Episode 169: Should Indie Authors Produce Audiobooks?

In this week's episode, we take a look at the perils and advantages of audiobook production for indie authors. A preview of DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS (as narrated by Brad Wills) is included at the end of the episode.

It’s time for a new Coupon of the Week!

This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE FORGE, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE FORGE for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

GHOSTFORGE

The coupon code is valid through October 7th, 2023, so if you find yourself in need of a good listen as we advance into fall, perhaps it’s time to get a new audiobook!

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00- Intro and Coupon of the Week

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 169 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September, the 22nd, 2023 and today we're going to discuss whether or not indie authors should produce audiobooks. Before we get to our main topics, let's do Coupon of the Week.

This week's Coupon of the Week is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Forge as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghosts in the Forge for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code, GHOSTFORGE. That coupon code is valid through October the 7th, 2023. So if you find yourself in need of a good listen as we advance in the fall, perhaps it's time to get a new audiobook. You can get the coupon code and the link to the store in the show notes. Let's have some updates on my current writing projects and some questions and comments from readers, and then we'll get to this week’s main topic.

00:00:59- Writing Updates

I am almost to the end of Chapter 15 of 20 of Ghost in the Serpent, which means I'm just about 75% of the way through the rough draft, so I'm hoping I will wrap that up soon, probably before the end of September, but possibly in the first week of October. The audiobook of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians is finished and is currently processing through all the stores, so hopefully we'll be able to announce that soon. And in fact, we're going to include an excerpt from Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians at the end of this episode, so you will be able to listen to a sample. Dragonskull: Tales of the Sorcerer is also going to be started. I think we're going to start recording that on Monday if all goes well, so hopefully we should be able to get that out and available before the end of the year. And once Ghost in the Serpent is finished and published, the next project will be Cloak of Embers, which I hope to start writing in October. That is a neat segue into questions from readers.

00:02:01 Reader Questions

Our first question this week is from John, who asks: This is great news. I've been wanting to read more about Caina and her friends, and now we're finally going to get a new series with her. I just checked and there is no pre-order available yet, so please let me know where we can get this one. I don't usually do pre-orders because setting the logistics of it can be kind of a hassle but if all goes well, Ghost in the Serpent should be out sometime in October 2023, so not too much longer.

Our next question is from Michael, who asks: Have you tried Starfield, Jonathan or do you intend to at some point when you have the time? I was surprised at just how much like Skyrim in space it is. I have in fact tried Starfield. I have Xbox Game Pass for the Xbox I got last year and since Starfield’s in Game Pass, I went to install it and give it a try. Michael's right, it is very much like Skyrim in space where instead of a sword and magic spells, you have a laser gun in the spaceship. Though if you get an axe, you can fight with it like it's a sword. I haven't had much time to play it because I've been focused on trying to get Ghost in the Serpent finished, but I should have more time to play it soon, I think.

Our final question this week is from Godfrey who asks: I love all your books that I've read so far. Still a few to go. I'm slightly confused. How about the audio availability of your Cloak Games and Cloak Mage series? Both these series, which are some of my favorites, only appear to have audio available for the first few books. I'm wondering therefore, if there are plans to issue the rest of each of these two series as audiobooks. Thanks for the kind words, Godfrey. I am glad you enjoyed the Cloak Mage and Cloak Games books and in answer to your question, this is a perfect segue into the main topic of the week, whether or not indie authors should produce audiobooks.

00:03:45: Main Topic of the Week

I had a conversation the other day about how indie authors sometimes try to produce audiobooks only to give up because the audio books don't sell or don't turn a profit. This is quite understandable. Audiobook self-publishing is like the hard mode of ebook self-publishing. Everything about the process is slower, harder, and more expensive than publishing ebooks, especially the more expensive part. As I've logged before with a bit of work, it's possible to produce an ebook entirely with free software. Audiobooks, if you want to hire a really good narrator, are going to cost between $200 and to $400 per finished hour.

