Karen@KarenCommins.com

Karen Commins

Award Winning

Atlanta Audiobook Share-rator™

Karen Commins

Audiobooks Are Not Easy Money

A journalist requested an interview with me last week to talk about audiobook narration, my favorite topic. I asked her to send me a list of questions and offered to write out some answers for her.

I knew this wouldn’t be a typical interview when I saw 2 questions:

  1. How much money do you make?
  2. What do you use the money for?

girl holding money and giving thumbs up

I realized that she wanted to interview people with side jobs rather than full-time occupations. It turns out that she was writing a column named “Easy Money” and was surveying multiple ways to make money that are associated with books. Her editor had seen listings on Upwork.com where people are looking for audiobook narrators and thought this job would be a good one to add.

I told her that I didn’t want to be included in her story because audiobook narration and production are definitely NOT ways to earn easy money!

As you learned in this article, narration is not as easy as reading aloud. Authors who are new to audiobooks are often shocked at the cost of production.

Also, due to the dramatic growth of the audiobook industry, authors perceive that sales for audio editions are easily made without much or any effort. I therefore thought it would be good to write an article this week about 3 financial aspects of audiobook production so authors can have realistic expectations.

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Resolutions and Intentions

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us

are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

— Henry Stanley Hoskins (not Emerson as I originally believed)

 

It’s day 3 in a new year. Have you already broken your New Year’s Resolutions?

At the end of 2016, I took Michael Hyatt’s 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever course. (This book is based on that course.) On day 3 of the course, he wrote about New Year’s Resolutions:

The average person makes the same New Year’s resolutions ten separate times without success.

After going through all of the exercises in Hyatt’s course, I confidently started 2017 with several specific goals in the areas of health, career, and avocation. I was making progress on all of them until mid-May.

Drew’s parents, who were 93 and 92 at the time, had been in good health for their age. They both were able to walk and care for themselves, and they were still living independently in their house of 54 years. He still drove, they did their own shopping, and they did all of the personal care activities that we take for granted. We enjoyed lunch with them at a restaurant on 12 May. In a blink of an eye, life changed.

Drew and his parents in June 2017
Drew and his parents in June 2017. They were at rehab, and we were hoping for better days to come.

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Should An Author Narrate Her Audiobook?

Last updated 3/15/21

 

picture of a microphone

 

One question that I’ve seen and heard repeatedly from authors and listeners is: How is a narrator selected to read the audiobook?

In addition, many authors tell me that they want to narrate their audiobooks for financial and/or artistic reasons.

At first glance, the author might seem to be the most logical choice for the narrator. The author has labored over every word in the book and obviously is the person most familiar with its arc and important points.

However, many avid listeners refuse to listen to books narrated by the author because they have frequently discovered that the writer is not necessarily the best performer. In fact, the annual consumer surveys from the Audio Publishers Association show this consistent finding:

“Audiobook consumers place a high priority on quality of narration. Non-fiction and fiction listeners alike prefer a professional voice actor to the author as a narrator.”

I always advise authors and publishers to select the narrator who can best serve the text. The following 3 questions guide the casting process:

1) Is the book fiction or non-fiction?
2) What narrative point of view (POV) is used in the book?
3) Who is paying for the production costs?

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Antidote For A Dry Spell

 

As I wrote over 10 years ago, in order for your ship containing job contracts to come sailing in to your harbor, you have to keep sending out promotional and prospecting ships into the world. But what happens when you don’t see any results from your efforts? It’s so easy to fall into a negative mindset, especially when it seems that every narrator you know is announcing on social media that they had scheduled work through the next 6 months even before they were just hired for a 10-book series.

I still am not at the level of success that I envision, and some days, the critical voice in my mind starts in on me about what I haven’t accomplished. I notice that mean girl never gives me credit for all of the things I HAVE done! No matter how circumstances may appear in the moment, the key is to push the doubts away and keep marching toward your dream.

In 2012,  Dave Courvoisier wrote candidly on his blog about a dry spell he was experiencing in gaining work. In this article, I’m including and expanding on my response to him.

