Creating an Audiobook Using ACX – My Experience – Part 3 of 3

This is the third part of my post on considering  production as an audio book.

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about finding a voice actor on ACX. I’ll pick up in this part with what to expect once you have submitted a proposal to a voice actor.

In Part 2, I talked about the audition, the offer and reviewing the first 15 minutes produced by the voice actor.

We will drill down in this part of the post into the production process and putting your book up for approval and sale once it is complete.

Reviewing the Final Product:

When you made your offer, you were asked to set two deadlines. The first was for the first 15 minutes to be completed and the second was for completion of the entire book. I gave my selected voice actor the recommended two weeks to finish the first 15 minutes and six weeks to finish the entire book. I was very fortunate that the voice actor completed the work well ahead of time.

An Unanticipated Step:

Once the voice actor finished the book, I found that I needed to listen to the entire thing. As I mentioned in Part 2, you’ll want to ensure that the voice actor’s pronunciations are correct. I also mentioned that I had a character with the last name of Figueroa. As I listened to the finished product, I again heard alternating pronunciations of this name. About halfway through listening to the nearly five hour book, I notified the voice actor. He said it was an easy fix if I could tell him which chapters were affected with the approximate time stamp.

This made sense and allowed him to ‘punch in’ the correct word or sentence as needed. It also made it necessary for me to go back and listen to the entire book from the beginning. I tried to be as clear as possible in sending him the places that needed to be fixed.

Here is a sample of the email I sent to him:

He very quickly turned the changes around and it sounded flawless in the final product.

Submitting for ACX Approval

Once this was done, I was able to submit the book to ACX for final review. I received this email reply:

ACX takes the review process seriously. I had heard horror stories that books were rejected for rework due to minor technical issues and other things that didn’t meet ACX protocol. I did not hear anything from them for two entire weeks, but then I received the following wonderful email:

True to the email, the book was up on Amazon and Apple iBooks within a few days.

I am repeating the process with another book and hope to have it ready for sale soon as well.

Overall, this has been a very positive process. If any authors are considering going through the audio book process and you have questions that are detailed in nature, I’d be glad to help. Just email me at don@donmassenzio.com