The whole reason that I started narrating audiobooks was because there was potential for it to be lucrative AND I thought I’d enjoy it. If it was missing either of those two ingredients, it wouldn’t have been worth my time.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was most attracted to it as a form of passive income through royalties. A royalty is when an amount of money is paid to someone whenever a book sells. Authors receive royalties and narrators receive royalties. With ACX, royalties are paid as a percentage. So if, as a narrator, your royalty share is 20% (1/5th of the purchase price), then if an audiobook sells for $15, you’ll receive a $3 royalty. These royalties are for life! So for the rest of your life, whenever that audiobook sells, you will get a monetary piece of that pie.
But that’s not the only way to get paid with audiobooks. You can also be paid PFH or “per finished hour”. In this payment method, you are paid for the total length of the book. If you charge $100 per finished hour, and the finished product is 10 hours, you just made $1000. Sounds pretty sweet, right?
So let’s look at the pros and cons of each.
ROYALTIES
Pros:
- Potential to build an impressive ongoing paycheck and retire early.
- Almost all books in ACX offer to pay through a royalty option. Far fewer have a PFH payment option.
- When starting out, royalty-paid books can be less competitive than PFH books, simply because there’s more of them out there. Therefore, it may take fewer auditions before you’re chosen to narrate a book.
- If you like narrating longer books, potential royalties are higher
Cons:
- Potential to make little or no money. If it’s a bad book, you may never sell a copy
- Can take quite a while to build up enough royalties each month to amount to something significant, especially if you prefer narrating shorter books.
- No immediate payout
PER FINISHED HOUR
Pros:
- Immediate payout, regardless of book quality
- For experienced narrators, potential to charge large per finished hour costs…and get it! (Can you imagine getting $5000 or more per book?! Narrate 1 book a month and you’ve made $60k that year)
Cons:
- No recurring revenue. If the book you narrate becomes the next Harry Potter, but you were paid per finished hour, you’ll never see another dime from it.
- PFH are often very competitive. Many authors want the immediate money
- The PFH books that aren’t competitive are often only willing to pay $50 per finished hour. If you recall from a previous post, it takes me a little over 3 hours to make 1 finished hour. As a beginner, it may take you 4. So $50 / 4 hours = $12.50/hour. That’s barely above minimum wage in some states.
- My opinion: PFH authors are more likely to be extremely nit-picky about your audio because the money is typically coming directly out of their pocket.
Keep in mind, these lists are absolutely biased. I prefer royalty-based books, so of course I’d have more “pros” for royalties and more “cons” for PFH.
So once you’ve decided that royalties are the best option for you (*wink), now it’s time to decide: long books or short books?
