Monthly Archives: March 2019

Should I create audiobooks of my novels?

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Most of my own “reading” nowadays is via audiobooks, which I listen to on my endless commute. There are pros and cons to this approach, but in my experience a good narrator can greatly increase my enjoyment of a book. (The main disadvantage is that it’s hard to skim an audiobook.)

It’s not especially hard to create audiobooks nowadays. ACX, the Audiobook Creation Exchange, provides all the resources an author needs–especially the ability to hook up with appropriate narrators. So I just need to decide whether it’s worth the time and money.

The money part is straightforward–narrators charge “Per Finished Hour”, which includes narration, engineering, corrections, and so on. (Many narrators do their own engineering.) So, if your audio book is seven hours long, and the narrator charges $200 per finished hour, you pay $1400.

Depending on the model you choose, you might get as much as 40% of the retail price as a royalty from Audible, the top audiobook vendor. If they charge, say, $20, that’s $8 per book. That’s a breakeven point of about 175 copies–which is not an insignificant number.

On the other hand, there’s synergy and cross-sales and all that good stuff. Maybe audiobooks will help increase my ebook or print book sales. Or maybe not.

Help me out here.

“Home” is available now in paperback!

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You still have to wait till April 2 to get the e-book version of Home. But you can buy the paperback version now. How cool is that? It’s available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, as well as probably other places I haven’t checked. Barnes and Noble will sell it to you for 10% off the already low list price; it also discounts the e-book.

Here’s what the book looks like, in case you forgot:

There’s a lot of value to getting sales up when a book is first published, so there’ll never be a better time to buy it (for the author, at least). And it goes without saying that reviews are extremely helpful as well.

By the way, this is the third book in my Portal series, but I think it stands pretty well on its own. Give it a try! Or buy all three!

Looking down at Aeschylus

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I was here last week:

The Acropolis is stunning. But I also spent a good bit of time looking down from the Acropolis at this place:

This is the Theater of Dionysus. (Wikipedia gives you a better view of it.) It’s where Western drama began, where the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were first performed in the fifth century BCE. And if that doesn’t make you shiver, what will?

(By the way, Mary Renault’s The Mask of Apollo gives a vivid depiction of what it was like to be an actor in the ancient Greek theater.)