I’ve decided to re-explore the possibility of creating an audiobook of the chapter book version of Uleyli- The Princess & Pirate. (Months ago I reached out to a prominent Native American actress to do the voiceover but that never went anywhere. So I abandoned the idea.)
There are two ways to produce an audiobook. You can do it under a revenue share where the voiceover artists receives no up-front money but receives a 50-50 split of your revenue. Or you can pay the voice over artist upfront for their services and completely own the audio recording which lets you keep all the revenue. Amazon’s Audible allows the split revenue option through their ACX service. They handle all the revenue tracking and division of royalties making it a painless process for the author.
I’ve decided to pay a voice over artist up front for their services. This allows me to own the voice over and thus I can do whatever I want to with it. If I want to create an animated iBook for Apple Books I can use the voice over for that purpose in addition to the standard audio book. Or anything else I can think to use it for in the future. So that’s why I chose this route.
I will be using FindawayVoices.com as my distributor. They have a great variety of voice over artists to choose from and they handle distribution to all the major and minor Audiobook retailers including ones that most public libraries use. This was another of the most important considerations. In fact, I found out about FindawayVoices.com in an online training course I subscribed to called RealFastLibraryMarketing.com. It’s been a very helpful educational tool for a new author of a book targeted at public and school libraries.
I’ll post updates as I go through the process.