Business Post: The Audio Conundrum

I've decided this week to unlock the content I'd usually reserve for the coffee cup tier ($5 a month), so you can see what goes on behind the curtain! And, you know, decide if you'd like to join. *grin* Today, then, a discussion of the Audio Conundrum. ErraticTransparency wanted to know if the Jokka audiobooks would be available at retailers now that their serialization is complete, and I said, 'the answer to that is complicated'. Which it is. Lemme 'splain.

Let's set the scene first. Print sales of the kind of genre fiction I write are not healthy, and not likely to become more so. When people talk about the stunning recovery (and reassuring persistence of) physical book sales, what they aren't saying is that those sales break down into very predictable categories:

• Nonfiction
• Textbooks
• Books for Children

(For a brief period, coloring books propped up physical print sales considerably. Their heyday is over. Sorry, y'all, the market is saturated.)

Anyway, if you look at that list, it will probably make sense to you. Most of us don't want to drag our electronic devices into the kitchen to consult an e-cookbook. Few people study out of e-textbooks. And kids like to put their hands on things, and probably will continue to need the tactile experience (even if it is augmented by a virtual one) for a long time.

The voracious reader of genre fiction, whether that's the person binge-reading a romance category or the one chewing through military science fiction novels like a woodchipper, has made the transition to e-books, and those are the people who feed people like me. *salutes them* Some number of those catholic readers will convert to superfans who want paper copies of things, preferably autographed or remarqued, but with rare exception you can't make a living off superfans. A healthy career is carried by the thousands of people who read your book and move on to the next author of similar style, and do that day after day, year after year.

I can hear you now: Jaguar... I thought this was going to be about audio. Why are you talking about print??

Because while print is shrinking, audio is heading straight to the stratosphere. The social and technological and cultural changes that are making audiobooks more viable are manifold and I could probably get into the nitty-gritty for another two thousand words, but instead I'll just say: audio is a good investment for a genre author. Unlike paper, which only pans out in very specific circumstances.

But audio, my friends, is not cheap to produce well.

If you wanted to, I suppose, you could hire a friend with a gaming headset to record your book for you. But you will run into many challenges.

• Audiobook listeners are sensitive to audio quality. Actually I'll back up. Everyone is sensitive to audio quality, whether it's in an audiobook or a youtube video. People will let poor video quality pass before they'll okay poor audio quality. Good quality equipment and a properly soundproofed room, along with proper audio editing, are important. (And needless to say, such set-ups aren't cheap.)
• Unabridged audiobooks are long. Most of my full-length novels are between 10 and 18 hours, and on average, a narrator will record twice that amount to get it right. (The editing process disguises those hours unless a chance error exposes how many times the narrator records the same line of dialogue before choosing which version to keep.) Have you tried to talk for over an hour at a time? Do you remember what your throat felt like? Yeah. Now imagine doing that day after day as your job.
• Related: unabridged audiobooks require serious commitment on the part of their narrators. It’s easy to find someone to do a twenty minute exhibition piece for you. It’s a lot harder to find a professional who will do the hours of work you need them to do, in the timeframe you require it.
• Reading for audio is very different from other forms of public speaking. A lot of people have trouble parsing aural data, and think this difficulty is unique to them. My experience is that most of us will fail listening comprehension checks unless the speaker in question is good at communicating information verbally. (Some of us will fail those checks no matter how good they are, but you’d be surprised how much the incidence falls when you match a person up with the right speaker.) Audiobooks require a specific kind of pacing, and books written to be seen with the eyes can be challenging to translate into an aural medium. This is why so many professional narrators develop a broad set of “types”—voices that have a specific accent, pacing, pitch—that they can assign to characters throughout a work to distinguish them in scenes where the author might not have left any other cues. 

So hiring a good narrator—one who knows audiobook “formatting”, has the equipment to record it at a high enough fidelity, and who is professional enough to respond to direction and deliver 10-20+ hours of audio on time—is not a minor affair. Accordingly, it's expensive. Most professionals hover in the $200-an-hour range; the famous ones are up in the $600-an-hour range. If you are willing to shop hard, you might find an up-and-comer in the $50-$100 range who’s got the chops but not the experience to demand what they deserve, but as a businessperson, your time has a cost. The hours you spend combing through auditions, hoping to find that unicorn, might deliver you into negative return-on-investment if you’re not careful.

