If you’ve self-published a book, you might be tempted to record an audiobook version and sell that too. We look at what this involves and help you decide if this is a step you want to take.
If you’ve self-published a book, you might be tempted to record an audiobook version and sell that too. We look at what this involves and help you decide if this is a step you want to take.
Audiobooks are increasingly popular, and having the author narrate their own book can give listeners a greater sense of connection to the work. In a previous article, we discussed the techniques necessary to narrate your own audiobook. Much of what that article covered was about working in a studio with a producer when your publisher has asked you to record your audiobook.
But what if you are self-published? What if you want to record your own audiobook? In this article, we look at how to go about recording and selling your audiobook, and discuss some of the issues you need to know before you start narrating.
Distributing your audiobook
Before you start thinking about recording your audiobook, you need to think about distribution. There are a number of platforms that sell audiobooks, but not all of them allow you to sell your book directly. As with self-published ebooks, you can go through an aggregator to upload your book to different platforms, and there is one company that can help you: Amazon. As the owner of Audible, the leading audiobook retailer, Amazon created its Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) platform, which can place titles on Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. These platforms cover the majority of audiobook sales, and Apple Books won’t even let authors upload their own audiobooks; they only accept audiobooks from aggregators.
Spotify’s foray into audiobooks is recent, and they let you do everything yourself. Its Spotify for Authors platform lets you upload your own book as you would upload an ebook to any retailer. Though if you are going to the trouble of creating an audiobook, Spotify may not be where your audience is likely to be, and it’s better to have broader distribution.
There are a number of other audiobook aggregators, which function as intermediaries to get your book on as many platforms as possible. There are hundreds of potential platforms that sell audiobooks, but none with the market dominance of Audible, which has nearly two-thirds of the US market. Companies such as Voices by INaudio and Author’s Republic can get you on multiple platforms, such as Kobo and Barnes & Noble, as well as many others you’ve never heard of. It’s important to note that ACX only works with people who live in Canada, Ireland, the UK, and the US, so if you’re not in one of those countries, you have no choice but to go through a different aggregator.
Technical requirements for self-published audiobooks
If you record your own audiobook, you need to ensure that your files meet certain technical standards. Amazon’s ACX spells these out in detail. Each chapter must be a separate file, with no file more than 120 minutes long. And you need to know what different audio file types are, understand things like noise floor and volume in RMS, and ensure that no file has peak values higher than –3dB to prevent distortion. Sticking to these requirements is a good way to ensure that your book will be compatible with all platforms.
If this sort of thing makes your head spin, then you’re better off going through an audiobook aggregator, though one option is to find an engineer who can handle the tech side of the process. (More on engineers below.)
Tech needed to record an audiobook
You don’t need much to record an audiobook. You basically need a microphone and a computer. If you use a Mac, you already have GarageBand, a free app for recording any kind of audio. The free Audacity is a good choice for people on any platform: Windows, Mac, or Linux.
But that’s not enough to make a good-sounding audiobook. You need a quiet space; very quiet. Any background noise will affect the quality of your recording, and if the audiobook has poor quality sound, it may be rejected by retailers. Professional audiobook narrators work in studios or in soundproof booths; you can see narrator Simon Vance in his home recording booth in this video.
The recording process
If you have decided that you want to record your own audiobook, read some of the tips on narration from Simon Vance in our previous article.
When recording any audio, you will make mistakes, and you need to fix them. Simon told me, “I do straight record. If I make a mistake, I drop a marker in my recording software, and I go back a sentence. I might do that a couple of times. Because I’m a good editor – I started in the BBC years ago, editing reel-to-reel tapes – I work very well with digital recordings, so I can edit that myself.”
He said that “new narrators are generally trained to use something called punch and roll. You make a mistake, and you look back on the audio file to see where the paragraph started. You punch in there, and what the program does is play three seconds before that so that you hear your voice coming up to the point, and then it drops into record, and you record from that point on.” GarageBand doesn’t offer this feature, but Audacity does, as do more expensive – and more complex audio tools – such as Logic Pro and Pro Tools.
But most authors won’t have these skills, and Simon said that “I think you definitely have to engage an engineer, and the engineer will often be the proofer at the same time.” The proofreader is the person who listens to your recording while reading the book to make sure you got everything right.
Authors can find recording their books daunting. I spoke with Isabella Valeri, author of Letters from the Dead, who was the guest of episode 53 of the Write Now with Scrivener podcast. She said that “you have to make a lot of decisions early on. Will you try to act your different characters’ voices out differently? If, as a female author reading dialogue from a man, will you try to emulate a male voice? Or will you just read it in your own voice? The former is actually very hard to do well, and you need to find ways to make characters distinct when they are in dialogue with each other in a scene.”
Beyond these decisions, the process itself is taxing. “I found that it is quite hard to read for more than an hour or two at a stretch, and I vastly underestimated the role of fatigue. At some point, even if your voice doesn’t begin to fade, you realize how much effort it is to perform (and it really is performance) for long stretches.”
Nevertheless, Isabella is currently recording the audio for her second novel, The Prodigal Daughter, which is due out in July 2026.
Post-production
After you’ve finished your recording, there’s still a lot of work to do. Audiobooks need to meet certain technical characteristics, as mentioned above, and this means that some post-production work is necessary. It’s very useful to have an engineer, especially one who can proofread your recording as well. This is an additional expense, but if you don’t have the skills to produce an audiobook, then it is essential to make sure your book sounds as good as possible.
If you look at all this and think that it is daunting, imagine how much time you spent and how much expertise you used in writing your book. Narrating an audiobook is not for everyone, but if you do feel compelled to put your own voice to your words and have the technical and audio skills, it can add value to your book.
You can listen to Isabella Valeri discuss her book Letters from the Dead, and how she uses Scrivener.
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.