The Bizarre World of Scam Audiobooks
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Many of these new narrators seem to have seen a Youtube video, or something, about how to make easy money narrating books. I'm guessing that, due to Covid, the ability to make money from home has been very attractive. I can usually tell within 10 seconds of listening to their audition that they're new - really low volume and lots of background noise. Just a non-professional setup.
There's also people who apply for my narration jobs using bots. As in they feed the narration script to a bot and have it read it. On their page they advertise how they can do male voices, female voices, and basically any kind of accent - which to them is just tweak a setting on the bot.
ACX must be way underfunded. Especially during Christmas time they get several months behind on approving fully narrated books. Seems like Amazon just isn't investing much in the platform.
I go for $50-100 PFH and get dozens of auditions. My last book had like 50 auditions. Most were horrible. I got around 5 good ones.
Probably because $50-100 PFH is a pretty low rate. So you're getting entry level narrators. Narrators willing to work at or around minimum wage, and in actuality much less.
Here is why I say that - authors/non-narrators don't consider that the ACX narrator is expected to do all the following: pre-read, script interpretation, direction (i.e. rehearsal), re-reads, editing, quality review, technical compliance / finalization (i.e. mastering) and uploading. There is not less than 4 hours work PFH (per finished hour) of audio, and it's probably closer to 6 to 7 hours PFH for a moderately experienced narrator willing to work for $100pfh, and 12 to 14 hours PFH for the novice narrator. I've been narrating a long time and have tons of automation built into my workflow, and I am still quite often more than 4 hours actual work to create a single hour of final audio.
Voice artists are just as deserving of 100 years of compensation as authors are.
Thats good enough reason for me.
Source: I was the founding audio production manager for ACX.
That's pretty interesting. From your vantage point could you say why that's true?
In my experience, I would agree it's true because it seems that the vast majority of Audiobooks don't actually sell that many copies. A narrator should never expect to earn, say, $1000 or more in Royalties, even over the life of the book. ($1000 dollars represents typical low-moderate PFH pay for a book length of 5-10 finished hours)
My guess is that you'd need to sell probably 300 to 400 copies of an audiobook to make $1000 in narrator Royalties. I don't have hard data, but I would estimate that audiobooks probably sell at a ratio of 20% or less than the paper version. So you'd need to narrate a book that's going to sell at least 1000+ paper copies in a year before you'd have a chance at breaking even in the year you narrated the book.
1000+ sales in a year is a pretty tall sales order. According to Scribe media: [0] "In the book’s lifetime Research suggests that the “average” self-published, digital-only book sells about 250 copies in its lifetime.
"By comparison, the average traditionally published book sells 3,000 copies, but as I mentioned above, only about 250-300 of those sales happen in the first year."
It would appear the odds are not in the narrator's favor.
I get such an odd feeling with stuff like that, like my brain buzzes in a very relaxing way for some reason... bah!
Where do you find access to those?
And it's clear the authors rarely check the work.
We saw on HN this week that the numbers don't work for authors [1], and considering that audiobook sales are a fraction of print sales, the business case for narrators is far worse.
[0] https://help.acx.com/s/article/what-royalty-is-paid-on-acx
So...
1. baddies write programs to randomly generate content
2. baddies post it to Audible's ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) platform
3. Some bored guy with no standards on what he's reading narrates the gibberish for free
4. baddie gets 200 promo codes
5. and... baddie presumably sells the codes somehow.From the article, this is what the step 5 should be. They would just redeem the codes for free and then get paid.