ACX Presentation
A couple of Fridays ago I got up early, hopped on the train to London, and went to Spotlight Studios, just off Leicester Square, to attend a presentation by Audible: ACX and the Audiobook Industry. Since ACX started to include UK narrators earlier this year, I’ve been considering signing up with them, but hadn’t quite got round to it, so the presentation seemed like a good idea.
The presentation was interesting and useful. It was 90 minutes long, and ran 3 times during the day. There were three main panellists. Jason Ojalvo, representing Audible/ACX; Anna Parker-Naples, an experienced actress and audiobook narrator; and Neil Gardner of Ladbroke Audio, editor, producer and general font of audiobook knowledge. Hannah, another Audible staffer, sat on the side-lines with a laptop poised and ready. Ready, as it happened, to field awkward questions about tax, of which more later.
Jason gave us a run-down of what ACX is, what it does, and how to go about doing it. He then went through a few other routes into the audiobook industry and gave some tips about audiobook-specific show-reels, and where to send them. He also gave a lot of useful advice for those starting out in audiobooks (or for actors who are considering audiobook work). It was good advice, well delivered, but - for me as an audiobook narrator - stuff I’ve heard before. Anna’s warning to pre-read all books you narrate in case the last page reveals the main character to have a Russian accent is a cautionary tale that I’ve heard a few times now, but one that bears repeating!
The three panellists then gave some quite detailed advice on how to use ACX to best effect, what to look for when choosing projects to apply for, potential pitfalls to avoid, safeguards within the system, and so forth. Some of the advice given included the following (in no particular order):
Production
As an ACX narrator, you are also responsible for proofing, editing, and mastering the audiobook to ACX/Audible’s specifications. You can subcontract this to third-party pros or do it yourself. Neil mentioned the benefits of handing the job over to the experts (such as his good self), but he and Anna offered quite a lot of advice about sound editing software and suchlike. Anna said that she actually liked to do her own editing when her work schedule allowed, although not all narrators share that impulse.
According to Neil, the current rate for an editor’s services is about £100 per day, and editing typically takes about 1.5 times as long as narrating. He also said that most studios are happy to make some arrangement to teach people how to do editing and mastering, if asked.
Choosing your first project on ACX
The general advice was to aim for a short project first, just to get to know the system a bit better, but then to stick with projects that are at least 6 hours long, since apparently Audible users don’t feel like they get their credit’s worth on works shorter than that. If you’re getting paid on a per-finished-hour rate, this is less of a concern, but if your fee will be based on royalties, you want to have as big a chance of sales as you can.
Royalty Risks
If you agree to a royalty-share job, check what territory the work is being sold in. Worldwide is far better than UK Only, for obvious reasons. All books on ACX must first be available for sale on Amazon, and another thing to look at is therefore the Amazon Sales Rank. Although you can never be 100% sure of your predictions, if a book is ranked in the thousands or ten-thousands, you’re probably onto a good thing. If it’s ranked in the millions, a royalty deal may be less profitable.
Incidentally, in case you wondered how much you get for royalties, Audible gets 60% of the retail price, you get 20% and the author/rights-holder gets 20%. The rate gets more generous if the audiobook sells squillions of copies, but that’s the rule of thumb, although note the bit about tax, below.
Rates
Anna’s advice on this was essentially that your rate is likely to depend on how much you want to do the book, and indeed how much else you have to do at the time. She also said that even if you want a fixed rate, and a rights-holder is only offering a royalty share, it may be worth talking to them - if they really like your voice, they might come back with a better offer.
Final Check Report
This is quite a big thing: get someone else to do a final check report before you submit the book. The author/rights-holder might agree to do this, or you might have to pay someone, but on no account do it yourself. You’re going to be too close to the work to reliably catch issues at this stage.
Mastering
The exact process of mastering seems to be something of an ephemeral art, and sounds to me a bit like being taught to cook something by my granny - a superb, intuitive cook of the “well you put a bit of this in, and some of that, and when it’s right, you just know” school of cooking. Mastering may well involve the same sort of hard-learned, intuition and familiarity to judge what a particular job needs… or perhaps it’s just hard to explain to a novice.
In any case, the ACX site apparently provides some fairly specific technical guidelines as to what the format, gain and peak settings (etc…) should be. If you don’t really understand what you’re aiming for, I’m not sure how much that will help, but in the meantime, Neil did offer the tip that it’s “things like not going from really quiet to really loud too quickly”, which did make some sense.
The (US) Taxman Cometh
Now this is something that was not touched upon during the main presentation, and no one else asked about it, but it was the single subject that I did not want to leave without it being explained to me. Tax.
You see, I’d been warned some time ago, that although ACX now takes UK narrators, they will deduct US tax at source before paying you, at somewhere in the vicinity of 30%. This always used to be the Big Thing about ACX: you could only be a narrator for them if you had a US tax code. I really wanted this explaining to me, and when, at the very end of the session, I asked about it, all eyes turned to Hannah. This is what I gleaned:
All in all, an interesting and enlightening session, and it was good to chat with the panellists and some of my fellow narrators. I’d have loved it to go on longer. Many thanks to Jason, Anna, Neil and Hannah for their insights.
The presentation was interesting and useful. It was 90 minutes long, and ran 3 times during the day. There were three main panellists. Jason Ojalvo, representing Audible/ACX; Anna Parker-Naples, an experienced actress and audiobook narrator; and Neil Gardner of Ladbroke Audio, editor, producer and general font of audiobook knowledge. Hannah, another Audible staffer, sat on the side-lines with a laptop poised and ready. Ready, as it happened, to field awkward questions about tax, of which more later.
