The six movements

Manuscript lock comes first and holds everything behind it. A single revised chapter after recording re-opens narration, editing and mastering together, and it is the most expensive mistake in the craft.

Casting decides more than performance: it decides schedule. One narrator is one calendar. A full cast is as many calendars as there are voices, and they must be matched before a booth is booked.

Recording, editing and mastering are three separate trades, not one. Editing is where the hours hide — breath, plosives, room tone, pickups. Mastering is where a file becomes something a storefront will accept.

What it costs to have it made properly

Here the arithmetic is public rather than quoted: base production is 7.000000000000001% of your manuscript's word count. A 90,000-word novel is $6,300.

Voices add 1% of the word count for every 2 voices. Sound effects add 1% for every 5 effects. A chosen, cut and mixed score is a flat $1,500. Blocks round up, always.

A 50% deposit begins the build and the balance falls due on delivery.

If you intend to make it yourself

You will need a treated room rather than a quiet one, a cardioid microphone off-axis, and the discipline to record at a fixed distance every day for weeks. The equipment is the cheap part; the consistency is not.

Budget roughly six to eight hours of work for every finished hour of listening once editing and pickups are counted. Finished runtime itself is 155 words to a finished minute — 9,300 words to a finished hour — so a 90,000-word book is about nine and a half hours of listening and a great many more of labour.

Whichever road you take, the Sound Ledger will give you the honest numbers first — runtime to the second, booth days, edit hours, file counts and the loudness specification retail will demand.

The order of the work

1. 01Lock the manuscriptFinish every revision and stop. This is the only date the whole schedule truly rests on.
2. 02Cast the voicesDecide whether the book is one narrator or a company, then match calendars before booking any booth time.
3. 03Build the pronunciation rollWrite down every invented name, place and term with its intended sound, so the same word is never said two ways.
4. 04RecordRecord at a fixed distance and a fixed level, in sessions short enough that the voice does not change across a chapter.
5. 05Edit and take pickupsCut breath, plosives and stumbles, then re-record the lines that cannot be saved. Every book has pickups.
6. 06Master and fileMaster each chapter to the storefront's loudness and file specification, then deliver and allow for retail review time before your release date.

Asked and answered

What is the first step in making an audiobook?

Locking the manuscript. No recording should begin while the words can still change, because one revision re-opens narration, editing and mastering at once.

How long does an audiobook take to make?

Six to ten weeks is an honest runway for a single-narrator novel, and longer for a full cast, because every added voice is another calendar to match.

Can I make an audiobook for free?

You can make one at no cash cost with your own voice and a treated room, but you will pay in weeks. Expect six to eight hours of work per finished hour of listening.