Comment by impostervt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by impostervt | Hacker News Reader

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I've published some books on Amazon and used ACX. Just to add on to the story - there's been a proliferation of new narrators on the system, which has naturally driven down prices being paid.

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.

There are so many TikToks about doing this kind of voice work.

I'm curious. For your books, do you offer the ACX narrator paid work per finished hour, or as a Royalty Share?

I pay per finished hour (PFH). Never seen a good reason to do a royalty split.

That's great. We narrators are always grateful for the PFH rate!

What's a typical range for PFH?

Prior to the audition phase, the book owner (me) specifies a pay band. Lowest is $50-$100 per finished hour of audio. I think above that is $100-200, and there's one more above that.

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.

>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.

I know it's a low rate and I'm surprised I can find pretty good quality at that rate. The books I publish are pretty simple - relatively short, non-fiction. I imagine fiction books requiring voices/emotion would require a higher rate.

> Never seen a good reason to do a royalty split.

Voice artists are just as deserving of 100 years of compensation as authors are.

Thats good enough reason for me.

Common misconception. In the audiobook narration world the price per finished hour is considerably more revenue than royalty split. It is therefore reserved for the more reliable and more talented ACX narrators.

Source: I was the founding audio production manager for ACX.

>In the audiobook narration world the price per finished hour is considerably more revenue than royalty split

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.

[0] https://scribemedia.com/book-sales/

No, narrators are not taking any book writing and publishing risks, authors do.

The books I publish are ghost written, so the "authors" don't get royalties either.

"deserving" is not how compensation works

Well, then lets abolish copyright altogether. It is a legal fiction created because authors "deserve" compensation.

That’s not why copyright exists. It exists explicitly to encourage more writing.

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