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In part 2 of this series on audiobooks, Jenny Hoops of Snowdog Audio and Suzy dive into the nitty-gritty of audiobook production. Learn what kind of equipment you need for a DIY setup, and the variety of options available to you if you choose to have someone else narrate your book.
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Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)
88. Audiobook Production (part 2)
Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Show, don’t Tell Writing Podcast with me, Suzy Vadori, where I peel back the layers of how to wow your readers with your fiction, your nonfiction. Anybody can bang out a first draft, but it takes a little more work to make your book as amazing as it can be. Join me as I share the step by step writing techniques you could apply to your writing right away.
As I host successful writers who share a behind the scenes look at their own [00:00:30] writing lives, and as I live coach writers on their pages giving practical writing examples that will make your own writing stronger. Nobody is born knowing how to write an engaging book. There are real and important skills that you need to learn on this show.
I cut through the noise and get you all the info you need. I can’t wait to see how this information is going to transform your writing.
I do. You choose a voice. If you’re a [00:01:00] fiction writer, you’re not doing it yourself. How do you actually go and choose a voice to narrate your book?
Jenny Hoops: Narrate your book Will. If you are an independent and you have no publisher that’s, that’s helping you with this, you would go to an online marketplace called A CX.
A CX is Audible’s online marketplace where authors and narrators get together. You would put up an an audition piece, so like a four or [00:01:30] 500 word audition. And accept auditions from narrators, perspective narrators. And then you would pick from those. If you are working with a publisher or, or someone like me who is a producer, what I do is I go to my roster of narrators that I’ve worked with, and I know they’re professional and I choose a whole bunch.
I I get them to audition for me and I would send my author. Usually five or six or sometimes 10 [00:02:00] voices to choose from. Not too many because then it’s just, it’s, it’s too hard to choose. But there should be a good conversation between the producer and the author about like, well, well, you know, what are you feeling?
Like, have you got a voice in mind? Do you, do you listen to a lot of audio books and you know you want this narrator, in which case we’ll see what his price is or her price is and, and see if you can afford it. But there’s a lot of ways, but a lot of it sometimes comes if you’ve written specific accents [00:02:30] into the book.
And I’m gonna ask for, for help from from authors. Please don’t. Give your characters random accents just because it sounds cool. Please. Because it’s just make them all like General American or general to be really
Suzy Vadori: distracting. Right.
Jenny Hoops: It’s awfully hard. And then if you have a book where the author has, has given every character a different accent of some kind, because they’ve [00:03:00] written it right in the book.
It’s so much more difficult for the poor narrator to get those, you know, authentic or to
Suzy Vadori: even find a narrator to agree. Do do narrators typically? Yeah. Do narrators typically, if you can pay them, they say yes, or do they consider the projects and they have to like the book? I mean, is that. I don’t know. I haven’t been in this space, so
Jenny Hoops: Wait.
Okay. Narrators don’t have to like the book, but they for sure need to embody the characters so that
Suzy Vadori: Yeah,
Jenny Hoops: because sometimes we, we don’t like [00:03:30] every book we, we narrate, of course. I mean, books are different.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah.
Jenny Hoops: But you know, every narrator has to be able to choose, like, I know I cannot do a Boston accent.
I cannot do a South African accent. For, I mean, I’ve, I’ve tried and I, I can’t, and so if, if those are accents that are, you know, in the book I say, please, PA Plus is on, we’ll find a narrator who can do those things. [00:04:00] It’s funny, penguin Random House, they have made it a policy that if any character is supposed to talk in a Boston accent, the narrator is supposed to just use a general standard American instead.
Because it is, it’s
Suzy Vadori: so expensive.
Jenny Hoops: It’s, it is such a difficult accent to do well and do correctly. Yes.
Suzy Vadori: So I went to elementary school in Boston and then when I moved away from there and went into a new grade four, [00:04:30] grade three. Three classroom. Yeah. And the kids were like, wow, you talk funny. Like I have they pretty, I mean, we don’t have a lot of video from those days.
I wish we did, but I think I could probably nail it.
Jenny Hoops: You could
Suzy Vadori: probably
Jenny Hoops: nail it. But I’m
Suzy Vadori: terrible at accents and last I’m immersed in it. Um, I’ve lived so many different places that people can’t play. I mean, I go to the United States and people say, oh, you’re Canadian. And here they think they sound American.
So,
Jenny Hoops: yeah.
