Based on my own research so far, audio books seem to be better sellers than kindle books. Looking at one of the better known groups in the audio book market, Sound Booth Theater, I see they work on a royalty sharing basis. Does anyone have experience with this type of agreement? What are the benefits, and down sides of it?
the obvious benefit is that there isnt an upfront cost, while the obvious downside is that you have to share the royalties... another difficulty can be that because many books don't sell all that well royalties are small and thus shared royalty deals don't tend to attract professional narrators which can affect the quality of the finished product.
Valid points, except for the last one. The founder Jeff Hays is a well known narrator. He and several other members of the group have reputations that will influence my choice on buying an audio-book because I know the quality of their work. If anyone is interested Sound Booth Theater
yeah sure Jeff Hays is, but he isn't going to be doing your narration personally... you'll wind up with one of the many people listed on their site who no one has ever heard of
I understand the point you are making. I am mainly asking for the experience of anyone who has dealt with this type of arrangement. Is it worth considering as a viable publishing route, or are there downsides that are not obvious at first glance.
Well, like Moose said, it's a flat fee vs rate fee arrangement. Which is likely to cost you more? If you anticipate selling a lot of books, it's flat fee all day. If you don't, then rate fee. I'm curious though as to why the business would offer just anybody a rate-fee agreement. Those only work if business anticipates selling enough product to recoup their costs, which makes me think they would only offer than to established authors. I have no idea whether you would fall into that anticipated category or not.
I do have experience with this model... admittedly not with sound booth... and the major downside was as i said the dubious quality of a lot of narrators... it was so poor in my experience that I declined to go forward with the projects there's a major difference between pro quality narration and just reading aloud which also why AI driven text to voice isn't currently a viable option for audiobooks (but maybe one day)... i had three different narrators on different projects to via ACX and one freelance via upwork, the first one mispronounced a lot of words and/or put the emphasis on the wrong syllable... i got the impression that they weren't a native speaker, but they may have just been poorly educated The second one clearly didn't have a decent condensing microphone and included a lot of breath and background noise The third could actually read and had pro level equipment but she was an aspiring actress and took it on herself to act out the various parts in dialogue instead of just narrating the damn thing. The other thing about royalty share is if you have the good fortune to break big you're giving away a lot of money... quality narration of a novel generally costs a about a thou (although costs vary dramatically) so if you sign sat a 20% royalty share, if you book makes more than 5k gross you'd have been better off with a flat rate... if you manage to break properly big and be the next Andy Weir and make like a quarter of a mil. then you've paid $50k for $1ks worth of work... and 20% is low, often these arrangements are more like twice that other things that stand out about soundbooth 1) they don't say what the royalty percentage is on the website , 2) their published works don't include any big name authors, 3) its not clear how the resulting audiobook will be sold... something like 80% of the Abook market is shared between Audible, google play, and apple store... so if it only going to be sold via soundbooth's own site and apps that's a lot of market that you're losing
They are on audible, which is where I learned about them. You raise a number of good points about the negative side of the income equation, thank you. Part of the consideration is their reputation in the audio book market place. Which is a possible plus when it comes to sales.
