How to Make Money with Audiobooks: Your Guide to Success

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Interested in knowing how to make money with audiobooks? This is the guide you need.

Audiobooks are becoming a popular market for publishers and voice actors. Our busy lives, coupled with the fact that we move about with our smartphones, make audiobooks easily accessible to the audience.

If you have a great voice, some acting and tech skills, then you have a high chance of making a good amount of money with audiobooks.

Although you may need to spend some hours to produce a quality audiobook, it is capable of producing good profits that are worth the time invested.

So, if you love reading and you are passionate about reading out loud, you can easily make money with audiobooks. This detailed guide will walk you through how you can make money with audiobooks. The tips in this article will show you what to do to make money with audiobooks.

Let’s get started.

The Audiobooks Market Is Growing

The audiobooks market is growing at an exponential rate. A survey carried out by the Audio Publishers Association, supported by data from The Infinite Dial 2019, reveals that half of Americans that are at least 12 years old have listened to an audiobook. Also, 55% of audiobook listeners are below the age of 45 while 55% have also listened to a podcast in the previous month.

Audiobooks are getting more popular because an increasing number of people spend less time reading. The majority prefer listening to an audiobook while on the go rather than reading an eBook. Although most people listen to audiobooks in their car, others prefer listening to audiobooks when they are doing tasks that do not require much attention.

Read Also: 8 Tips on How to Make Money with Your Voice

How To Get Paid As A Narrator

As a narrator, you can get paid to narrate your book or other people’s books. The payment options will depend on whose books you are narrating. The payment rate may be hourly, per project, or based on royalties.

If you want to narrate other people’s books then you are a freelance audiobook narrator and you can get paid in different ways. You may be paid based on a flat rate or hourly. You can also earn through royalty shares.

If you are a beginner, you are most likely to be paid hourly or flat rates. You need to show that you are an experienced audiobook narrator before you can start receiving royalty shares. The royalty shares are the most passive type of income in the audiobook industry; one that you will love.

Narrating your books is an avenue through which you can start earning passive income right away. This path will earn you more money because the sales will go directly to you and they are recurring payments.

However, it takes time to build your audiobook from scratch. You must prepare your mind for the challenges on the way.

You may not make any sales when you are just starting, especially if you have no audience or website. However, platforms like Kindle Publishing allow you to sell directly to users that are searching for content.

How You Can Make Money With Audiobooks

Highlighted below is a list of tips that you can use to earn passive income with audiobooks. As stated earlier, you can earn from audiobooks by either narrating other people’s books or narrating your book.

We will consider both options in this section.

1. Choose a niche

If you love being an entrepreneur, or you are passionate about biographies or fiction books, then you can make money from narrating books in areas that you love. It will be easy if you are narrating your books since you have already written what you are interested in.

However, if you want to focus on narrating other people’s books, you may not have control over the niche that you work in.

One of the best ways that you can start making money with audiobooks is by narrating other people’s books. But note that you will not be able to choose the topic in this situation. The client will provide the content that you need to narrate.

When you are just starting, don’t reduce your client base by stating that you don’t narrate some types of books. However, once you become experienced, you can specify the niches that you prefer. This will improve the quality of your work and the quality of clients you attract.

If you are narrating your books, then you probably have a website with lots of content or you have a following (audience) already. You must also be able to create your ebook and convert it to an audiobook.

If you have a website or an audience, pay attention to how you can offer value to your audience and then turn it into an ebook.

But, what if you don’t have a website or an audience?

How to make money with audiobooks if you don’t have a website or an audience

If you don’t have a website or an audience and you still need a good niche for your audiobook, do the following:

  • Go to Amazon.com and select a topic that interests you. Then search for books on that topic. You will see the total number of search results at the top of the screen. Go through the Best Seller Rank (BSR) of the books on the front page. Note that books with smaller BSR sell more.
  • Find a niche that does not have many results in Audible. If you don’t find any book on Audible, then it means the book is strong on Amazon and its potential is thus, huge. This signifies an opportunity that you need to take advantage of.
  • Ensure that the niche is what you are interested in.

Read Also: Get Premium Sound Quality With the Best Audio Editing Software

2. Find the right platform

The platform you intend to use to narrate your books will be different from what you would use to narrate other people’s books.

