My fellow narrators and I often contact authors about creating audiobooks of their books. Many times, the author tells me that her publisher has the audio rights, or she isn’t sure who owns them.

Authors could make more money by exercising as many subsidiary rights as possible for each book, especially the audio rights. The audiobook industry is on a 3-year trend of double digit growth that shows no sign of slowing.

If you have your audio rights, you could contract with a narrator or producer to create an audiobook. You also could choose to license your audio rights to a publisher or producer. The trade-off is that you earn more royalties if you retain your rights and contract with a narrator or producer. When you license your rights, your royalty rate is lower because someone else is managing the audiobook production process.

I’m posting this list of links about rights so that more authors can get their books into audio.

• PublishLawyer.com
  • Rights 101
  • Tell me about royalties for subsidiary rights

• UK Society of Authors Guide To Copyright and Permissions
  • This site publishes a number of other guides and articles that you will find helpful.

• Managing Intellectual Property in the Book Publishing Industry PDF

• The Creative Penn blog How Authors Sell Publishing Rights with Orna Ross
  • Note: I bought the book with the same title but found the coverage on audio rights in chapter 10 to be limited to ACX, Podium Publishing, CD Baby and Author’s Republic, with the emphasis on the author’s costs and royalty rates. Licensing the audio rights to a publisher or producer isn’t discussed.

• The article Securing Audiobook Rights: Rights You Need to Bring Your Audiobook to Market on Jane Friedman’s blog is a good summary.

In addition to managing your own publishing rights, you’ll want to be sure to honor copyrights on others’ works. This Cornell University chart shows copyright terms in the US.

Lyrics and Music

Many authors include popular song lyrics in their books without understanding that they first need to obtain permission from the copyright holder, which may be granted at a cost based on projected sales of the book. This article explains the process of licensing reprints of song lyrics.

The reprint rights are non-transferrable, so they don’t apply to the narrator. Be aware that your narrator will not be legally allowed to sing or say the lyrics of a copyrighted song in the audiobook unless you also obtain a mechanical license, which is an additional permission and expense.

You cannot include copyrighted music in your audiobook without also obtaining a master use license from the copyright owner of the sound recording.

If you want to fully understand the flow of copyright and licensing agreements in music, I highly recommend Harvard Professor William Fisher’s video lecture on this topic.

I’ll continue to add to this page as I discover useful sites. If you know of a helpful site on this topic, please post the URL in a comment. I’ll also be happy to answer any questions.

The post Links to Help Authors Know Their Rights appeared first on Karen Commins.

In talking with people who came to our booth, I noticed 3 reasons authors shy away from audiobooks.

1) Authors aren’t sure about consumer demand for audiobooks.

One person who never listens to audiobooks asked me the average price for one. When I said it might be $15-$20, the astonished reply was, “for a BOOK?” I explained that many options exist that enable listeners to acquire audiobooks at cheaper prices, including free ones at the library.

More importantly, an audiobook isn’t just a book. It is its own performance art.

You could look at it this way: you could spend $15 for a movie ticket that gets you about two hours of entertainment. You don’t own that entertainment and can’t enjoy it again without paying the additional money. With an audiobook, though, you could pay the same or less amount of money for 6, 10, or more hours of entertainment that you’d be able to revisit as often as you like.

Audiobooks are a $1.2 billion industry that has experienced double digit growth for the past 2 years. That trend isn’t likely to stop anytime soon. Both production and consumer costs have come down dramatically as technology has streamlined the process.

2) Authors aren’t already audiobook fans.

A few authors told me that they don’t have a commute and therefore didn’t have time to listen. I know I sure appreciated hearing a good book last week while I sat in abysmal Atlanta traffic going to and from the convention.

While audiobooks are popular companions during commutes, you don’t need to travel to listen to an audiobook. I listen every day while walking my dog. I also listen on the treadmill and while swimming. Audiobooks complement almost any form of exercise! I’ve also been known to listen while eating my lunch. You could listen while you’re in the shower. In fact, there’s no end to the variety of things you could do and hear a great book at the same time.

Once you start listening, not only will you get through more books each year, but you may also start planning your own audiobook. You’ll find that writing for audio will make you a better writer.

3) Audiobook production is too complicated.

Some authors were very interested in creating audiobooks but don’t have the time to learn how to do it. The good news is that you don’t have to spend time and energy to figure it out! The narrators who attended the RT Convention have our own studios and are experienced in working with authors to create independent audiobooks. We know how to get an audiobook done through ACX and other distributors, and we would be more than happy to assist authors with the steps.

You’ll find samples and contact information for over 30 professional narrators on the boutique site RomanceNarrators.com. Don’t worry if you don’t write romance. Most narrators work in a variety of genres.

I hope I’ve gotten you thinking differently about audiobooks and that you’ll soon contact me or one of my fellow narrators about starting production.

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The post 3 Reasons Authors Shy Away From Audiobooks appeared first on Karen Commins.

With that point in mind, I decided it would helpful to list all of my audiobook-related resources in one place. (Last updated 29 May 2017)

Guides:

Audiobook Resources For Authors is a curated list of articles that are grouped to take authors through the stages of production from thought to final product.

My Audiobook Marketing Cheat Sheet contains oodles of ideas for specifically publicizing and marketing the audiobook edition.

Authors and narrators will benefit from subscribing to 1 or more of my 5 Twitter lists of audiobook people and organizations.

Last fall, I spoke at the Georgia Romance Writers annual conference to help authors get started with creating audiobooks. I recently created a 41-minute video from that presentation which:

• explores the audiobook landscape (beginning at 2:43)
• explains reasons every author should produce audiobooks of their books (beginning at 7:23)
• demonstrates Amazon Whispersync capability between an audiobook and Kindle ebook (beginning at 10:19)
• offers specific tips about ways to write with audio in mind (beginning at 12:09)
• advises the viewer about the audiobook production process and gives concrete information about using ACX.com to create an audiobook, including payment for production costs and distribution options (beginning at 22:04)

If you have questions or comments about the video or the audiobook production process, please leave a note for me on the blog!
 

The post Setting Sail In Audiobooks: A Video For Authors appeared first on Karen Commins.