I don’t know if I ever really thought this would be a problem in my Voice over Work, but I am starting to wonder if I have time to do all the work I have committed to.

Five books in one day?

I have a hard time saying no. Here, that means it is difficult for me to turn down an offer. Almost any offer. I have, though – a few have come to me offering as low as $10 pfh, but instead of saying no I gave a counter offer of $40 and never heard from them again. I wonder, do they find someone to do a book for $10 pfh? I need to follow up on that in a few months and see want kind of product they get onto Audible for that rate.

Anyway, I may need to be a little more selective in my accepting of books. I find myself now working on several long (three to nine hours) books as Royalty Share deals (see a previous post for my breakdown of Pay for Production vs. Royalty Share), and in need of a little cash flow. Within the last 24 hours, I have received offers for five books, and a line of interest in a sixth that I think will turn into an offer, all at $40 pfh or higher. A quick rundown on these new titles:

• Subprime Felon, memoir of a young man going to Federal Prison Camp for fraud;

• Content Marketing how-to;

• 8 Steps to Happiness self-improvement book;

• Algorithm Universe Theory, a long technical treatise on the origin and nature of the universe(s). My math and science background helped here in reading so much technical language;

• Critical Thinking.

One of my special project Royalty books went on sale this week – Shall I Pray or Watch TV? By Vic Zarley. I don’t know Mr. Zarley, but I feel like I know the type as he reminds me of some family and family friends of mine from my childhood. He seems to me like a straight talking older Christian man who had some things worth saying, but maybe not the access to an audience of any significant size. His book is a Scripture-based challenge to believers to spend more time in prayer as opposed to watching television. No matter what your religious affiliation, if any, it is a bit difficult to argue with that position! But that isn’t the point of the discussion here. The points I would like to make are, in no particular order:

• Vic found some areas for me to change in his initial review of the recordings, which of course is the point of the review. Two things he wanted changed were due to manuscript changes that should have been made that weren’t, which meant in my opinion that I was being asked to fix things that should have been addressed before the manuscript was uploaded. ACX likes to have the recorded files close to the uploaded manuscript – as close as possible. They also indicate that once a Producer has downloaded a manuscript, it is “locked.” I explained this to the author, and I think I offended him, which I did not want to do. I did fix the two areas where the manuscript was in error, but I felt like this could happen another dozen times throughout the book, and that was too much for me to not challenge. I don’t think I did wrong by Vic in this, but I am not convinced I was completely in the right.
• After this series of messages, I didn’t hear much else and he approved the book, and it went on sale on June 15th. Two days later, I got this message:

Russell, I’ve started promoting heavily the “Shall I Pray or Watch TV?” that you narrated. Listening to it, I found at 1 hour and 44 minutes (and 37 seconds) a clicker noise and a repeated phrase. I do not want this to be unavailable to anyone, but would like that error corrected. Would you find out if you can correct that and not halt or impede people being able to buy or view the audiobook? Thanks, Russell

The clicker noise is completely my fault. I misspoke a phrase and clicked my error, but missed it when I did the edits later on. But, he approved the book, and we don’t have access to it anymore! It’s on sale on Audible, no longer in the ACX system for editing. We might be out of luck on this one. As this was just yesterday, I have not heard back from ACX yet on whether this is even fixable or not. Another cliffhanger for the next post.

Categories: Voice over Work