Suzy Vadori: Um, because I’ve lived on both sides of the border, but when I’m immersed in it, I can mimic somebody really well when I’m [00:05:00] in. Because sometimes I do it without,
Jenny Hoops: yeah,
Suzy Vadori: without thinking, but it’s hard to recall those accents. And I know that, you know, you’re saying the ones that you can’t do, but one of your actual talents as a narrator is you have a lot of accents in you.
Oh, for sure. How do you keep them all straight? Like how do you even do that?
Jenny Hoops: When, when I’m doing an audiobook, if, if I am like the, a single narrator who does all the characters, I have a spreadsheet. And I pre-read the book, and as I’m going through, I’m making all my notes about what accent is [00:05:30] required, and then I do a, a real plan and I, I make little notes and I, I do some audio clips for myself on that character’s exact voice because it’s not just the accent.
Uh, you have like. Old versus young, male, female, you know, gruff. If every author wants a, you know, gravelly voiced male for their, for the romance, and so you have to be able to do these things, but every character has to be so distinct that the person listening [00:06:00] will recognize who’s speaking. Without having to, you know, go back and say, who, oh wait, who, who was that?
They all have to be distinctive voices. And so I have a spreadsheet, it’s a very technical thing where you, you go through the book, it takes quite a bit of time to prep the book and have the characters all come out as real, you know, not, not caricatures of with an accent and that sort of thing.
Suzy Vadori: And when you’re, I mean, when you’re [00:06:30] doing that, there’s two different things, right?
There’s dialogue where you’re actually seeing what the character does, but there’s also multiple points of view characters that might be written, right? So we’re also doing their inner thoughts and things. So it might be a large chunk, or it might be just little snippets. So you know, for the large chunk, you could probably prepare yourself when you’re switching point of views at a chapter or something.
Right. But for those little snippets where it’s dialogue between two characters, you can’t be gotta be on the fly. Is that hard?
Jenny Hoops: It takes practice. Nothing is [00:07:00] hard. It just takes practice. So,
Suzy Vadori: yeah.
Jenny Hoops: Yeah.
Suzy Vadori: Talent, right? Yeah.
Jenny Hoops: Once you get into it, because really when, when you’re narrating a book, you are the characters and so it’s easy to to switch because you just become.
The next character and then use, use, you use their voice. So,
Suzy Vadori: yeah. And
Jenny Hoops: so yeah, you’re acting. Yeah. Once in a while. I, I think my, my biggest, I, I’m so proud of this one book I did because it was a very small group of [00:07:30] characters, but there were 10 people. All of whom were old ladies in a nursing home in Texas, and they were all from Texas.
So I had 10, like I have my old lady accent. I have my Texas accent. Great. And so I, I can do that. Yeah. But 10 of them all sound who had to sound different. Wow. It took a lot of time
Suzy Vadori: and hopefully they were written very differently and that their, their actual voice on the page. It was unique. That might’ve helped, right?
Like
Jenny Hoops: might’ve helped, but I don’t think it, you know, it was, [00:08:00] uh, yeah, it was an early book for this author and, and, uh, so she was just getting out the, you know, the thoughts in her head. I think,
Suzy Vadori: I’m sure the listeners are gonna agree. This is actually really fascinating things that I’ve never really thought about.
But, so as I’m thinking that, I’m like, wow, you know, maybe listeners here wanna be narrators and wanna learn how to do this. Can anybody do it? And how would you get involved? If you, if you think that you have this talent and you, and you’re, you know, love acting and think that you might wanna be a narrator, how would you get involved?
Jenny Hoops: Well, you’d be just like [00:08:30] me 10 years ago, uh, or 11 years ago. Now what you do is you first have to invest in some good equipment. You, you have to have a real microphone. You have to have a computer where you can do the editing, and you have to have a space where, I dunno if you can see in, in here, my, my whole studio is covered in moving blankets.
And so you do some prep work and, and set yourself up to do that. And then you start approaching. Authors and publishers and whoever [00:09:00] will possibly hire you. You, you just start getting gigs and you get better, you get better as you do it. So those early books, I’m really embarrassed about and I don’t tell anybody about them.
But you know what, you get out and you practice.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Um, we’re gonna talk about costs and what it, what it costs and all that in a second. Before we move on, any comments on AI voices? ’cause it’s now possible to produce Yes. Uh, know. I like this was a hot, hot ticket. Right? I have
Jenny Hoops: lots of [00:09:30] of comments on your, let’s hear it.
