Do you listen to audiobooks?
Before I became an author, I had no clue what a loaded question that was.
I won't bore you with the nitty gritty details of the negative Nancie's who despise audiobooks and think they don't count as books. Rather I want to recount my own journey with audiobooks for you.
Personally, I have attention span issues (it's an acronym you may have heard of) as such I always struggled with audio books. Somewhere along the way my brain would tune out, my vision would go fuzzy, then I'd 'wake up' twenty minutes later realizing I'd been staring at a wall and not be able to recount a single thing that had happened.
The few times I have been able to properly digest an audio book was when it was for a story I was already familiar with. I'm the type of person who likes having 'comfort shows' on in the background while I work. Something I've seen a hundred times and don't need to have my undivided attention on. I found I could apply that same idea to audiobooks. Now I have a small collection of them on my smart phone and I put in my headphones when I'm busy cleaning, organizing, home projects, or doing marketing work.
Even before I made this discovery, I knew not turning my novels into audiobooks wasn't an option.
Why? Because there are hundreds of people out there who use and rely on audiobooks as their way of reading. Parents who have little down time pop in an audio book while doing nightly chores or sitting on the sides of little league games. Workers with long commutes, or people who drive for a living, turn on a book to keep their minds fresh while on the open road. And most obviously, people with vision impairment, either totally or partially blind, rely on audio books. Brail isn't readily available at a lot of local bookstores, (heck I'm an author and I'm not even sure how to get my book translated into brail) but audiobooks are available on any smartphone.
So once my debut novel 'Hidden Realm' was published I started the process of audiobook narration.
I found an amazing narrator, Yi Ming Sofyia Xue who worked tirelessly to perfect the voices of each character and to evoke emotion into the narration. Together we got everything publication ready. A few years later I purchased my own microphone and did a dramatic reading of my horror novella 'The Devil Within' to make it available to more people.
With my first two books turned into audio I was excited, ecstatically planning out the next audio book and looking forward to working with Yi Ming on the sequel to 'Hidden Realm' and maybe having her do a more professional version of my horror books. Sadly, those projects have been put on hold.
What I think many readers don't realize is the amount of work, time, and cost, that foes into audiobook production. It takes hours upon hours of work on the end of the narrator. The final (well deserved) payment starts at about $1,500 USD.
I'm not ashamed to admit that with me being a smaller author I've sold less than 20 copies of my audiobooks. No one's career starts off on hyperdrive, I'm OK with that. But the sad reality is it means I can't afford to create more audiobooks, meaning there is a section of the population my books are not accessible to at the moment. While I hate that, I also understand it, and hope my readers understand it as well. One day I hope to have every one of my works turned into audio, but I'm going to have to be patient as will my readers.
Audiobooks, regardless of whether you love them or hate them, they are necessary, but sadly, not always attainable. Especially for smaller authors with limited budgets.
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