How to Make Your Own Audiobook
My audiobook is published! It’s on Audible or Amazon. All my own work—with the help of Tad Nicol, a young audio engineer at our church.
Lots of people I know told me they barely read books anymore, but love audiobooks: so they said please get your act together and put out the audiobook. But I discovered that is impossibly expensive unless you do it yourself. The web told me that was entirely possible. But it’s not so easy. Another author friend of mine gave up for the time being: too big a hassle.
Web advice was first to make some kind of sound-dampening space. So I cleared out half my clothes closet and lined it with the ancient red army blankets my wife, Debi, inherited from her parents. With the blanket-covered door pulled across I was in a quiet red cave.
The other imperative, it seemed, was a good mic, if possible hung in a cradle to reduce vibrations. I got a Blue Yeti online, one that was widely recommended. The baffle between me and the mic prevents some lip-smacking noises from getting through: it’s worth getting.
The software is critical, and my MacBook came with GarageBand, which apparently was good enough.
Various friends were distressed that I self-published on Amazon. I did so because it is so easy and I was out of energy: writing the book had exhausted me. Amazon also makes it super easy to do the audiobook version. As soon as you publish on the main site, you find that ACX, their audiobook wing, has laid out all the chapters for you and invites you to upload an MP3 audio file for each chapter. Within seconds of your uploading a file, the site tells you if it meets their specs.
This is where I ran into trouble. I didn’t meet the specs. I didn’t understand them—stuff about decibel levels and who knows what. I did find a wonderful guy online who offered a free sample MP3 file for GarageBand that met all ACX’s specs. I put that into GarageBand and … I sometimes met the specs but still most often didn’t.
I almost gave up. Tech! I beefed at church and found Tad, audio engineer extraordinaire, taking a health-related work break, so he had time to help me out. I paid him, of course, and it was well worth it. In addition to showing me how to use GarageBand properly, he ran each file through some software that further reduced noise: that last may have been a bit of a luxury but he was very quick at it.
What do you do if you don’t have a Tad? You could contact me and I’ll see if I can help.
I chose to keep the closet studio for now: it was too much fun recording the book to let it go yet. Lucky, because after publication I found that one of the chapters was garbled. I was able to redo it.