The audiobook version of "Alone Together: Sailing Solo to Hawaii and Beyond" is now available on Amazon books and through other sources.
Here's the sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDUKoeHpD-c
I did the recording myself in my home studio, and found it a hill to climb.
ACX, the company that handles the tech aspects, has high marks to hit regarding RMS levels, noise gates, compression and so on. The ratio of performance to post-production is 5:1, meaning that for every ten minutes of reading you face an hour or so of editing the waveform and balancing all the variables that ACX's algorithms, and human QC staff, insist must be right.
The reason given is that the final files, which are mp3s, are further massaged for various applications. They have to work with headphones, on computer speakers, and on a car radio at 70 mph.
Audible sets the sales price, depending on hos long the book is (this one is a little more than 11 hours).
Professional narrators offer to narrate titles for 50 percent of the take, and an author can audition them from samples they provide. There's a whole world of people out there doing this in home studios, although I don't know how many of them make a living at it.
All in all, it was an interesting foray into audio engineering--and left me with respect for the field.
And hoarse for a week, which my wife found made the house much quieter.
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