Additional Info

As mentioned previously, this is not a complete guide on how to record, edit, and publish an audio book. There are lots of guides like that out there, but I recommend Podcasting for Dummies. Then again, I may be a little biased.

If you’ve come this far and are thinking “what the heck have I gotten myself into,” don’t worry. We can probably help.

Our Valet, At Your Service

For a small fee – currently $9.99 a month – we’ll take care of all the technical stuff in this guide. You’ll still be responsible for recording the narration of your book, but all of the things required to make it into a serialized audiobook, we’ll do on your behalf. If you’d rather not worry about bit rates, ID3 tags, or file naming conventions, we can do it for you for a modest fee. Best of all, there are ways we can make this service free to you, and even provide a revenue stream with one of our sister sites. If you’re interested in our Valet service for your book, send an email to inquiry@podiobooks.com and we’ll fill you in on the details.

“Can’t You Just Do Everything For Me?”

OK, so maybe you don’t want to do any of the work, including the narration. No sweat. Over the years, several of our contributors have discovered they’ve a special knack for doing just that. If you choose our Concierge Service, we’ll collaborate with you to find the best voice for your book… and then we’ll take care of the rest of the process, from start to finish. All you’d need is a completed and edited manuscript.

Note: This isn’t a cheap option, and it’s based on the length of your final book. Estimate roughly $1000 for an eight-hour long book. Which is less expensive than sourcing the services yourselves.

To get a quote, send an email to inquiry@podiobooks.com to start the conversation about our “Concierge Service”. A total word count is helpful in coming up with an estimate.

A Note About Rights

Keep in mind that if you choose to distribute your audio book with Podiobooks.com – you keep all the rights. During the process and before your book goes live, you’ll grant us a non-exclusive, world-wide license to distribute the audio files. No, we don’t charge you for this service. And no, we don’t charge our listeners. Free can be a good thing, and we don’t want to muddy it up with commerce.

Tips Are Welcome Here

But just because we offer free books, it doesn’t mean we won’t take people’s money! Every book has a Tip button next to it. Any tips we get are split 75/25 with the author or producer, and you get the bigger share.

Serialized Yet Complete

If you’ve been watching our site for a while, you may recall a time when we used to release in-progress audio books, dropping new episodes weekly or whenever the author/producer finished a new episode. At the start of 2012, we changed our policy to only list serialized audio books once all episodes were produced and ready to be released. This was initially a defensive move to reduce administrative costs, but then we noticed our total downloads – and therefore our authors’ readership – spiked in response.

If you would like to take the “one episode per week” approach (and I still think that’s a fabulous idea), then you’ll need to release the book on your own site/feed first. When you’ve gone through that initial delayed release cycle, we’ll be happy to list your book on Podiobooks.com. Consider us your archive!

Special Thanks to Libsyn

Finally, I have to thank the fine people at Libsyn for their generous support. They donate the media file storage and bandwidth, so none of this is possible without them. Tell your friends!