[atlasunshrugged]

I have a question for you both (drakonka and turkeygizzard): Would you ever sell all or a portion of the rights to future earnings for your already published books to a third party? We've seen in the music industry PE firms basically acquiring known catalogues for the residuals and I'm wondering why that doesn't seem to happen in the publishing industry.

[drakonka]

It happens quite a bit! I mentioned it in another comment here, but one thing that publishers can be very useful for is audiobook rights and translations. These are very costly to produce and it sometimes makes more sense to offload that part to a publisher. That is definitely something I'd consider doing if the opportunity came along.

[krisroadruck]

I wonder how much longer this will remain true. Audiobooks and translations seem like near-term target for AI.

[drakonka]

That's a good point. I'm already in the process of using voice synthesis to narrate one of my books. It is still a huge time outlay to get to the quality bar I want, but much cheaper than paying for a narrator.

One thing working in favor of human narrators is the fans. Audiobook listeners can get very attached to certain voices, to the point where they'll read _anything_ that narrator works on regardless of the book's author or genre. If I had the budget for it, I'd definitely favor a well-known human narrator over AI for the visibility aspect of working with that person. But most authors don't have the budget to hire popular narrators, which is where less popular or entry-level narrators may find themselves losing work to AI alternatives. The narration quality is still higher with competent humans at this time as well, but that'll change.

For translations, I don't think I'll ever trust AI entirely (just like I don't trust myself as a human writer entirely!) I'd still be hiring a native-speaking human editor and proofreader if generating AI translations. Or more likely, I'd be hiring a human translator who is able to charge competitively by using AI in their workflows (and is also able to handle the quality checks etc for me).

[AlbertCory]

True. On this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU

100% of the commenters are Matthew's fans. Did that lead to any sales for me? Not clear.

[atlasunshrugged]

Interesting! Do you have an email or way to get in touch by chance? I'd love to connect and ask more as I'm both writing a book and considering trying to build some stuff in this space. Alternatively, I'm at jb2956 at georgetown.edu!

[drakonka]

Sure! Feel free to reach out at me at liza dot io.

[AlbertCory]

get on Reedsy. You can put work out for bid, and the quality is quite high, IMHO.

[atlasunshrugged]

Yes! I just used an editor from there who gave some phenomenal feedback for a very reasonable price

[johnrgrace]

Audiobook natation isn't that expensive - the same narrators being used by publishing houses can do it for $200 an hour with it being 10-12k words per hour. Audiobook production is a few thousand for most books under the current system.

[drakonka]

For most self-published authors, a few thousand dollars is a lot to drop into a project that may never pay out. And in many cases if they do have the money, it makes more business sense to spend that budget on editors and cover designers across multiple books.

But there are definitely people who fund their own audiobook production. And narrator royalty share options exist too, which some use (I would personally not). It's just not the default option or choice for many.

[AlbertCory]

Accurate. Go on ACX and audition narrators. Also Voices.com.

The "per hour" rate usually means "per finished hour" not "per hour that they spent doing it."