I’m excited to be speaking on Tuesday 23 June at 4pm during the Audiobook Empire Narrator Summit! I’m passionate about my topic From Arthurian Legends to WhodunIts: Creating Your Publishing Empire With Public Domain Books. I hope you’ll be able to join us, especially since we’ll include a Q&A in the session.
You may be thinking, “That’s great, but what does your presentation have to do with AI?”
This article will answer that question.
Last updated 1/28/26
I received this comment on my article Public Domain Narration Headquarters. Since the question involves a book still under copyright, I decided to create a new article, redacting some of the identifiable aspects of the message.
I would love to record a memoir by a great [person]. Once recorded, I think there would be a market for it. The book was published in 2002, therefore is not public domain. It’s sold by Amazon but there is no audiobook of it.
I know I’ll have to contact the publisher but I don’t know where to go from there. I don’t know how to set up a contract for the job (I’d be willing to do royalty share). I don’t know how to get the audiobook onto Amazon and Audible so people can buy it.
I’ve recorded more than X books, mostly for Learning Ally. I have a good home studio. I got two jobs from [a Big 5 publisher] but have not been having much luck with auditions of late. My work of late has focused on [certain]-themed books. I haven’t figured out Findaway or Spoken Realms. I’m getting my business education from you and APA but there’s a lot I need to learn. Any advice you can give will be appreciated.
Thanks for the note.
First, this article may seem more of a general answer than you’d hoped. It needs to benefit the most people. Obviously, each discussion and negotiation about audio rights and audiobook production will be unique. I can’t anticipate or explain every possible scenario, and the scope of the topic is beyond what I can cover in an article. I can only give you a basic game plan and some resources.
Second, I need to state a few general facts about copyright so we’re all on the same page:
You must research the publication and copyright renewal dates to determine a book’s copyright status, and, if it is still copyrighted, the rights holder. If it’s public domain, head over to my Public Domain Narration Headquarters for more info and resources.
This article concerns only those books still in copyright.
When I was young, I had this poster or similar ones taped on my bedroom wall.
I adored David when I was young, and I learned a valuable lesson from him as an adult.
Last updated 1/28/26
When the obstacle in your way seems to have stopped you in your tracks,
it’s not a failure.
It’s part of what’s calling forth the necessary change
so you can move through, around, over, or under whatever is on your path to success.— Christian Sørensen
This quote applies to my relationship to public domain books.
Although I started narrating audiobooks in 2002, it wasn’t until ACX launched in 2011 that I really got a foothold in the industry. Prior to that point, the market didn’t exist for a narrator who lived in Atlanta. You either had to be in New York or LA; otherwise, producers didn’t want to talk to you. With ACX, all of the rest of us could have a voice in audiobooks, too.
I soon burned out doing ACX projects since most of them were royalty share books where the rights holder was not promoting the audiobook. (Shameless plug: If you’re interested, I explain how to pick good ACX titles in my webinar Put Yourself in the ACX Drivers Seat, available on my Shop page.)
At the same time, I wasn’t getting traction with publishers. I decided to start recording more public domain books.
Public domain (PD) books are those where the copyright has expired. They belong to all of us, and anybody can do anything they want to with a book that’s in the public domain.
Over time, I’ve kind of become what I think of as the Public Domain Whisperer™️. I regularly search HathiTrust.org for interesting PD books. HathiTrust is a consortium of academic and research libraries with over 17 million digitized items, I often find a book that I think would be a good one for another narrator to do, so I send the link and the suggestion to them.
I’ve been gratified by the enthusiastic and excited responses to my finds. One experienced and award-winning narrator told me I had set them on a new path, and they’ve won a number of awards for their PD productions!
This article will be my Public Domain Narration Headquarters. I’ll start with ten reasons why I love, love, LOVE recording and publishing public domain books. Plus, check out the resources list below as well as the comments, where I answer your questions!
Happy belated birthday Walt Disney!
I narrated, produced, and published the public domain book The Story of Walt Disney by Diane Disney Miller and Pete Martin. I was thrilled that it released on 5 December in celebration of the 120th anniversary of Disney’s birth.
While I’m excited to announce this audiobook, I’m writing this post to talk about its cover art, and more specifically, information about image usage that may help you if you publish your audiobooks.
I’ve previously written about Copyrighted Images in a Public Domain Book.
That article discussed the images inside the book. Of course, the copyright laws also apply to the cover art, so I encourage you to read it.
Today, I want to talk about the laws concerning right of publicity. (Insert my usual disclaimer about not being a lawyer though I have voiced many in audiobooks.)
As far as I know, iAnnotate software doesn’t have a way to automatically highlight all your search results.
However, good ole MS Word — even my 2004 copy for Mac — has that option under Find and Replace. This article has instructions.
In addition to or instead of highlighting the text, the Find and Replace formatting box lets you make font changes like underline and bold to the search results. You can even change the font, its size, and color on each search result.
Of course, you also can change the font type and size for the entire document in Word, which you can’t do in iAnnotate. PDF means “portable document format” and was devised as a method to present the text in the same way to all users regardless of their software or hardware. As long as a document is a PDF, you have no ability to change the size, color, or type of the font.
If Word can’t open your PDF, you can cheaply and easily convert it to a Word file using Adobe Export PDF.
Once you’ve made all the global changes you want in Word, iAnnotate automatically opens Word files and converts them back to PDF.
By the way, you can pretty quickly manually highlight your iAnnotate search results if you don’t want to transfer the doc to Word and back. With the search results showing on the right side of your iAnnotate screen, tap the Highlighter tool on the left side with your document. Then, tap on each search result to go to the next instance, and highlight the word.
Members of my NarratorsRoadmap.com site can watch my 12-module video course on iAnnotate to learn how to use this software to its fullest advantage in prepping audiobooks.