The thing is, okay, AI voices have been around for a long time and it is, they’re just there. To me, having an AI voice just means you took the shortcut route. So listeners really don’t like AI voices. There is such a huge backlash from people who you get bad reviews, you get a lot of bad feedback from your listeners, uh, who should be your [00:10:00] fans, and instead, they, they diss the the AI voice.
Now AI voices are getting better and better. There’s a phenomenon called, is it the, the empty canyon? It, it’s something where suddenly you realize that it is an AI voice, and it’s like you have lost that human connection, and that is the thing that makes the audio the most valuable, is you are making a human connection between the voice and your thoughts, and, and [00:10:30] it’s in your head.
So there, there’s a backlash, but on the other hand, because of AI voices, you can now charge a premium for your authentic voiced audiobook, and people are willing to pay a little bit more for the, the real voice of the author. So,
Suzy Vadori: absolutely.
Jenny Hoops: Yeah.
Suzy Vadori: So I think, I mean, if you’re gonna use an AI voice, in my opinion, because you don’t need to produce an audiobook, actually, you can just have Siri read you any ebook.
That’s right. Um, your phone can read you an [00:11:00] ebook. In, in a, uh, mechanical voice and there’s, there’s streaming services or there’s apps where you can use different voices to read an ebook. So you don’t actually, like, if you’re gonna do that, don’t bother, is my opinion, because people can do that Now, I often will listen to books for.
My job. And so sometimes it’s on three times speed or something If I’m researching a book. Right? Oh, and that takes, that takes practice hurts. It hurts, right hurts. But that’s what I’m saying is sometimes that that AI voice, [00:11:30] actually, I can’t tell the difference because I’m listening to not three times speed quickly.
But I’m not listening then for pleasure. I’m listening because I’m editing a book where the author’s like, I’m trying to do this, and then I’m like, okay, I haven’t read that book. And then I go and consume that book in three out
Jenny Hoops: basically.
Suzy Vadori: And then I’m like, okay, now I know what. Now that I know what you’re trying to do, it’s a very different experience.
Jenny Hoops: If you’re listening for information, then it doesn’t matter. I mean, who cares? Exactly. That’s what I am. And if, but if you’re listening for pleasure, if you’re listening for the artistry of the book, then, then [00:12:00] you wanna have a real voice. And it’s funny, which, and it comes right back to the, the a hundred percent accuracy to the text.
To me, if you have the authors reading the book and there’s a few little mistakes or, or hesitations, that makes it that much more human. And so I love that. I, I love hearing. Errors. I love hearing hesitations. I love hearing like the catch in the voice when you’re starting to cry because it’s so emotional.
That’s what I [00:12:30] want to hear in the book because that tells the listener that you are totally not an AI voice. You are real. And, uh,
Suzy Vadori: yeah. And you’re evoking that in your, in your listener as well. Yeah. And your reader.
Oh,
Jenny Hoops: yeah.
Suzy Vadori: Okay. So what happens to the recordings? First of all, where should we be recording?
If we wanna record it, what? What would be like an app or a software that you would recommend? Where do we keep these files if we’re reading a book and recording it?
Jenny Hoops: Right. So for the raw beginner, you’re gonna wanna get a free [00:13:00] software called Audacity Be, and it, it’s got a couple really. Good parts. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s free, it’s clunky, but it’s got something called punch and roll recording, which is a technical term for a lot of you, but it will make your life so much easier and it will make it much easier to edit the audio afterwards.
We’ll, we’ll leave that maybe for another time. So you wanna get like, so it’s free software. You wanna get a [00:13:30] decent microphone. It doesn’t have to be, you know, a, a Neumann $5,000 mic, but it can’t be your laptop microphone. So you want to have, and the Blue Yeti that you are using right there is a workhorse.
Uh, I, I can’t tell you
Suzy Vadori: that’s what I use. I actually use Audacity as well.
Jenny Hoops: Fair.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. Um, when I do solo episodes. And, um, so if you listen to the podcast, if you listen to a solo episode or a lot of the instructions that I do, those are all recorded on Audacity.
Jenny Hoops: Audacity,
Suzy Vadori: uh, [00:14:00] when I interview people, yeah. When I listen to, or sorry, when I record an interview like this one, we do it on Zoom just so that we can see one another, but we don’t keep the, yeah.
