I love writing! When I first started, my thought was that I wanted to publish a book. I didn't really think beyond learning more about each element of writing fiction and the actual writing itself. So imagine my surprise when I decided to self-publish. There was so much to learn!
The same applies to my decision to put my books on audio. There was the learning curve of how to record and edit a book, the practical need to find an audio engineer to finalize everything, doing more edits when working with the audio engineer, etc.
And now I'm learning about how audio books are published and distributed. All good stuff!
The majority of audio books are published on, and distributed via, the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX). ACX is owned by Audible (which is part of Amazon). ACX is to Audible audiobooks as Kindle Direct Publishing is to Kindle eBooks. But ACX also publishes on iTunes, which is nice.
Basically, you upload your book cover (it's square and has to meet ACX's standards). Then you upload your book, chapter by chapter. Certain standards have to be met for the book to be approved and accepted by ACX. See below.
The price is set by ACX and it's based on the length of your audio. They provide you with credits to give, in order to get the audio for free, that you can use for promotional purposes.
There are other audiobook publishers/distributors that you can use instead, like Findaway Voices (owned by Spotify). So you have to decide if you want to go exclusively with ACX or if you want to have the ability to go with more than one. I plan to go exclusively with ACX since Amazon is the biggest market.
I submitted my opening credits, acknowledgements, all chapters, and ending credits for #HuntedLives this morning so it should be published inside of 2 weeks! Yay!
I really enjoyed recording this book. It was a lot of work but I learned so much in the process.
And I know the learning will continue as I work to market the audio and work with those promotional credits.
I plan to record #JusticePrevails next but I want to focus for a bit on my 4th novel so I probably won't start recording until August. Now that I've gone through the complete process, I fully expect it to be faster and easier the 2nd time around.
Speaking of the 4th novel, I interviewed a Boerne police detective to gather some general knowledge on process and how they do things in Boerne, and will tell you all about it in my next blog.
Have a fabulous day!