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