So, some basic math will demonstrate the difficulty. At 10 hours long, an audio book of your novel might cost you around $3,000 to produce. If you sell it exclusively via ACX, which means Audible, Apple and Amazon, you will probably get an average of $5 per sale, which means you have to sell about 600 copies to turn a profit. If you sell it through wide distribution, which means you can sell in stores other than Apple, Audible, and Amazon, you will probably get around $2.40 for an ACX sale. Though what you will get on with other stores can range from anywhere to like $1.00 in the library services to almost $6.50 on Chirp and Google Play, depending on your sale price. So just on ACX sales alone, you would need about 1,240 sales to get back your money. Therefore, if you are an indie author and you are thinking about audiobooks, it's a good idea to take a hard look at your finances and business plan and think about whether it's really a smart idea or not.

All that said, I have turned a profit on several of my audiobook projects, Frostborn number six through eleven have all made back what I spent on them, and so have about six of the eighteen Ghost books. I'm pretty sure they'll all eventually earn back what I spent. I am unsure if the Cloak Games or Cloak Mage books will earn back. To refer to Godfrey’s earlier question, so that's why I haven't done any more of them for a while. With all that in mind, here are some….actually, how many tips are these?…with all that in mind, here are 9 tips I found that make audiobook production profitable.

00:05:56: Tips for Audiobook Production

#1: Deductions

Depending on how you have organized your publishing business, you may be able to take the production cost of your audiobooks as a business deduction on your taxes, which could reduce your total tax liability, i.e. how much you owe the government when you file taxes. Note that I am not an accountant or a lawyer and you should obtain tax advice from an accountant qualified for your jurisdiction and legal advice from a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction. That said, the whole idea of deductions sometimes gets sneered at by people ignorant of how taxes actually work, like it's some sort of trick which people use to buy themselves caviar but in most taxing jurisdictions, you can deduct business expenses from your taxes. Though what qualifies as business expenses will vary depending on where you live and what sort of business you actually have, basically business deductions are the governments way of saying spend this income on something on our list of approved expenses to benefit the economy or we're going to take it as taxation, so in my specific situation and business structure, audio production is a deductible expense, which is very beneficial when it comes time to file taxes for the year, but again, consult with a qualified accountant regarding your specific situation.

Of course, there are still taxes on audiobook payments. I have to file 1099 Forms for my narrators, which means they have to pay taxes on the payment as income. When I file taxes and then any sales of the audiobook count as taxable business income, to say nothing of the state sales taxes the customer pays when buying the audiobook. Uncle Sam has centuries of practice of getting his cut and he's very, very good at it.

In my frank opinion, it's wisest just to figure out what you legally owe, preferably with the help of a qualified accountant, and paying that. A lot of otherwise smart people have brought themselves a lot of woe by ignoring that obvious truth.

00:07:35: Tip #2

#2 Finishing a Series

I've noticed that in fantasy and science fiction, readers really dislike an unfinished series. I had originally planned to make Silent Order open end with sort of an adventure of the week format, but that really didn’t work out. I think you could do a more open-ended series structure in genres like mysteries, thriller, and regional crime, but science fiction and fantasy readers have come to expect a complete series arc with a definite and satisfying conclusion at the end.

Audiobook science fiction and fantasy listeners have that as well, but it's even more intense, selling just one audiobook that isn't part of a series is an uphill climb. I have noticed a definite uptick in sales once an audiobook series is complete. Listeners really like to be able to start a series and just listen on straight through to the end. That said, getting to a finished audio book series is a lot of work and money. Frostborn was 15 books long. The Ghosts and Ghost Exile together were 18 books. The last few books, and though all those series were longer than usual, which means they were more expensive to produce.

So if you've written a really long series, getting the entire series in audiobook can be a huge commitment of time and money. As an example, the first Frostborn audiobook I self published was Frostborn: The Dark Warden in late 2018, and the final book finally came out in June 2022. The final audio book finally came out in June 2022, almost four years later. Why the delay? Money ran short on occasion or I didn't have time to work on it or there were health difficulties and then COVID happened in the middle of all that, but now the series is complete and is consistently one of my best sellers.

Audio books number one through five in the Frostborn series were produced by Tantor and then I did number 6 through 15 myself. 6 through 11 have all earned back where I spent and I expect 12 through 15 to reach that point sometime towards the end of 2024. So it was worth it to put them all out, but man, it was a lot of work to get there and I didn't even do the actual narrating. I paid someone else to do it. That said, if you write shorter series of books than I do, putting them out into audio will be obviously less expensive and less effort.