First, it’s possible to want something so badly that your desperation to have it can actually push it away from you. I wrote about this phenomenon in the article Voiceover and the Law of Paradoxical Intent.

I can tell you honestly that it was only after I truly ACCEPTED my life as it was that things really started to move forward for me.

Second, the number of jobs booked in a time period is only one small way of measuring success. I wrote about 3 techniques for maintaining a feel-good mentality about your career in the post The feel-good voiceover blog post of the summer!. I write my articles for myself as much as for my audience, and this is one post that I often re-read to maintain balance and objectivity during slow times.

I cannot overemphasize the 3rd technique too much — STOP THE COMPARISONS TO OTHER PEOPLE! It is the single greatest act of self-negation that keeps us from our good.

In fact, when I listened to Rob Lowe’s most excellent narration of his autobiographical audiobook Stories I Only Tell My Friends, I heard a compelling reason to keep going forward with your dream. When Lowe talked about meeting an unknown LeVar Burton about a week before ROOTS was aired on TV, he said:

“It showed me how quickly the rocket fuel of stardom can ignite, how unimaginably GIANT the g-forces can be as you are propelled into fame’s orbit.

Looking back, I also wonder at the mystery of destiny and fate. I marvel at the mercurial forces of fortune and am reminded that one must be ever vigilant to stay on one’s own path, without envy of others.”

When I don’t know what the next step is, I just take one. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s the best thing I could do at the time. It doesn’t matter if other people agree with me, cheer me on, throw spitballs my way, or totally ignore me.

It’s not about them. It’s about me. It’s about “staying vigilant on my path, without envy of others.”

All that matters is that I take that step…..because that step gets me one step closer to the life I’m meant to lead.

Law of Attraction

Shortly after I responded on Dave’s blog, I wrote the article Power of “I Am” In Maintaining a Positive Attitude. Whatever you put after those 2 words becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A passage in the 12/15/17 Science of Mind magazine daily guide really brings home this point.

“Whenever a negative, demeaning thought is believed and allowed to repeat, it is a prayer. “I am [blank] is a prayer. This thought repeatedly spoken becomes a belief. A belief becomes a reality, a prayer answered. By repeating the thoughts, “I am not good enough”…or “Life has always been a struggle”, I am actually creating that reality.

One of our greatest tools is practicing discipline with what we allow ourselves to think. The reality is that you must first believe your affirmation to be true of you.

…See and know your good, then praise and embrace it.”

We need to keep thinking and believing that the success we seek is coming to us. What we think about expands. If we focus on what we think we lack, we will continue to experience more of the same lack.

Just because things don’t happen on our timetable or in the way that we would expect them to show up doesn’t mean they aren’t going to happen. They probably will happen and be even greater than we could imagine!

Just keep smiling, taking steps, and sending out those ships!

 

Is This Coach Right For Me?

Professional fitness coach isolated on black background

 

When people ask my advice about getting training, I refer them to my article 10 questions to ask coaches and demo producers and the vetted coaches and consultants linked in the Connections section of my NarratorsRoadmap.com home page.

Recently, someone told me she wanted to develop confidence and wondered whether I thought a particular coach was sincere. I recognized that she really wanted to know if the coach was right for her before she committed to spend the money for the course.

I decided other people may find my answer with 4 additional questions to be useful, so I’m posting the modified version of my reply here.

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From Casting a Narrator to Happily Ever After

Last week, I looked at the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX.com) as a matchmaking site between indie authors and narrators. Today in part 2 of the series, we’ll continue exploring the ACX process, from casting the narrator you love to living happily ever after with your completed audiobook.

I should mention at this point that ACX refers to everyone on the production side as a producer. Some producers only manage the project, but most ACX producers are also the narrator with whom you will contract your book. Therefore, I’ll use these 2 words interchangeably.

In most cases, one narrator will perform the entire book, giving voices to characters of both genders. You can find your ideal narrator by taking either of 2 non-mutually exclusive paths on ACX: contact narrators individually, or let them find your title.

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