If you know me, you might be aware that I’m the kind of person that loves to take on projects. Unfortunately, I’m also the kind of person that underestimates the difficulty of things.
I think you know where we’re going with this.
I’ve recorded my own audiobook for my collection I self-published back in March, Losing Air: Dark and Strange Tales (you wanna buy it?). And instead of a boring retelling of how that experience went, I’m going to frame what I learned as pieces of advice I’d like to offer to anyone in my boat: deciding to record your own audiobook.
My Qualifications
None.
Aside from a Sound Engineering class in high school where I learned the basics of the recording software Audacity, plus a smattering of sound engineering tidbits from when I was a musician, I have absolutely no qualifications to speak of. I mean, you’ve got to admire my can-do attitude, right?
Right?
My Advice
1. Don’t try to fly through it. I don’t know if anyone else is like me, but when I start a project, I do not like taking my time on it. This isn’t to say I rush and create subpar quality things; I just like to spend all the time I possibly can working on something because I don’t like having something unfinished.
Sometimes doing things this way isn’t an issue, but in this instance, it definitely was. Your voice is a muscle like any other part of your body. When you decide to use it for hours at a time with no lead-up training, you’re going to hurt. Imagine deciding that tomorrow, you’re going to do 500 bicep curls in a row. With no strength building routine to help you reach that goal, no carb-loading, nothing. Just you and a dream.
That was me.
I pushed my voice until I sounded like the chocolate lady in that episode of Spongebob.
So, don’t spend every waking moment you can recording. It’s good to have a grind mentality for some things, but not for this thing. If you’re a beginner like I am, read one or two chapters a day. No more than an hour of voice work at a time, at least at the beginning. Otherwise you’ll sound like a draugr waking from its crypt.
2. Take the time to understand your setup. You don’t need to be an expert in audio mixing to narrate an audiobook, but there are a few basic things you should understand. Depending on the kind of microphone you’ve got, you may need to be a certain distance away from it for optimal recording. I was used to non-powered dynamic microphones used for on-stage vocals. With those, a vocalist generally will get as close up to the mic as they can for optimal pickup.
Table mics (for podcasting and such) do not work this way.
I’m not an audio technician, so I’m not going to try to explain microphones to you, but I will give you this bit of advice: test your microphone from multiple distances away. You want to be far away enough that you can comfortably project your voice at a confident and even level without the mic peaking. Peaking is when your input exceeds the comfortable sound threshold, essentially causing the audio to distort when it’s too loud. This is a bit difficult to control when you have to record lines such as characters shouting at one another, so make sure that you get a feel for when to back off a bit so you don’t peak during lines that require projection.
Most of my pitfalls fell into this category. I didn’t notice I was peaking until I had recorded the whole thing, and no amount of compression and limiters could make it better. Because, as I mentioned, I was used to having to be right up on the mic.
Now, you may be saying, geeze Ava, did you not do any sort of research before you started this thing? The answer is yes, I did, but not on the things that mattered. I spent my time educating myself on quality narration. Not the technical side of things.
Another goof-up I did is pretty embarrassing. Now, you all are my friends, so I’m not ashamed to tell you. It’s important to carefully examine your equipment. Otherwise, you might realize on your third time through your book that you’ve been speaking into the back of the microphone the whole time.
In my defense, the thing didn’t have clear (to me) markings regarding its proper orientation. Well, it probably told me in the manual. But who reads those things?
Yes, I realize how stupid this article is making me look so far. I don’t care. I am stupid when it comes to this.
I’m trying to protect you from your own stupid.
3. Editing takes a while. Once you’ve finally got everything recorded, be prepared to spend a long time in the editing stage. Losing Air is a little over 4 hours long, and it took me 9 hours to edit it. If we can assume that’s an average editing speed, expect to spend at least twice the length of the book’s runtime editing.
Think about it. Not only do you have to listen to the entire audiobook searching for dropped words and cutting out all the goof-ups you made while narrating, you also have to trim long silences, slide takes together, re-record any lines that didn’t come through right, and silence all those mouth sounds (I had a lot of those). Narrating is really the quickest part of this whole process.
4. If you’re publishing through ACX, the “publish audiobook” button DOES NOT put the audiobook on the marketplace. This is an oddly specific one, but I wish someone had told me, so I’m telling you.
ACX is essentially what KDP is for audiobooks. It’s the author’s creation and publishing portal for Audible. It’s very user-friendly and straightforward, except for that stupid “publish audiobook” button. Imagine you’ve got all your MP3 files for all the chapters uploaded. You’re totally ready to go, and you’ve somehow stayed up until midnight on the release date you’ve promised to the two people who see your Instagram posts. You hit that big orange button with excitement, only to be told that it’s now time to wait up to 10 days for your audiobook to go through QA checks.
So, that “publish audiobook” button is NOT the last step. I don’t know if it just goes live whenever it passes the QA checks (I only clicked the stupid button yesterday), but just keep that in mind.
In Summary
Recording your own audiobook is really not that unattainable. If you have decent oration skills and about a hundred dollars (the cost of the microphone I bought), that’s about all you need for the basics, since Audacity is free. However, don’t let its low cost and the ease of the ACX publishing platform make you too comfortable. There are still several things to keep in mind as mentioned above, including taking your time to not damage your voice, understanding your setup and equipment, and preparing yourself for the time it takes to edit. If you’ve got all that in the bag, you’re probably going to be just fine.
And, yeah. Read the manual that comes with your microphone. Don’t spend three takes talking into the back of it.
Personally, all the takes it took me to get this thing recorded (4 entire read-throughs of the book) made me honestly hate my book. But, if I had done things the way I’m suggesting in this article, I wouldn’t have had to spend all that time re-recording the stupid thing because I overlooked something basic.
Losing Air: Dark and Strange Tales will be available on Audible at some point. Hopefully within the next ten days. Who knows! I’ll make sure to let you guys know in a post (and update the Read Our Stuff section with a link).
I am also doing the same thing for my upcoming release Cobwebs: Reimaginings of Classic Horror (due 9/22), and I’m definitely relieved that I learned the things I did and can have a much easier go of it the second time around.
Monthly Writing Goals Update
August Total: 36,400 / 20,000 words
September: 1172 / 30,000 words
You might immediately notice that I’ve upped my monthly word count goal for the first time since December. This is because, clearly, my dumb little Excel writing tracker is really working like a charm to get me to write consistently and in good amounts.
Now that we’re starting a new month, I’d like to present my completed tracker for the month of August:
Honestly, I’m proud of that. There are only five days last month where I didn’t manage to complete the tasks I’d set before myself. Yay me!
What’s great is, if I continue at the pace and consistency I’ve set up, I will 100% be finishing Project Wishbone before the end of 2026. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find a way to rekindle my passion for the two Malthea projects sitting at around the 75% mark.
Also, another quick note for anyone who missed it, pre-orders for the Cobwebs paperback are live! Everyone who orders their copy before release date (9/22) gets some special goodies in their package, like stickers and bookmarks! So order yours today here!
This content was written and created by a human, without the use of any artificial intelligence tools. The authors do not authorize this article’s usage in training AI tools. We proudly support the original works of creators and individuals over technology that steals and manipulates original content without consent of creators.
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