00:09:37: Tip #3

#3:  Ebook advertising

Basically, if the ebook of your book sells well, then odds are the audiobook is going to do well as well. I've experimented a lot with this, but I haven't found very many very good ways of directly advertising audiobooks. More on that soon. It's easier to advertise ebooks than audiobooks, at least in my experience. So rather than trying to advertise audiobook, it’s generally better to advertise the ebooks attached to the audiobooks. As an example, I'm advertising The Ghosts Omnibus One at $0.99 right now. For every 10 or so sales of the ebook, I seem to get one sale of the audio book. Of course the ebook gets  about $0.35 a sale while the audiobook does roughly between $5 and $5.90 per sale, so the audiobooks really do help with the profitability of any advertising, especially on a discounted ebook.

Interestingly, this means that if you have an ebook series that is also available in audiobook, that means it becomes easier to profitably advertise the series, because you will also have money coming in from the audiobooks. I've had a couple of months where 40% of the profit from advertising Frostborn and The Ghosts came from the audiobooks. Though as we've said, getting the entire series in audiobook can be a significant challenge.

00:10:47: Tip #4

#4: Bundles

One thing I found that works well for audiobook sales is bundling. Like, The Ghosts Omnibus One which I mentioned above, is a bundle containing Child of the Ghosts, Ghost in the Flames, and Ghost in the Blood along with the short story Ghost Aria. This lets me have the nice quartered cover with four different titles on it so that it looks very good on Audible. Audible is basically the reason ebook bundles work so well.

There have been some changes in recent years with the addition of Audible Plus, but Audible still mostly works as a subscription credit system. That means you subscribe to Audible and you get your credit a month, which you can then use to buy an audiobook on the store. Since you have the credit, it makes sense to get the longest possible audio book you can for your one credit to maximize the value. The Ghost Omnibus One was the first bundle I did in March 2020. I wasn't expecting much to happen because a lot of other stuff was going on in March of 2020, as you might recall, but the Ghosts Omnibus One was 39 hours long, which made for an attractive value for your credit. It did really well and was my first audio book title to sell more than 1,000 copies in total. I've since had good luck with other bundles. The rest of The Ghosts and Ghost Exile series, and then the Malison complete series audiobook.

00:12:04: Tip #5

#5: Going Wide.

It might be worthwhile to go wide with your audio books, which means having them available on platforms other than Audible, Amazon and Apple. ACX, Amazon's audiobook creation platform has been nasty hook to it. If you set your audio books exclusive to ACX you can get 40% royalties, but if you go non exclusive which is what Y means in this context you get 25%. Sometimes depending on promotions and so forth and the weird way ACX's accounting works, in practice it turns out to be around 12%. For a lot of writers, it’s worthwhile to go exclusive with ACX because the money will be better and Audible, Amazon are the dominant market in audio book publishing.

That said, it is in fact, possible to make more money at the other stores. Google Play, Chirp, Kobo, and Spotify all offer better royalty rates than ACX, even if they don't have the number of users that Audible does. Going wide also allows you to offer direct sales, i.e. selling off your own Shopify or Payhip store or other similar e-commerce platform. Part of the reason I can offer 75% off audio books for my Coupon of the Week is because even with the massive discount, I still make almost as much as I would with a non exclusive sale off ACX. Another advantage is that you get your audiobook into the various library services. The way most of these work is that the library or library system most likely gets access to a big catalog of books and ebooks and audiobooks and the library system only gets charged if someone actually checks out one of the titles.

The rate per checkout for the author is pretty low. It's usually around $1.30 USD, but somebody was checking your audiobook out from the library probably wasn't going to buy it themselves, and the $1.30 is still better than nothing. We've mentioned earlier how if an ebook sells well, the attached audio book will probably sell as well. If you have a lot of ebook sales on non Amazon stores, then it is definitely worthwhile to think about going wide with your audiobooks.