If you want to narrate other people’s books, you can use Fiverr. To get started on Fiverr, simply sign up and carry out the following steps:

  • Look at the competition by searching for other audiobook narrators on Fiverr. Study the best narrators and create your profile modeling the best ones. Note that you shouldn’t copy their content verbatim.
  • Complete your profile and provide as much information as possible while doing so. You need to convince buyers that you have what it takes to get their jobs done perfectly.
  • Create your gigs (i.e. your offer). You can do this by writing a compelling and attention-grabbing title and a description. Also, provide your price and let people know if you can narrate in other languages apart from the English language.
  • Ensure you upload samples. Uploading samples increases your chances of attracting buyers.

If you want to narrate your books, there are many platforms that you can use to upload and sell your audiobooks. Listed below are some of those platforms. Ensure you study them and choose the one that best suits your needs:

It is more profitable to sell audiobooks on your website because you won’t have to pay any commissions on your sales. You can also use Awesound that has a search engine; which means people can find your books on the platforms they use most of the time.

3. Promote your content

You can promote your audiobook in different ways. You can use YouTube, podcasting, or blogging. These avenues will help you build your audience and have a market that will buy from you.

If you are narrating other people’s audiobooks, you won’t need to bother about promoting their content. The only thing you will promote is your job offer. You need to build up a portfolio that demonstrates your work so that prospective clients will be interested in working with you.

Ensure your Fiverr profile is updated and that you have good ratings. These will help you to rank higher in Fiverr’s search results. You can also use a YouTube channel to promote your services.

If you want to narrate your books, a great way of promoting your audiobooks is through a podcast. Podcasts offer an effective means of reaching your potential listeners. However, you need to understand how to create a podcast for this to work.

If you are a pro in your niche, and you have a great audiobook to share with your audience, you can be a guest on other people’s podcasts instead of starting your podcast. This is an effective way of building your audience and reaching new listeners.

Another option is to create a blog or a YouTube channel to promote your audiobooks.

Read Also: How To Start Blogging: Step-By-Step Beginner Guide

Which Route Should You Take?

Should you narrate your book or other people’s books?

It is possible to make quick money from narrating other people’s books. In this case, you will have to find authors or clients that want to pay you to narrate their books or content. The clients will pay you per hour or project.

This is a good place to start if you are a beginner, especially if you don’t have your content at the moment, or if you don’t have a large audience that you can promote your audiobooks to. You can narrate other people’s content on many platforms, such as Fiverr.

Once you have gained some experience, you can then proceed to narrate your books. This is synonymous with creating an eBook, but it is not as demanding as creating an eBook because you will spend less time narrating 20,000 words than writing them.

You can make lots of money if you sell your audiobooks, especially if the audiobooks are in demand and if you can promote them directly to consumers from your website.

FAQs

How much money do audiobook narrators make?

Audiobooks pay well. Even for newbies, audiobook narration is a lucrative side hustle. According to Business Insider, audiobook narrators that are just getting started can earn about $100 per hour of finished audio. The industry pros can earn up to $500 per hour of completed work.

How do you get paid to read audiobooks?

ACX gives you access to an unlimited number of potential projects, and the audiobooks that you produce will be found on Audible, iTunes, and Amazon. You can select how you want to get paid for your narration project.

You can choose to be paid per finished hour rate or on the successful completion of the audiobooks.

How much do audiobook narrators make per year?

An audiobook narrator’s earnings depend on different factors such as the pay rate, the length of the audiobook, the narrator’s experience, as well as the platform used to create the audiobook. As stated earlier, beginners can earn about $100 per hour of finished audio while experienced narrators can earn up to $500 per hour of completed work.

How do you become an audiobook narrator?

If you are interested in becoming an audiobook narrator, you need to decide if you want to narrate other people’s books or your book. If you want to narrate other people’s books, then you can sign up on Fiverr to start.

You can start on ACX if you want to narrate your ebook or content.

Read Also: Best Podcast Software: Free, Freemium & Paid [+ Pros & Cons]

Conclusion

We’ve come to the end of this article which explains how you can make money with audiobooks. Selling audiobooks is a market that is still under-tapped; many people are ignoring it. This is because the steps involved in creating an audiobook are many.

This is the best time to take advantage of this little competition and make a good amount of money. Make use of the tips discussed in this guide to make money with audiobooks.

If you loved this article, you will also love our guide on how to make money flipping domains.

Thanks for reading.