Creating a Nonfiction Audiobook – Hiring a Narrator

In this week’s blog post, we will be considering having an audiobook version of your nonfiction book. There are two ways to do this – you can either hire a professional narrator or do it yourself. There are advantages and disadvantages of both methods, so you will want to weigh up your options before you decide. This blog will focus on hiring someone as the narrator, with another to follow looking at the DIY option.

Advantages of Audiobooks

First of all, why have an audiobook? Audiobooks are increasingly popular for fiction books but don’t always suit nonfiction books. This will depend on what type of nonfiction your book is. For example, if it contains a lot of diagrams and graphs to explain things, it might be difficult for your readers to understand as an audiobook. However, some nonfiction books, such as memoirs, work perfectly as audiobooks. Depending on the exact nature of your book, many self-help books also make good audiobooks.

One advantage of audiobooks is that you should find it easier to climb the rankings of your selling platform. Although the audiobook market is growing, it is still much smaller than the ebook one. This means that there is less competition, and your book will be higher in the search rankings. The higher in the search rankings your book is, the more views it will get. Hopefully, this will lead to more sales and your book again going up the search rankings.

Audiobooks can also help you to reach new buyers for your book, as well as giving more options to your existing audience. A lot of people prefer audiobooks for convenience – listening to it means that they can get on with something else, such as cooking or cleaning. It may also just be easier to carry around, as audiobooks can be downloaded to almost any device and taken on a work commute, for example.

Finally, audiobooks are more accessible. People with visual impairments can listen to audiobooks, making them a much better option. While there are other adjustments that can be made, such as Braille or large-print books, audiobooks are often the easiest and are widely available.

Advantages of Hiring a Narrator

So, why would you hire a narrator? One of the primary advantages of this is that you will be getting a professional quality audiobook, assuming you carefully sorted through potential narrators to choose someone talented and reliable. It is difficult to make your own audio sound this professional, as it takes practice, and you will need to learn the basics of editing. A professional narrator should have several short samples available that you can listen to as an example of a finished audiobook.

A professional narrator will also sound better as they will have invested in a good microphone and some soundproofing to reduce the background noise. They should be able to edit the final recording with their own software and send you the files ready to publish. The end result will be a clean, high-quality audio file for you to upload to your selling platform without any trouble.

The samples available on the narrator’s website or that they can send you are also a good opportunity to listen to their voice. Does it suit your book? Is it the right speed for comprehension? The advantage here is that you have a choice, whereas you can’t really change the pitch and accent of your own voice! While you are sorting through samples, consider whether the narrator has experience reading out non-fiction. This can be very different from fiction, especially if you are writing about an area with lots of niche-specific words.

Another advantage of having a narrator is that they will provide all of the necessary equipment. While hiring a narrator obviously costs a lot more on the surface, the two options might end up being closer than you think. If you choose to record the audio yourself, you will have to invest in things like a microphone and some editing software. These don’t need to be too expensive, but they are still a cost for you. Depending on the noise levels where you will be recording, you might also have to pay for soundproofing to make your final audio clear enough to publish.

Creating an audiobook yourself is also costly in terms of your time. Bear in mind that this will not be limited to how long it takes to read your book – you will need to allow extra time redo parts where you have made mistakes and take regular breaks to rest your voice. You will also need more time after recording to edit the audio.

Wrapping Up

I hope that this helps you to decide whether you want to hire a professional narrator to create your audiobook. In my next blog post, we will instead be looking at the DIY method, so come back in two weeks for that!

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