repetitive, and much longer than the recording — and after a few hours of it your judgment about your own voice is gone. Mastering is a different task again: measurement against a published target rather than taste, and the stage where the specification actually bites.
So the split many authors land on is a good one, and it is the middle path in Narrating it yourself, or hiring someone. Narrate it yourself if your voice suits the book, and hire an engineer for the edit and master. You keep the part that only you can do and that carries the value of an author-narrated edition. You hand over the part that is technical, unglamorous, and responsible for most of the failures.
If you do hire someone, agree in advance which distributor's specification they are delivering to, and who fixes it if a file is rejected. That means settling your route to market before the edit rather than after it — see Getting an audiobook into stores.
Keep the raw recordings
Keep the unedited session files, backed up, until the book is published, accepted and live. Not the edited masters — the raw ones.
If a file is rejected, if the check described in Proof-listening before you publish turns up a chapter missing a paragraph, if you need to retake a scene to match, the raw session is the only thing you can work from. Clearing it off the disk the week before you deliver is how a narrator ends up re-recording a chapter they already read perfectly well.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Proof-listening before you publish · More: The recording session · How an audiobook actually gets made · Audiobook cover art is a square, and that changes everything · Distributors, aggregators and who actually sells your book