Audiobooks!

Maybe.  I hadn’t thought about audio versions of the Dream books, but my wife’s old boss, who loves books but who’s legally blind and has tremendous difficulty reading, suggested the idea. 

I think it’s a great idea, and I’m very excited about it…except that it’s very expensive – the prices I was qouted were all in the $3,000-$4,000 range per book.  Why so much?  I didn’t know any of this, but I do now:

You get about 8,000-10,000 words read an hour for an audiobook.  So for ream Student at 94,000 words, that’s anywhere between 10-12 hours. 

You pay for those hours; not just the narrator (who’s a skilled professional) but also a producer and/or engineer (who might be one and the same person), and that works out to anywhere between $200 and $400 an hour depending on who you’re talking to. 

But there’s an alternative, provided (no surprise) by Amazon, called the Audiobook Creation Exchange (or ACX – www.acx.com).  There, you can offer your book as a project to be recorded, and narrators/producers can offer themselves, and both side can set the price they’re willing to pay (or accept).  The neat thing is that you can offer to do it for a split of the royalties, rather than money up front.  Which is what I’m hoping will work out for the Dream books.  We’ll see…