The video files, so,
Jenny Hoops: right. Yeah. And so what you’re gonna do, and this is really important, you will not be saving it as an MP three. You’re gonna save it as either a wave or a flack or some kind of file. And the reason that’s important is because MP threes are called lossy files. That means every [00:14:30] time you open and close the file, every time you do something like compression or noise reduction or some kind of process on the audio, you will lose some of the integrity of the audio every time.
Wave Files. WAV, they are called non lossy files, and that’s a technical term, non lossy. And you can open and close and open and close and save and re-save and do as many [00:15:00] processes like noise reduction and changing the compression file. You can do all kinds of stuff on the files and it will never lose integrity.
So you will always have a nice full spectrum voice to, uh, to listen to. MP threes are really quick and easy and, and fast. And if you’re not gonna do much editing. Sure. But if the work that you have to do to make an audiobook really well, really good sounding means you, you can’t use an MP [00:15:30] three.
Suzy Vadori: Okay, fine.
Jenny Hoops: Yeah,
Suzy Vadori: that’s a great tip. Thank you. And okay, so then you either edit yourself or you work with a producer to get it edited. Formatted, yeah. But this is where most providers of audiobook services stop, right? Yeah. But your business actually does. A lot more. Can you talk about the pieces that are missing and what happens after all those files are produced?
Jenny Hoops: Oh, for sure. Uh, and you know what, and I, I got into doing this part of my [00:16:00] job just because I used to be a professional speaker with, with books. And so I know anybody who’s producing an audiobook, they, they don’t know what to do. And that might be the, the pain, the pain point. That that makes ’em never put the audio book up at all.
That could be the point where they just get too frustrated and stop. So for me, what you’re gonna be doing is you have these beautiful audio files. Every chapter is its own file [00:16:30] and you have to go and upload it to a distributor. You can choose just to go to Audible, and then again, that’s through a CX. Or you can do wide distribution and I, I recommend wide.
So that’s like another whole story. But that means, uh, you would be able to get it into library systems and other distributors so that you can have a lot of people listen to your audiobook. Plus you can put it up on your own website. Do direct [00:17:00] sales. So remember again, every audiobook now is a digital download.
So you don’t have to go make CD sets anymore, right?
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. There’s no, there’s
Jenny Hoops: nothing
Suzy Vadori: else to do. You just have to upload
Jenny Hoops: it. You’re done. Nothing else to do. You, you upload it to distributors. And what you’ll need when you’re uploading is so you, um, you’re gonna have to have your metadata. ’cause that’s, that’s a really good way to get your audiobook discovered is make sure you have [00:17:30] really good metadata.
And that would be, you wanna
Suzy Vadori: tell us what that is? Yeah,
Jenny Hoops: well. The metadata when you go up, has information about your audiobook that
Suzy Vadori: it makes it searchable.
Jenny Hoops: Makes it searchable. So when someone goes on Google and says, oh, I’m looking for this audiobook, uh, or I’m looking for a title, and you might know the author, or you might not know the author, all of that data is searched by the, in the databases and you, you are [00:18:00] discoverable then, and that will lead to sales.
Suzy Vadori: Awesome.
Jenny Hoops: One hopes.
Suzy Vadori: Okay,
Jenny Hoops: so
Suzy Vadori: the one hopes, exactly. So that’s, that’s where I’m bleeding here, because what does it cost? What does it cost to make an audiobook in 2026? And what would you make? Okay. What’s the potential?
Jenny Hoops: There’s a spectrum as always. You can either pay nothing, have zero cost, and that is if you do a royalty share project with your narrator, and again, that would be a CX, which is the audible [00:18:30] Amazon affiliate.
So that then
Suzy Vadori: it limits your pool of narrators willing to work with you, right?
Jenny Hoops: Exactly. Yes. So you’re limited to who’s gonna work with you, whether they’re professional, whether they actually do produce the audio or not. And they probably will not market it very well. Like there’s a lot of think, but it’s free.
So. That, you know, and I’ve, I’ve done royalty share projects galore. So it’s one way to get an audiobook without any extra cost. However, I don’t recommend that [00:19:00] because it’s all out of your control as an author when it gets produced. And so the next thing you can try is, uh, it’s called Royalty Share plus.
So you would do royalty share. Which means 50 50 all on the sales between you and the narrator. But you would, in addition, provide a per finished hour fees so that the narrator would have a little bit of income in order to produce the audiobook. Often it’s a hundred dollars or [00:19:30] $150 per finished hour.
