Narrating it yourself, or hiring someone
This is the decision that sets everything else about your audio edition: the cost, the schedule, and the ceiling on how good it can be. It is worth arguing both sides rather than reaching for the answer you already prefer. We sell no audio tools and take no cut of either route, so what follows is only what tends to be true.
The case for reading it yourself
Some books are better in the author's voice. Memoir and personal nonfiction are the clearest case. When the book is one person telling you what happened to them, hearing that person tell it is not a convenience — it is closer to the thing itself than the page is.
Nonfiction listeners often prefer it. For business, self-help and practical books, the author reading is frequently treated as the authentic version, and listeners say so in reviews.
It costs money you do not have to spend. For a first book with no readership, that matters more than anything else on this page.
You control the schedule. No queue, no booking, no waiting for a narrator's calendar to open. If you decide on Tuesday to record chapter four again because you changed a line, you record chapter four again.
The case against, plainly
Narration is a performance skill, not a reading skill. Reading your own sentences aloud is not the same as holding a listener for nine hours. Pacing, breath, emphasis, where a sentence lifts — these are trained, and most first attempts are flat and too fast.
Consistency across sessions is hard. A book recorded over three weeks has a different voice in it by the end unless you work at matching. Microphone position drifts, energy drops in week two, a cold arrives in week three. The listener does not know why chapter nine sounds different; they only know it does.
Fiction with a cast exposes you. Every character needs a voice that is distinguishable, consistent across the whole book, and sustainable for hours. An untrained narrator usually manages two or three and then starts colliding. This is the commonest reason an author-narrated novel sounds amateur.
You cannot hear yourself accurately. You know what the sentence is supposed to sound like, which is exactly what stops you noticing that it did not come out that way.
The cost nobody counts
Your own time.
A full-length book is many days of recording — not hours — plus more days of editing, and then the proof-listen against the text. How an audiobook actually gets made walks the stages, and the pattern holds: finished audio takes several times longer to produce than it takes to play.
Put a value on your writing time, even a rough one, and multiply. Authors who do that arithmetic honestly often find hiring is the cheaper option in real terms, because the weeks spent learning to record are weeks not spent on the next book. The money is visible and the time is not, which is why the time loses arguments it should win — How an audiobook earns its money back puts both sides of it into a break-even you can run on your own book.
That is not an argument against narrating. It is an argument against pretending it is free.
In the tools. Whichever way this goes, the audio edition sits alongside a print and ebook edition that have to exist and match. Those you can finish this week, from one manuscript and one cover design, while the audio question stays open. Start your book → · about the tools
The twenty-minute test
Here is the test that settles it, and it costs an afternoon.
Record twenty minutes of your own book. Not the opening page you have read at events until it is polished — pick something from the middle, including dialogue if the book has dialogue. Use whatever microphone you have; this is not a production test, and Where to record, and what you need is the thing to read only once you have answered the question below.
Then leave it for a week. This part is not optional. Played back immediately, you hear your intentions. Played back seven days later, you hear what is on the recording.
Listen to the whole twenty minutes without stopping, and ask one question: would you keep listening to this voice for another eight hours?
Most people's answer arrives right there, and it goes both ways. Plenty of authors find they are better than they feared and narrate everything they write afterwards. Plenty find twelve minutes in that they would have stopped listening, which is worth knowing before spending three weeks proving it. If you cannot judge your own recording, play it to two people who will tell you the truth.
The middle paths
The choice is not binary, and the compromises are often the right answer.
Record it yourself, hire an engineer to edit. You do the performance; someone else does the cutting, leveling and mastering to the distributor's specification. That removes the most technical part of the work, and the part most likely to get a file rejected — Editing, mastering and hitting the spec explains why that stage produces almost all the rejections.
Narrate the front and hire out the rest. An author-read introduction or afterword with a professional narrator for the body. Common in nonfiction, and it gives listeners the author's voice without asking that voice to carry the whole book.
Hire, but stay involved. Hiring does not end your job. You still supply the pronunciation list, a character sheet describing who sounds how, and a note on tone — and you still listen to the first fifteen minutes closely, while changing the read is cheap.
If you are going to hire, Finding and auditioning a narrator sets out where to look, what to put in an audition, and the terms — scope, pickups, deadlines, how they are paid — to agree before anyone records. Rates and terms vary by narrator, language and market, and anyone quoting a single number has not looked recently — get real quotes for your own book.
How to decide
Ask whether your book's value is in the voice or in the text. Memoir, personal essay and a nonfiction author with a following lean toward your own voice. A multi-voice novel leans hard toward a professional.
Then run the twenty-minute test anyway, because the general rule is not about you and the recording is.
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: How an audiobook actually gets made · More: Finding and auditioning a narrator · Where to record, and what you need · Should you make an audiobook? · Writing by dictation