Now. I have done the math for my books, and the math says that—under normal and existing circumstances—I will be in my dotage before I earn back the outlay for most of my books, particularly the non-Peltedverse offerings. But two things keep me coming back. First: audio is growing. The largest retail markets for audio are digital, which means I don’t have to worry about failing bookstores as my primary sales outlet, the way I do with print. Most people are using their phones or other devices to listen to digital copies of audiobooks, not buying CDs. (Do modern cars even have CD players anymore? I don’t think my computer has a DVD or CD player, even.)

The other thing is that the promotions that drive enormous sales bumps are targeting e-books… but e-books that have an audio edition represent a significant enticement to readers who enjoy audio. With Amazon pairing cheap audio editions with e-book purchases, the temptation to click ‘buy’ on both creates a measurable halo effect on audio sales. The Bookbub promo for Earthrise singlehandedly made back all the money I spent on the narration not just for that book, but for the next one in the series as well—in audio sales alone.

None of this changes, of course, that audio is expensive, and that for a lot of books it’s not likely to make the money back. Some of the most lovely audiobooks I’ve produced are languishing because they’re attached to books that don’t sell themselves well. But on the whole, I consider audio a good enough investment, particularly for my various flagship series, that I’ve committed to getting those audio editions done. I refuse, though, to eviscerate my annual budget to do it, which is why I’ve put together the compromise that got the Jokka audiobooks completed.

Here’s how that works: in acknowledgment that serialization represents a much narrower audience than selling at retail, the narrator charges me a discount rate per finished hour, to be delivered on a month-to-month basis. So long as the audio remains available only as a serialization, crowdfunding incentive, or Kickstarter prize, we’re golden. When I decide to offer the books through retailers, though, I am on the hook for the remaining amount-per-hour, and I need to pay before I can post.

Every month, then, I pay the narrator his discounted rate for 1-2 hours of audio, and in this way, I get the book done. At that point, it’s in my pocket, and I can hold off on any decision to market it more broadly until the gamble looks good. If, for instance, I landed a major promotion for The Worth of a Shell, paying the narrator the remaining money so that the audiobook would be available for the halo-sales would be a smart move. Or, if I had a hole in my schedule and wanted to fill it with an event, I could bash a Kickstarter together to “unlock” the audiobook, to keep that expense from hitting my pocket directly.

So to answer, in a roundabout fashion, ErraticTransparency’s original question: I don’t have immediate plans to make the Jokka audiobooks available at retailers, because doing so would incur a pretty significant bill that the sales figures for those books don’t support. This is not to say that I might not one day decide to go for it—maybe I’ll score that promo, or feel like that Kickstarter, or maybe some SuperJokkaFan will decide to pass me the money because they want to give the audiobook to the world. But for now… I’m waiting. But if you love them, they'll continue to be available here, via Patreon, and you can always use the tags to find all the MP3s and download them to keep!

In the meantime, I am continuing with the serialization scheme. Our next target is Princes’ Game 2, Some Things Transcend, and as you can hear above the narrator’s gotten me a test file so I can decide if anything needs tweaking. I trust his instincts, and I’ve liked what he’s said about his plans; we always do some amount of planning before embarking on a series, discussing the arcs and the number of voices... in essence, setting the emotional and aural "levels" so that audio readers perceive an arc. With my first payment this month, we’ve embarked on what will probably be 60+ hours of audio, narrating the Chatcaavan War’s beginning, and I look forward to hearing Lisinthir, the Emperor, and the Chatcaavan Queen reprised from Even the Wingless, which was a tremendous performance. I hope you all enjoy it too. <3

That concludes my unexpectedly long business dissertation on audiobooks! Wow, that was lengthy. If you made it all the way to the end, I salute you. *grin* As always, questions and comments are welcome!