Jason gave us a run-down of what ACX is, what it does, and how to go about doing it. He then went through a few other routes into the audiobook industry and gave some tips about audiobook-specific show-reels, and where to send them. He also gave a lot of useful advice for those starting out in audiobooks (or for actors who are considering audiobook work). It was good advice, well delivered, but - for me as an audiobook narrator - stuff I’ve heard before. Anna’s warning to pre-read all books you narrate in case the last page reveals the main character to have a Russian accent is a cautionary tale that I’ve heard a few times now, but one that bears repeating!
The three panellists then gave some quite detailed advice on how to use ACX to best effect, what to look for when choosing projects to apply for, potential pitfalls to avoid, safeguards within the system, and so forth. Some of the advice given included the following (in no particular order):
Production
As an ACX narrator, you are also responsible for proofing, editing, and mastering the audiobook to ACX/Audible’s specifications. You can subcontract this to third-party pros or do it yourself. Neil mentioned the benefits of handing the job over to the experts (such as his good self), but he and Anna offered quite a lot of advice about sound editing software and suchlike. Anna said that she actually liked to do her own editing when her work schedule allowed, although not all narrators share that impulse.
According to Neil, the current rate for an editor’s services is about £100 per day, and editing typically takes about 1.5 times as long as narrating. He also said that most studios are happy to make some arrangement to teach people how to do editing and mastering, if asked.
Choosing your first project on ACX
The general advice was to aim for a short project first, just to get to know the system a bit better, but then to stick with projects that are at least 6 hours long, since apparently Audible users don’t feel like they get their credit’s worth on works shorter than that. If you’re getting paid on a per-finished-hour rate, this is less of a concern, but if your fee will be based on royalties, you want to have as big a chance of sales as you can.
Royalty Risks
If you agree to a royalty-share job, check what territory the work is being sold in. Worldwide is far better than UK Only, for obvious reasons. All books on ACX must first be available for sale on Amazon, and another thing to look at is therefore the Amazon Sales Rank. Although you can never be 100% sure of your predictions, if a book is ranked in the thousands or ten-thousands, you’re probably onto a good thing. If it’s ranked in the millions, a royalty deal may be less profitable.
Incidentally, in case you wondered how much you get for royalties, Audible gets 60% of the retail price, you get 20% and the author/rights-holder gets 20%. The rate gets more generous if the audiobook sells squillions of copies, but that’s the rule of thumb, although note the bit about tax, below.
Rates
Anna’s advice on this was essentially that your rate is likely to depend on how much you want to do the book, and indeed how much else you have to do at the time. She also said that even if you want a fixed rate, and a rights-holder is only offering a royalty share, it may be worth talking to them - if they really like your voice, they might come back with a better offer.
Final Check Report
This is quite a big thing: get someone else to do a final check report before you submit the book. The author/rights-holder might agree to do this, or you might have to pay someone, but on no account do it yourself. You’re going to be too close to the work to reliably catch issues at this stage.
Mastering
The exact process of mastering seems to be something of an ephemeral art, and sounds to me a bit like being taught to cook something by my granny - a superb, intuitive cook of the “well you put a bit of this in, and some of that, and when it’s right, you just know” school of cooking. Mastering may well involve the same sort of hard-learned, intuition and familiarity to judge what a particular job needs… or perhaps it’s just hard to explain to a novice.
In any case, the ACX site apparently provides some fairly specific technical guidelines as to what the format, gain and peak settings (etc…) should be. If you don’t really understand what you’re aiming for, I’m not sure how much that will help, but in the meantime, Neil did offer the tip that it’s “things like not going from really quiet to really loud too quickly”, which did make some sense.
The (US) Taxman Cometh
Now this is something that was not touched upon during the main presentation, and no one else asked about it, but it was the single subject that I did not want to leave without it being explained to me. Tax.
You see, I’d been warned some time ago, that although ACX now takes UK narrators, they will deduct US tax at source before paying you, at somewhere in the vicinity of 30%. This always used to be the Big Thing about ACX: you could only be a narrator for them if you had a US tax code. I really wanted this explaining to me, and when, at the very end of the session, I asked about it, all eyes turned to Hannah. This is what I gleaned:
- Firstly, this only applies to royalty-share deals. If you get paid a flat rate, the deal is between you and the author, who pays you directly, before the completed audiobook goes on sale.
- If you sign up on ACX with an International (non-American) tax ID, ACX will deduct tax at source, before they pay you. The exact rate varies, but for the UK it’s 28%. So going back to the royalty split, for every £100 spent by Audible customers on your audiobook, you would get £20.00, minus £5.60 which goes to the US taxman, leaving you with £14.40. I’m not completely clear on whether that amount is then subject to UK tax, but it needs clarifying.
- Or... you can apply for a US tax identity. Hannah says that the process is painless, and takes about 2 days to come through. No tax will then be deducted at source, but if you earn more than US$600.00 in a given tax year, you will have to account for your income to the US tax authorities, and presumably be liable for US tax at the normal rate. I presume that’s only on income that comes from this route, but once again, I’m not completely sure.
All in all, an interesting and enlightening session, and it was good to chat with the panellists and some of my fellow narrators. I’d have loved it to go on longer. Many thanks to Jason, Anna, Neil and Hannah for their insights.