In the never ending quest to reach the digital market with our words we cannot ignore the audiophile
As pointed out in earlier posts, I have fivematted my ebook and worked with DogEar to create a paperback but what about those who don’t have the time to browse through the 300+ screens of verbiage or turn the 327 pages of paper. Those who barely have time to comprehend a blog entry or peruse an online article might just be able to find the time to give a daily listen to a fifteen or 20 minute episode.  Kind of a serial podcasting concept.

Forgetting about how to monetize this for the time being, let’s focus on physically creating an “ear book”. You have several choices.  As the author you can read it yourself into some form of Podcasting software like audacity.  This was my initial plan, but I couldn’t seem to find the time, the silence or the voices to record all my characters as
they progressed through the 30+ chapters of my book.  So, I thought I would get some actor friends of mine to do the reading and I would just supply the technology and editing.
Unfortunately, actors, like most writers have day jobs, so the ability to put such a coalition together proved to be more time consuming than my initial DIY plan.
Next I turned to professional audio publishers.  The LOWEST quote I got for my 327 page novel was…are you ready? $12,500.  Not a reasonable sum for even a crazy self publisher like me.  So I resigned myself to taking several months to do it myself, WHENEVER I could find the time.

Then one day,  while researching script writng software for my 2008 goal of turning my novel into a screenplay, I came across a company called iscript. This company records 50-200 page scripts to be played to busy producers and directors while they are stuck in LA traffic.  Their samples were very professional and their rates a fraction of those in the audio book business. 

But these were scripts with 1/10th the words of my book so I wrote to them and asked if they would consider branching out into novels. They gave me a very reasonable quote and sent me a sample.  Folks, if you want a real rush, have a pro read the first 5 pages of your novel into a studio microphone and send you the MP3. 

Needless to say, I will have a chapterized audio book in about a week for a fraction of what the other guys wanted.  I still need to work out the distribution model, but the profit margin on my $10 earbook will be at least 4 times the margin of my paperback and 2 to 3 times the margin of any e-book.