When I asked the room in Marketing 101 who was already on ACX, I got a mix of yeses and nos. So we spent the whole night on it, and this post is the short version of that class.

ACX is the Audiobook Creation Exchange. It started as its own company. Audible bought it, and Amazon owns Audible. It's where independent authors and narrators find each other and get audiobooks published on Audible and Amazon. It's also one of the very few places that's truly free to join, with no application to get accepted.

I'll be straight with you. ACX isn't where the bestsellers live, and a lot of the work pays pennies on the dollar. But it's work. I've always felt that work begets work, and if you're sitting there twiddling your thumbs, you might as well be doing some kind of paid work while you go after the other stuff.

Set up your profile and don't overthink it

Your ACX profile has four parts. There's your audio samples and an About section, plus a section for credits and one for awards and recognition.

Do you need all four filled in? No. But I don't like leaving things blank, ever. If you don't have credits or awards yet, write about where you're training, what your setup is like and what you're working on right now. Even a sentence is fine. Add a photo too. I've used the same doggone picture for about seven years (my beard was darker then).

For the About section, remember who's reading it. Authors aren't interested in reading a book about you. They want to know how you're going to help them. I always used to say that you're Yoda and they're Luke Skywalker. They're the star of this story. And what almost every author tells me they care about most is selling more audiobooks, so talk about how your performance helps them do that.

Upload your samples three at a time

This is the easiest way to get work on ACX, and people forget it all the time.

Every time you upload a sample to your profile, ACX puts it at the very top of the Find Talent page, where authors browse narrators. So I upload three samples at a time, about three times a week. Your three sit up there together until newer uploads push you down the page. It might be 45 minutes or a couple of hours, but for that stretch you're the first narrator an author hears.

Authors can offer you a contract straight from there, without you ever auditioning for their book. I've gotten tons of work that way. The samples can be simple, too. A single read of 30 seconds to a minute is fine, and you can upload the same reads you've been auditioning with. Nobody on ACX is going to care.

And if a contract comes in and you don't want it, you just say no thank you. There's no penalty on ACX for turning a book down. But you never know. It could be a $400 per finished hour audiobook.

Leave the filters alone

When you go to find projects to audition for, ACX shows you books based on the filters in your settings. I talk to people all the time who tell me there's nothing on ACX. Then I look at their filters.

Here's the trap. On most of those filters, the moment you tick one box, ACX hides everything you didn't tick. Tick one budget range and every other budget range disappears. So I leave them all unticked and make my own decisions. The only one I set is English.

I also never filter by gender or accent, and I leave age alone too. What an author puts down isn't written in stone. I've seen so many narrators get cast in a role the author listed for somebody else, because the author liked their storytelling better. One of our members told the class he'd just booked a book where the author asked for an Irish accent, and he doesn't have one. Don't let a checkbox stop you from trying.

Keep auditions short and answer the author's questions

I only ever do two to three minute auditions. Sometimes an author uploads 15 pages or the whole manuscript. Don't freak out. You're not being paid to audition, and if they can't tell in the first 30 seconds whether they want you, I wouldn't want to work with them either.

Then there's the message box. Put the things the author actually wants to know at the top. When can you start, are you good with the pricing, and do you have any questions about the characters? "I can start right away and have this done in two weeks, and I'm good at $75 per finished hour" is worth more than a paragraph about how much you loved the book.

And follow the instructions. If the script says slate your name, slate your name. If it says don't, don't. Then listen back before you send it, and make sure there's no noise in the audio.

I wrote a whole post about building an audition routine, How Many Auditions Does It Take to Book a Voice Over Job, if you want the numbers side of it.

What happens when you get the book

Once an author offers you a contract and you accept, you record a 15-minute sample first. The author listens and approves it, and then you record the rest of the book. You upload your finished files, and they have to meet ACX's audio requirements. My older post on formatting your audio files for ACX in Adobe Audition walks through that step by step.

On a per finished hour book, the payment happens between you and the author outside ACX, and you click "Confirm payment" in ACX once the money is really in your account. The book doesn't go to ACX's final quality check until you do. I went through how narrators get paid, royalty share included, in last week's post, How Do Audiobook Narrators Get Paid.

Where Academy Voices fits in

ACX is one door. Academy Voices is the other one I'd want every new narrator to have.

It's our own audiobook production platform, and every VO Journey Academy member gets free access to it. Our narrators have published over 750 audiobooks through it. It also has a built-in tool that checks your files against the audio standards and fixes them.

If you want something to practice on before your first real audition, the audiobook section of our free scripts library has excerpts built for exactly that.

Come see how we work

Free Class Week is Monday 12 to Thursday 15 October. You can sit in on all four of our live classes for free, including Marketing 101 on Tuesday night, where this ACX class came from, and Launch Pad with Angela Ohlfest on Thursday, where members bring in their auditions for notes. There's no card to enter and no sales call. Save your free seat here.

If you already know you want in, your first month of CORE is $39.

Go out there and upload three samples this weekend :)
Anthony