For a manuscript of 75,000 words, you should expect the Audiobook to be about 8 hours long. A good pace for narration is 9,300 words per hour. The choice of narrator is primary, followed by the cost of engineering, quality control and preparing for delivery to Audible, ACX, or any other audiobook retailer of your choosing. Also, the book gets released on Apple Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, independent booksellers, and other outlets. The cost of producing an audiobook to a finished, fully mastered digital product is simple. Multiplying the narrators per finished hour rate with the estimated run-time of your book. You will then have a rough idea of the cost of producing an audiobook.

There are several ways to produce an audiobook. Some authors opt to record themselves at home, which is fine if the quality is not an issue. Background noise and interruptions can complicate the process. Or, you can go into a studio and hire a narrator or read it yourself. If you have an engineer, they can edit of the fly while you narrate which saves a lot of time. The best produced audiobooks are mastered professionally in the studio, which will get you approved on Audible quicker. If you are a writer you can choose to narrate yourself, or we can cast for you. Either way the production process is the same.

Narration takes twice as long as the finished book, and editing plus engineering takes at least 3 hours per finished hour. Add in a final control pass, and you’re looking at more than 6 hours of actual work per finished hour. That adds up to 30 hours for that 5-hour audiobook, according to a post Scribe Media which we agree with. Let us add that recording session last approximately four hours and should yield between ninety minutes to two hours of finished, consolidated, audio.

Many people are concerned about making mistakes when they read their book, and what that may mean for editing. There are two ways to go: one way is a “straight” read, or “roll record”, and the engineer does a manual, analog, edit. The other audiobook production process is what we call punch and roll. This results in fewer errors and is beneficial, particularly if you are concerned about how long it takes to produce an audiobook. If you’ve asked yourself any of the above questions, then you are in the right place. Feel free to give us a call or email us. We look forward to hearing from you.