00:13:50 Tip #6

Number 6: Chirp Deals

Additionally, going wide offer is access to the one effective way I found of directly advertising audio books, Chirp deals. Chirp is owned and run by Bookbub. If you're familiar with Bookbub, you know they send out a daily e-mail newsletter containing links to free or discounted ebooks and authors and publishers pay for spots in those newsletters. I myself have done it many times. However, Bookbub could never promote audiobooks because Audible was the dominant force in audiobook publishing, and Audible doesn't let authors or publishers set the price for any audiobooks. To get around this problem, BookBub started its own audiobook store, Chirp Books, where they could sell audiobooks. Chirp offers a daily e-mail newsletter with a list of discounted books, and I've had good results with Child of the Ghosts, Ghost in the Cowl, and Cloak of Dragons. The reason those three audiobooks worked well is because they all have a long tail of sequels: 8 each for Child of the Ghost and Ghost in the Cowl and 5 after Cloak of Dragons.

Usually for a Chirp deal, the first audiobook in the series is $0.99 and then I set the second and third books to $2.99 for the duration of the $0.99 promotion on the first book, which lasts a month. Obviously I will sell the most copies of the $0.99 audiobook and get about $0.30 a pop for those sales.

But I get just under $1.50 for each of the sales on the $2.99 books and some lights them and goes on to get the entire series through. So the later titles in the series can generate like $5.50 per sale depending on price. This works so well that Cloak of Dragons has actually made more from its Chirp deal than it did from the entire time it has been on ACX.

So if your audio books are wide and you have a series of them, is definitely worthwhile to apply for Chirp deal. That said, if you just have one or two audiobooks, you probably would not get much benefit from it.

00:15:46: Tip #7

#7 Time and Chance.

The more audio titles you have across more platforms, the more likely it is that something will take off unexpectedly or do unexpectedly. Well, I had a good example of that in July. My payment from Findaway Voices was usually high. I dug into the data and found out that the Ghost series had experienced a very good month on Storytel. It's one of the stores you can accessed through Findaway Voices distribution. They're based in Sweden and mostly distributed in European and Asian countries. I honestly had only a vague idea that Storytel existed at all. But because my audio books were available there, I had a very good audio month in July, thanks to Storytel, sales. Granted, “plan on getting lucky” is not good planning and should not be in a business plan.

However, for good luck to happen, it takes time and effort. Luck is like lightning and the more lightning rods you build, the better the chance of catching some lightning. It's just that audiobook lightning rods take a really long time to build. ACX famously offers royalty share audio book productions where instead of paying the narrator, you split the royalties from the audio book for seven years. If you pay for production, it's not unrealistic to project seven years or so to make your money back. Like, I started on Frostborn audio books in the fall of 2018 and finished the series in audio four years later in the summer of 2022. And like I mentioned above, 6 of the 10 books recorded in that time have turned to profit, which is actually really good in terms of the time frame.

00:17:12: Tip #8

#8: Beware of reviews.

If you're new to the audiobook space, one thing to watch out for is the overall hostile tone of the negative reviews. I think some indie authors have gotten spooked by negative reviews that were weren't actually indicative of how the audio book was selling or was perceived. I have the feeling that the easier form of media is consumed, the nastier the reviews. Like, a book takes some amount of mental effort to read, but it's less effort to listen to than an audiobook and even less effort than watching a movie or playing a video game, so you are more likely to find over the top negative reviews.

The easier form of a media is to consume, which is why you find things like people posting 7 hour video reviews of why they hate Starfield, or the PlayStation or something. I have an additional theory that this is one of the unfortunate side effects of social media. Negativity always gets more likes and clicks so some people become even more negative to get the likes and clicks, which sets up a vicious cycle.

Anyway, what this means in the audiobook space is that you can have most perfect book ever written, narrated by the most beautiful and charismatic voice ever to speak a human language, a voice that would have made kings and emperors listen enraptured in ancient days, and people will still leave long angry reviews because they didn't like the way weather was pronounced. So when you publish your audiobook, be aware that it's going to get some negative reviews and don't panic when you do. I'm afraid it's simply inevitable and part of the process. Your audiobook will not be for everyone. The challenge is connecting your audiobook to the audience that will appreciate it, which is why we were talking about marketing so much.

00:18:40: Tip #9

#9 Selling AI audiobooks is even harder.

