The three ways narration is priced

Per finished hour (PFH) is the industry's habit: a rate for every hour of edited, delivered audio. Common independent rates run from a couple of hundred dollars an hour to many hundreds for a known voice.

Per word is what authors can actually check, because you already know your word count and you do not yet know your runtime.

Per project is a single figure for the book. It is the easiest to compare and the easiest to pad, so ask what the figure is derived from.

How to convert between them

Use one number: 155 words make one finished minute, so 9,300 words make one finished hour. That is the retail standard, and it holds for both audio and film editions.

So a 75,000-word novel is about 8h 04m of finished audio. At this house's 7.000000000000001% rate, $5,250 across that runtime works out to roughly $651 per finished hour — production, direction, edit, proof and masters included.

Run the same conversion on any quote you are given. If a per-hour rate will not state the runtime it assumes, it is not a quote.

What the per-word figure must include

Direction, not just reading. Someone has to be responsible for whether a scene lands.

A proof pass against the manuscript, so a dropped line is caught before your readers catch it.

Retail-ready masters and the pronunciation record, so book two can match book one years later.

A rate that excludes proofing or masters is not cheaper. It is unfinished.

Asked and answered

Is per-word cheaper than per-finished-hour?

Neither is inherently cheaper — they are the same work measured differently. Per-word is simply checkable before recording exists.

Does a faster reader cost less?

No, and you should not want one. Pace is a performance decision; the arithmetic here uses the retail standard so nobody is rewarded for rushing your book.

What about narrating it myself?

It is legitimate and it is harder than it sounds — expect several hours in the chair for one finished hour, plus edit and proof.