>In the audiobook narration world the price per finished hour is considerably more revenue than royalty split
That's pretty interesting. From your vantage point could you say why that's true?
In my experience, I would agree it's true because it seems that the vast majority of Audiobooks don't actually sell that many copies. A narrator should never expect to earn, say, $1000 or more in Royalties, even over the life of the book. ($1000 dollars represents typical low-moderate PFH pay for a book length of 5-10 finished hours)
My guess is that you'd need to sell probably 300 to 400 copies of an audiobook to make $1000 in narrator Royalties. I don't have hard data, but I would estimate that audiobooks probably sell at a ratio of 20% or less than the paper version. So you'd need to narrate a book that's going to sell at least 1000+ paper copies in a year before you'd have a chance at breaking even in the year you narrated the book.
1000+ sales in a year is a pretty tall sales order. According to Scribe media: [0]
"In the book’s lifetime Research suggests that the “average” self-published, digital-only book sells about 250 copies in its lifetime.
"By comparison, the average traditionally published book sells 3,000 copies, but as I mentioned above, only about 250-300 of those sales happen in the first year."
It would appear the odds are not in the narrator's favor.
That's pretty interesting. From your vantage point could you say why that's true?
In my experience, I would agree it's true because it seems that the vast majority of Audiobooks don't actually sell that many copies. A narrator should never expect to earn, say, $1000 or more in Royalties, even over the life of the book. ($1000 dollars represents typical low-moderate PFH pay for a book length of 5-10 finished hours)
My guess is that you'd need to sell probably 300 to 400 copies of an audiobook to make $1000 in narrator Royalties. I don't have hard data, but I would estimate that audiobooks probably sell at a ratio of 20% or less than the paper version. So you'd need to narrate a book that's going to sell at least 1000+ paper copies in a year before you'd have a chance at breaking even in the year you narrated the book.
1000+ sales in a year is a pretty tall sales order. According to Scribe media: [0] "In the book’s lifetime Research suggests that the “average” self-published, digital-only book sells about 250 copies in its lifetime.
"By comparison, the average traditionally published book sells 3,000 copies, but as I mentioned above, only about 250-300 of those sales happen in the first year."
It would appear the odds are not in the narrator's favor.
[0] https://scribemedia.com/book-sales/