ACX Follow-up!

Hi everybody! On Monday I told you about my initial experience using Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX). As promised, here is my follow-up post now that my first project has been finished.

Wow, where to start? I am so, so pleased with ACX! I love the setup, I love how easy it is to use, and I love how my end product came out! Once I found the narrator I wanted to go with there wasn't much for me to do, but here is what I did need to do:

• The narrator asked me for some character notes. I was glad he was on the ball with this, because I hadn't even thought of it. Now it is totally, blatantly, ridiculously obvious to me. I gave him a few specific notes regarding characters (i.e. how to pronounce their names, how I wanted them to sound, their personality), but now I see that I didn't give him nearly enough. For my next project I am going to prepare notes on all characters so things turn out exactly how I want. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy how the narrator chose to do some things.
• Throughout the process my narrator and I stayed in contact via email, messaging through ACX, and by using Dropbox. If your narrator does not bring this up, I highly suggest using some sort of file share so you can hear each chapter as it is uploaded. That way you don't have to wait until the whole thing is finished and listen to all of it quickly.

So, besides staying in contact and listening to each chapter, I mostly just hung around and waited for the book to be finished. Once my narrator was finished there were several things I needed to do:

• Make sure I had listened to the whole book and either approve or not approve the final product. I believe you can request edits only. I was happy with it though, so all I had to do was approve the audio that had been uploaded.
• Select a recorded segment to play as the sample on Audible, iTunes, and wherever else the audio book would be sold. That took a bit of thought, for sure, but I finally settled on what I thought would grab listeners and make them want more.
• Stay in contact with my narrator and make sure we both knew how the process was going.
• Wait for everything to be finalized.
• Find the links to my audio book - that was a little bit of a pain. I didn't see anywhere on the actual ACX site that gave me the links. I had to go find them on the Audible and iTunes sites. So ACX could improve a bit in that regard.
• Market! That's the stage I am facing right now, figuring out how I want to get the word out there. Remember that both you and your narrator should be marketing wherever and however you can! I'm a bit limited this time around since my narrator has never done a juvenile fiction book before, so most of his followers are not interested in that, but we are figuring that out. ACX does provide help for marketing, which is nice.

Well there you go. Hopefully between my two posts on ACX you have learned something. I hope you'll try it out! I already know one author who is using ACX now because of my recommendation and he is also loving it.

Want to check out my finished project? Well here you go! Grab yourself a copy if you so desire. I hope you will. I enjoyed listening to it immensely, and I think you will too!

Audible
Also available from iTunes!