That’s a key phrase I want everyone to learn. Every, the entire industry works on the finished hour counts. So your pricing, your costs,
Suzy Vadori: and that’s recorded hours, right?
Jenny Hoops: That No, that’s not recorded hours. Sorry, that’s,
Suzy Vadori: sorry. Yes. It’s recorded after editing and everything else finished and then
Jenny Hoops: Yes. Yeah, finished hour.
So you, you could record for 16 hours, but only have a nine hour audio book. And, and so everything is based [00:20:00] on the finished hour. So you could do that. And, and again, that, that’s okay, but it’s not. Quite as definite as if you go out, hire a narrator and a producer and, and get it done. Often you can find a narrator to work per finished hour.
Again, you can go back to a CX and audition. And generally professional narrators now, especially if they’re in the union, uh, there’s the actors’ unions on both [00:20:30] Canada and the US side. They will work for $250 per finished hour as a minimum for it to count. So that’s. Now you think, oh, well that’s not bad, $250, but if you have a 10 hour audio book, you’re paying your narrator $2,500.
So that’s why you need to have that multiplier in mind. Yeah. How long, okay. How long is book be I
Suzy Vadori: Amazing. Are are audio books producing an audiobook? Is are you seeing it be profitable for writers?
Jenny Hoops: You know, the [00:21:00] publishing business is like this all around. There is like probably one in 10 audio books will make back the cost of production and the reason is more.
The marketing after the audio book is produced, then it is so much how much it costs to produce it, and I think it goes right back to what you were saying earlier, that if you give yourself a longer lead time so that you can get the buzz going and market and have your plan even a year in advance. Your sales will [00:21:30] go that much easier and you are more likely to make the cost of production back.
It’s the people who don’t know how to market, who just say, no, no, I just want an audio book. I just want an audio book. That’s okay. Yeah. I don’t have to make money. Uh,
Suzy Vadori: exactly.
Jenny Hoops: I hear a lot of, and
Suzy Vadori: there’s lots of us out there doing that. Right. Cost.
Jenny Hoops: But
Suzy Vadori: yeah. At the end of the day, regardless of how you publish, regardless of what formats you publish in, you, the writer are going to need to be involved.
In the marketing of your book, even if you’re [00:22:00] with a huge publisher in today’s day and age, there’s a lot of things that you need to do on your own and think through. Give yourself that time and space. Okay? This has been absolutely amazing, Jenny. So if you’re super inspired, where can, and all your listeners are like, all right, I gotta do this.
Now it’s time. I wanna talk about it. Where can we find
Jenny Hoops: you? Well, I am online, of course. I have two websites. One is, and this is my primary website. My company is called Snow Dog Audio, and you can [00:22:30] find me@snowdoaudio.com. That’s named after my dog. My funds decided my company should be called Snow Dog Audio.
Suzy Vadori: Love it. I love it.
Jenny Hoops: Yeah. Yeah.
Suzy Vadori: Snowing out today and, and Jenny lives near me. Not in the same city, but near
Jenny Hoops: nearby. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, so we, we have a lot of snow. So I have my snow dog, and so on my website I have information for authors who don’t know what they’re doing. I have information for [00:23:00] speakers. I have tips how to self record, how to, how to get into it because I want everybody to feel like they can do this, that, that this is a doable.
Part of publishing a book that
Suzy Vadori: Absolutely. And you work with writers from all over the world, right?
Jenny Hoops: All over the world. Yep. Yep.
Suzy Vadori: Amazing. Hey,
Jenny Hoops: I tend to work with, um, a lot of people and, and it’s funny ’cause there’s a lot of people who read all about how to, to [00:23:30] set up their own studio and they decide anyway, they’re just gonna come into my, my studio.
So I have a lot of local authors come into record and then I feed them potato tips.
Suzy Vadori: Wait, it’s much like, come, comes full, comes full circle. You get up and you wanna feel like you’re dressed for work. Right? Yeah. And I think that’s true too. If you go into a studio, you’re, you’re there to do the job and, and there’s a
Jenny Hoops: lot to
Suzy Vadori: be said
Jenny Hoops: job.
Yeah. That’s
Suzy Vadori: alright. This has been so amazing, Jenny. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Jenny Hoops: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to be here.[00:24:00]
Suzy Vadori: Thanks for tuning into the show. Don’t Tell Writing podcast with me, Susie Vadori. It is my absolute honor to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or the book that you’re planning to write. Please help me keep the podcast going by helping people find us. You could subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening.
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