When I was narrating my first audiobooks, I was still teaching full time. I'd teach all day and record at night, and I badly underestimated how long a book was going to take me. There were stretches where I got one or two hours of sleep and fell asleep at work.

So when somebody asks me how long it takes to narrate an audiobook, I want to give them the honest answer I didn't have back then. A 10-hour audiobook is not 10 hours of work. It isn't even close.

Start with the finished hour

Everything in audiobooks is measured in finished hours. A finished hour is one hour of the final audiobook, the length a listener actually hears. ACX works it out at about 9,300 words per finished hour.

So you can size up any book before you audition. Take the word count and divide by 9,300. An 80,000-word novel comes out around eight and a half finished hours. A 28,000-word nonfiction book is about three.

That tells you how long the audiobook is. It doesn't tell you how long it takes you to make it.

How many hours of work go into one finished hour

For new narrators, I usually say six to eight hours of work for every finished hour. You haven't found your groove yet, and that's normal. So that 10-hour book could be 60 to 80 hours of your life. A three-hour book could be closer to 18 to 24.

You get faster with reps, and I'll get to that. But plan around the slow number when you're starting out, because the slow number is the one that bites you.

Where does all that time go? It's more than reading into a microphone. You're reading the book first, so you know who the characters are and where the story ends up. You're recording, then going back for the lines you flubbed. Then there's editing out the breaths and mouth noise and mistakes, and mastering the files so they meet ACX's audio requirements. On ACX there's also the 15-minute sample at the start, which the author has to hear and approve before you record the rest.

Read the whole book before you record

This one saves more time than anything else. At least skim it to the end before you start.

There's nothing worse than getting halfway through and finding out you missed something big about a character. Maybe the gruff old man turns out to be the narrator's father, or the main character has a British accent and you've been doing her American for six chapters. Now you're re-recording, and that's hours you don't get back.

While you're reading, figure out who the book is for. A picture book for seven-year-olds and a business book for engineers need very different reads. If you're not sure, ask the author how they want the listener to feel. They'll usually love that you asked.

Keep chapter 30 sounding like chapter 1

Audiobooks are the longest projects most of us will ever do. Your voice has to sound the same in chapter 30 as it did in chapter 1, and that's hard to pull off if you try to grind the whole thing out in a few long sittings. Break it into sessions you can keep up, and stop when you hear yourself getting tired.

Your setup matters here too. Keep your microphone in the same spot, the same distance from your mouth, every session. If chapter one is recorded like this, chapter two like that, and chapter three from somewhere else entirely, it's going to sound weird.

And put your sessions on your calendar like any other job. If a book needs 60 hours from you and you've got 10 hours a week, that's six weeks. Now you know what you can promise the author.

Pick your first books by length

This is why I tell new narrators to keep their first books short. If you're doing royalty share, I'd stay around three to five hours or less when you're starting out. You'll actually finish it and learn a ton, without being stuck on one book for three months.

It matters on per finished hour books as well. Say a book pays $100 per finished hour and it takes you eight hours of work per finished hour. That's $12.50 an hour for your time. At six hours of work per finished hour it's closer to $17. Getting faster is a real raise, and it's also why knowing your rates matters. If you haven't looked yet, our voice over rate guide is a good place to start, and I went through royalty share and per finished hour in How Do Audiobook Narrators Get Paid.

How you get faster

Reps. That's really it. The more you read out loud, the fewer retakes you need, and the less you have to fix in the edit.

A few things help. Clean audio at the start means less editing at the end, so find the quietest space you've got. I built my business in a booth made of packing blankets, so it doesn't have to be fancy. Mark up tricky names and words before you hit record. And practice reading cold, so a page you've never seen doesn't slow you down.

The audiobook section of our free scripts library is good for this. Pick an excerpt and set a timer. Record it and edit it, and see how long one finished minute takes you. Then do it again next week. If you're new to ACX itself, start with last week's post, ACX for Beginners.

Get real books done with us

This is a big part of why we built Academy Voices. Every VO Journey Academy member gets free access, and our narrators have published over 750 audiobooks through it. You get real books with your name on them, and you find out your own speed on actual projects.

Free Class Week starts Monday. From the 12th to the 15th of October you can sit in on all four live classes for free, including Launch Pad with Angela Ohlfest on Thursday night. Angela has narrated over 250 audiobooks, so if you want to ask somebody how long a book really takes, ask her. There's no card to enter and no sales call. Save your free seat here.

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

Have a great weekend everyone.
Anthony