Monday evenings, I typically grab an hour to listen to my favorite podcast, This Week in Tech (TWiT) hosted by Leo Laporte, with frequent guests John C. Dvorak, Patrick Norton and others who analyze the weekly news in from the world of technology.
Seeing as Audible is their major sponsor, I knew the time would come when they discussed recording audiobooks, the time required and how much narrators get paid.
Well, I've got some answers for you.
Audiobook Market
Pat Fraley reports on Vox Daily that:
According to my friend and president of Blackstone Audio, Craig Black, this figure will balloon to 24,000 over the next four years. Why? Because of the success of downloadable audiobooks on the Internet.
Industry news source Voice Over Times reports:
Earlier this year, Amazon announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Audible, the audiobook website for a transaction value of approximately $300 million.
In short, the audiobook industry is red hot!
Audiobook Narrators
Audiobook publishers need all sorts of talents and sounds. If you have struggled because you sound like you’re 16, or 60, guess what? There are audiobook projects out there that need your sound. It is just a matter of finding the door where the welcome mat is ready and waiting.
Do You Need an Agent?
In the Billion $ Read, Pat Fraley explains that there is no need to go through an agent. Audiobook publishers deal directly with the voice talent. That's you Leo.
Time Required
As an estimate, it requires 4-5 times as long to produce a finished minute of a recorded voice over as it does to simply read the script.
Here's an example:
- 1 hour to read a short story.
- 2 hours for editing (removing breaths, pops, clicks,
- 1 hour for mixing (equalization, compression, limiting)
- 1 hour for mastering (saving the file to disk, converting to other formats, burning a hard copy for archive)
Total = 5 hours
Freelance Voice Over Rates
While the narration of audiobooks are often priced on a per word basis, somewhere between $0.10 and $0.25, rates for other types of voice over recordings can be found by viewing this voice over rate sheet [PDF].
Don't Let Just Anyone do the Movie Trailer
Should the book you record ever get made into a movie, don't let just anybody, including Calacanis, voice the movie trailer.
The "In a World..." imitation that Jason Calacanis tried to do is of Don LaFontaine. Don invented the movie trailer voice and even wrote the copy. There are many people who strive to be the "Voice of God", the select who nail it, but oftentimes many fall short.
TWiT Fans, Would You Buy an Audiobook by Leo Laporte?
Leave your comments below.
Hi David,
Thanks for posting this. Audible has been a long time sponsor of TWiT so it would seem that perhaps Leo has thought of recording an audiobook to sell via the service.
I'm sure Laporte fans would be up for buying an audiobook narrated by Leo. I would.
Best wishes,
Stephanie