Because audio audiobook production is expensive and difficult, and AI technology has advanced so much in the last few years, people have been experimenting with creating and selling AI generated audiobooks. This will not be the solution to the challenge of audio production. People seem to either love AI or hate AI, and I definitely have a strongly negative personal opinion about generative AI.

That said, it won't be as amazing as its advocates think, nor as dire as the doomsayers believe. People who hate AI or love AI both have a vision where someday you'll be able to type in a prompt like: Lit RPG book where Luke Skywalker and Sherlock Holmes team up to Sauron on Muppet Treasure Island, and the AI will spit out a perfectly crafted book, movie, or game that matches that prompt. But this is as much a fantasy as Lysenkoism or the Whig theory of history, or Rumpelstiltskin’s attempting to generate infinite wealth by spinning straw into fake gold.

As much as people like Bob Iger and David Zaslav would like to get rid of all those annoying actors or writers and replace them with AI, the technology isn't good enough, and the courts and the legislatures generally don't seem to be in favor of copywriting AI generated material. But that's a larger discussion beyond the scope of this podcast episode for the specific area of my audiobooks. The problem is that the AI can generate a voice that sounds almost like a perfect human voice, fluently reading the text. This has the unfortunate side effect of triggering the uncanny valley effect and making it difficult to listen to the audiobook for a long period of time because the voice swiftly becomes boring. You know the voice narrating the drug side effects at the end of commercials, where it's like Zinoplav can cause blah blah blah. Imagine listening to that voice narrating a nine hour romance audio book.

The performative aspect of audio books is hard to quantify, but it is undeniably real and undeniably has a strong effect on the finished audiobook. I experimented with AI audiobooks on YouTube a bit over the last two years. Google Play came out with a program where you could automatically convert one of your ebooks to an AI narrated audiobook. Since I never had any intention of turning Silent Order into audiobooks, I felt comfortable experimenting with the program for that series since it wasn't screwing anyone out of a job.

I didn't think the results were good enough to sell, but I did post them on YouTube for free, though, to be fair, I did make some money from the attached ads.

What did I learn? First off, there isn't a lot of money in it. In the time I've had AI narrated audiobooks on YouTube, I made about 60% of what it would cost to turn Silent Order: Iron Hand into a real audiobook.

Second, people really, really hate AI voices, like intensely and with a passion. They hate them, if a brief glance at the YouTube comments for those audiobooks will reveal, this is one of the things that the Pro AI advocates never seem to accept.

People generally hate AI generated stuff. Like, people have no problem using generative AI to write their homework assignments or doing unpleasant writing tasks they don't want to do, like writing cover letters. That kind of thing. But when it comes to actually consuming entertainment media, most people hate AI like this. This sounds, looks, reads, like an AI did it has become a common insult online.

00:21:55

The Marvel show Secret Invasion got a lot of flack because they used AI generated images for the opening titles. Though to be fair, that show had a lot of other problems, so I don't really think AI is a way to lower the cost of audiobook production or to generate a viable audiobook for sale. I think the eventual use of the technology will be to integrate with ereaders. Like say you want your phone to read a book aloud to you. You'll select the voice and accent you want and the e-reader app will read a book to you. In fact, you already can do that on many devices, just with voices that aren't quite as advanced.

In my opinion, I think that's a big win for accessibility for visually impaired readers and listeners. But I don't think it's going to replace human narration.

00:22:37 Conclusion

Producing audiobooks can be very satisfying and help you reach an audience that otherwise wouldn't encounter your work, but they're definitely not a get rich quick scheme, and they are unquestionably a whole lot of work.

If you're an indie author, should you turn your books into audiobooks? I'm afraid the answer has to be individualized. You have to take a good, honest look at your finances, business structure, and goals, and decide if audio production audiobook production will work for you or not. That said, it is nice when you get the emails from listeners saying they listen to the entire series on a cross country drive or while doing something difficult and unpleasant. And with that in mind, thank you all for listening to so many of my audio books.

00:23:18 Conclusion

So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you find the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave for review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week. And now we'll close out the show with the sample of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians as narrated by Brad Willis.

00:23:44: Audiobook excerpt of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians