What You'll Need If Youre Listening To Your First Audiobook
If you have never recorded an audiobook before, working with a producer would help you through the technical difficulties. Turns out, converting your self-published book into an audiobook using a pro can cost less than half the price of doing the work yourself, mostly because you don’t have to buy equipment. For those of you writing a fiction novel, you’ll likely want to hire an audiobook narrator, as these stories often need a narrator with an acting skillset. The cost of an audiobook depends on many things such as if you are going to record the audio yourself or pay a professional as well as how long the recording will be. Reddit Audiobooks Thread → On Reddit forums you can post your book but be aware that Reddit can get nasty (I’ve seen it happen) so you must ensure your book is excellent before posting! That said, I’ve had good results with Reddit for my audiobooks as this is a well-traveled subreddit.
Theoretically, you can also pause or jump back while listening to an audio file. The fact that printed text is anchored to a specific location on a page also seems to help people remember it better than screen-based text, according to more research on the spatial attributes of traditional printed media. All this may be relevant to the audiobook vs. book debate because, like digital screens, audiobooks deny users the spatial cues they would use while reading from printed text. Veteran Broadway actor Jim Dale narrated all seven books in the Harry Potter series, amounting to a total of 117 hours and 4 minutes of reading time. He crafted over 200 voices to capture the iconic characters as well as the magic, tragedy and comedy of the source material.
So it’s possible that, had her study pitted traditional books against audiobooks, old-school reading might have come out on top. An audio first production is a spoken word audio work that is an original production but not based on a book. Examples include Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King, who released a Vinyl First audiobook called Dark Carousel in 2018. It came in a 2-LP vinyl set, or as a downloadable MP3, but with no published text. Another example includes Spin, The Audiobook Musical , a musical rendition of Rumpelstiltskin narrated by Jim Dale, and featuring a cast of Broadway musical stars. Above all, a celebrity may not be prepared for what an exhausting experience recording is.
This information can provide students with a connection to the author as well as insight into the author's thoughts and the writing process. If you're happy to narrate your audiobook, break it down into milestones that you'll tackle each day. For example, aim to record one to two chapters every day rather than the entire book at once. That, way you can send files to an audiobook engineer and get feedback on issues and mistakes.
As a teacher of ESL students, I'm looking forward to sharing audiobooks with my students. Since being introduced to audiobooks, I've put classics on my list that I never would have wanted sit down and read, or would have been deterred by the old fashioned language. I don't have children now, but when I do, I can't wait to listen to audiobooks with them over and over! Another use of audiobooks is the ability to listen to books in new languages.
The term "talking book" came into being in the 1930s with government programs designed for blind readers, while the term "audiobook" came into use during the 1970s when audiocassettes began to replace records. In 1994, the Audio Publishers Association established the term "audiobook" as the industry standard. An audiobook is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. A reading of the complete text is described as "unabridged", while readings of shorter versions are abridgements. Also, I youtube audiobook highly recommend forking over the $10 for the featured audiobooks, it’s such a great value! The recordings vary in quality, there have been a few that were so bad, I couldn’t even listen to them, but some are as good as the pay sites and read by pro readers.
There are other options out there for audiobook publication, but none as huge as ACX. This means you will receive significantly lower ACX royalties. Until Monday, when I really, really wanted a book, but the only edition the library had was the audiobook. So I gave in, signed in to Overdrive, and checked it out. The average audiobook is 100,000 words, or about 11 hours long . It takes four to six hours to produce one hour of completed audio, or hours per book.
You’ll need your audiobook files, your square book cover, and about 5 minutes to get this task completed. Here’s a great little video of the actual recording setup I used in my dining room to record my audiobook version of Recording Audiobooks. Let’s cover these the two methods of producing an audiobook—pay for production vs. recording it yourself and also discuss the pros and cons of each. However, recording your own audiobook—though a fair amount of work—can be done even by novices, and the production cost is not as astronomical as you might think. It’s vital to note here that some types of books do NOT make good audiobooks.