Will Your Investment in an Audiobook Edition of Your Book Be Worth It?

Let’s start with the magnitude of the opportunity side of the equation. Last week, Publishers Weekly reported the latest figures from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) showing that in 2024 audiobook sales increased by 31.2% for adult fiction and 18% for adult nonfiction. Audiobooks accounted for 16.5% of the overall book market in 2024, up from 14.1% in 2023.

This growth follows a trend of 11 straight years of double-digit growth in audiobook sales through 2022, making audiobooks by far the fastest-growing segment of the book market.

Don’t Abandon Your Print and eBook Editions

Now, to keep some perspective, the 2024 ebook market share was 20%, down from 21.6% in 2023. Combining the 2024 ebook and audiobook shares (20% + 16.5%), this leaves the overall print book market share at 63.5%. And be aware that these stats come mainly from the traditional publishing world and don’t fully account for the ever-growing influence of indie published books.

These numbers should help explain why we urge our clients to start with the print edition’s writing, layout, cover design, and marketing plans and go from there.

But those growth trends cannot be ignored. Audiobooks seem likely to pass ebooks in the next few years to become the second-largest share of book sales.

Your book is built to last, right? More than this week, month, quarter, or year?

Understanding these trends, we can confidently predict that NOT having an audiobook edition of your book will be a major missed opportunity over time.

So What’s the Investment?

Just like with your print and ebook editions, creating and publishing an audiobook requires an investment of time and money. How much of your time and how much of your money depends on several factors.

The choice that will have the greatest impact on both is whether to narrate the audiobook yourself, or hire a professional voice artist. If you choose to do the reading yourself, you will save the single largest chunk on the money side.

But you will be committing yourself to a larger investment of time than most people expect. We’ll get into the concept of the “finished hour” of recorded audio in a moment. But in simplest terms, if your book ends up at 10-15 hours of listening — with a manuscript of 90,000 to 135,000 words, or roughly 300 to 450 pages — you can expect to spend anywhere from 30 to 150 hours at the microphone recording and re-recording to get your audiobook files into shape for production.

These time predictions vary, with reading speed guidelines of 9,000 to 9,300 words per hour and studio time estimates of 3 to 10 hours per finished hour of recording. The ACX Help article on the subject falls in the middle, saying:

“For new narrators it generally takes between 5 and 7 hours to record one hour of an audiobook.”

And unless you have a recording studio in your home or access to one for little or no cost, there will still be some money investment to get the basic recording equipment and software necessary to produce a recording that will pass the quality checks on platforms like Amazon’s ACX or Spotify’s FindawayVoices (essentially the same tech specs as ACX’s).

But Wait, There’s More

Once you’ve gotten the audiobook fully recorded and eliminated all the um’s, ah’s, missed words, mispronunciations, and so on, you still have to process the files to bring everything into compliance with those tech specs we just mentioned. Things like:

• “volume range of -23dB and -18dB RMS [root mean square] for consistent volume”
• “peak values no higher than -3dB to avoid distortion”
• “a noise floor no higher than -60dB RMS to avoid background noise distractions”

There is free software available called Audacity that can enable you to handle these post-production tasks, but expect a substantial learning curve to become proficient. Once you do, ACX estimates you’ll spend an additional 1.2 hours for each finished hour of audio on these Quality Control steps.

Getting Professional Help: Narrators

You can find and audition narrators online, for example, on the ACX platform. Most narrators quote their fees in dollars per finished hour (pfh), and these can run from $250 to $500 pfh, or even higher, depending on the experience and reputation of the voice talent.

Going back to our example of a book in the 10-15 hours of listening range, this would give you cost estimates anywhere from $2,500 to $7,500 (or more) for the narrator.

ACX also enables arrangements with narrators to be compensated with royalty-sharing only, or a combination of pfh fee and royalty-sharing.

Some narrators are also skilled sound engineers and can handle those tech spec compliance tasks, which may put their rates at or above the high end of the range just mentioned. If they don’t handle those tasks, you may also need to hire a production person to process the recorded files for uploading to ACX or another audiobook publishing platform.

Don’t Overlook Your Publishing Platform Choice

When you have your audiobook files fully recorded, edited, and QC-tested, you still have to publish them. Much like uploading the print and ebook files to KDP or IngramSpark to get them ready for selling on Amazon, B&N, and other retailers, you have to have a publishing account for your audiobook, too.

The two big ones are Amazon’s ACX (shocking, I know) and Spotify’s FindawayVoices. Each has strengths and we’ve used both with our clients.

If you’re comfortable with using online platforms like KDP, you should be able to figure out the audiobook platforms, too. We typically help our clients get themselves set up and then show them how to use the platform for tracking sales and royalties, running promotions, and making any updates that may be needed in the future.

Finding a Package Deal

We’ve always preferred to offer package pricing for our services, and audiobooks are no different around here. We work with seasoned professional narrators, handle the post-production, and as just explained, help our clients choose and get comfortable with their publishing platform. We can also handle the other parts for authors who wish to narrate themselves, including assisting them to set up their studio.

Every book, every author, and every project is unique in various ways, so we don’t set a price without first talking through your needs and creating a custom proposal. The main advantage, we think, is that we both know going in what the cost will be.

We’re not the only ones who work this way. Scribe Media, for example, describes their package as including recording, post-production, and distribution, though we can tell from their website that their pricing is higher than ours, e.g., showing their audiobook packages “starting” at $8,000.

Worth It?

So now you have some idea of the investment trade-offs in time and money to bring an audiobook edition of your book to life.

Recall those market share trends we started with. Those trends indicate that, soon, as much as a quarter of your book’s potential sales and readership may depend on having an audiobook edition.

Nobody can predict or promise specific sales results, of course. But that’s a big slice of your potential audience to completely disregard.

We think the question you address should not be whether, but when and how you’ll get your audiobook done. There’s no rule preventing you from releasing the audiobook edition months or years after the first printing, if finances and time commitments prevent doing it along with the print and ebook.

But overall, we think the answer to that when-and-how question should be: the sooner, the better!