Before a word is recorded

Prep the text: mark the dialogue, the accents, the emphasis, the places where a scene turns on one word.

Cast. One reader, or a cast, and the registers that fit the book rather than the ones that are convenient.

Write the pronunciation roll — names, places, invented words — so book one and book five agree.

In the chair

Direction. Someone listening who knows the book and will stop a take that is technically clean and emotionally wrong.

Continuity. A character's voice must not drift across twelve hours of recording.

Room and chain discipline, recorded and kept, so a pickup line months later matches the session it belongs to.

After the last take

Edit: breaths, mouth noise, false starts, pacing between lines.

Proof against the manuscript, line by line, by someone who did not record it.

Master to retail specification — levels, noise floor, room tone, chapter structure — and deliver the masters to you, with the pronunciation roll and the session record.

In a film build the same producer carries the picture cut too: scenes, score placement, effects and the visual grammar of the house.

Asked and answered

Can't the narrator do all of this?

Some can, and the good ones charge accordingly. What you must not accept is nobody doing it — an unproofed, unmastered recording is not an edition.

Is production included in the price here?

Yes. The published rate — 7.000000000000001% of word count for audio, 12% for a film book — is the whole production: casting, direction, edit, proof, master and delivery.

Who owns the recording?

You do. The masters are handed over and no share of your sales is taken.