Even if you are unable to travel and do the “book tour” thing, you and your book can still tour without leaving your front door!

How is this done?

By making a short video that promotes your book and uploading it to YouTube.com.

Here’s a quick guide on what you can do:

1. Write a brief, appealing script that educates the public about your book.  If you don’t have time to write a fresh promotional script, you may wish to simply use the copy that is reserved for your book’s back cover to get you through.  You may need to discuss this with your publisher to get their permission and or opinion and feedback.
2. Arrange a number of pictures and graphics to act as a slideshow for your book.  These images should reflect your script and make sense with the thoughts that are being delivered.  If you’d like to be on-camera, that’s great!  It’s not necessary that you as the author appear on-camera but if you’re comfortable with it, the more power to you.
3. Hire a voice over talent to professionally narrate your script.  Depending on the script and theme of your virtual book tour, you can go for a variety of styles including commercial, straight narration, or movie trailer type narration which is more promotional and suspenseful by nature.  You can find voice talent online at Voices.com quickly and easily to get this part of your virtual book tour kicking.
4. Have the voice talent send you their voice file and then sync it to your video.  Make sure that you include a text link at the end of your video that directs people to where they can order or purchase your book.  This should be on the screen for at least 3-5 seconds for people who are writing it down or opening a new tab to visit your site.
5. Once your video has been completed, you can upload it as a .mov file to YouTube.com and start promoting your book online, distributing it to the masses through  marketing using the Internet as the hub of your Virtual Book Tour.

She’d discovered an invaluable vehicle for achieving success in her voice over career faster than she’d imagined.

I asked Janice what factors she felt were key to her rapid success.

Janice: “I believe my success results from a combination of several factors:

• my faith
• marketing and sales experience
• rate integrity and most importantly
• really keeping it “real”. Real comes from that place where you close your eyes and actually let yourself feel the texture of the words. It’s just me being me without over-thinking what’s coming out.”

Here’s where to read more of Janice’s story…

No one wants to be sent to sleep (or perhaps some do!!) listening to a story being told. And if you are anything like me - I listen to audio books on long car journeys - you want the story to help you keep alert as you while away the hours behind the wheel.

But the ability to bring a story to life, enhance the drama, and effectively portray the various characters is a great talent indeed.

Here’s a tribute recently released to one of the great narrator voices - Canadian Promo Voice L. Harvey Gold Goes Platinum at Voices.com

You just need 2 elements:

• a book
• a voice
  

Finding a voice over artist to work with is made easy with online voice over marketplaces. You can audition multiple voice talent at once, or simply browse, listen to demos, and select a professional voice talent based on their demos.

But what book should you record?

Copyright issues prevent you from going down to the local bookstore and picking up a bestseller to have recorded and start selling as an audiobook. However, there are thousands and thousands of books available free in the public domain to have recorded. Books that are listed as belonging to the public domain are not copyrighted and are essentially public property, belonging to anyone and everyone for a wide range of uses. It is estimated that about 15% of all books found in the world’s libraries are part of the public domain. But be sure to look into your country’s laws before selecting a work to record - copyright laws differ from nation to nation.

Avoid Copyright Issues

Currently, under US copyright law, all works published before 1923 belong to the public domain. This includes many classic works including those by Mark Twain, Jane Austen, L. Frank Baum, and Jules Verne - just to name a few. Although you won’t see literary works by these authors on the bestseller list from day to day, they are still highly regarded and studied in many levels of academia.

Free Public Domain Books Already Online

Project Gutenburg is the internet’s largest collection of free ebooks and contains many public domain works. Just by taking a look at their “Top 100″ lists you can see that there is a large market for classic literary works. This is a good place to start when deciding what you want to have recorded.

Top 100 Authors?

Charles Dickens’ name can be found very near to the top or at the top of the Top 100 Authors lists on a regular basis. As of this writing, there have been over thirty thousand downloads of his works in the past 30 days alone! Certainly some readers would be interested in listening to an audiobook of his classics, or of the works of any of the top authors listed at Project Gutenburg. By comparing these lists to lists of audiobook downloads, you will quickly be able to identify which books have steady popularity and thus are most likely to be purchased.

There you have it… how to find a public domain book + how to find voice talent = a foolproof guide on How To Get Started As An Audiobook Publisher. What are you waiting for?

Photo: margolove

• iPod Shuffle with 2 gigabytes of storage for under $100
  
• iPod Classic with 160GB of storage space is under $400
  

Audiophiles can take days and days worth of music with them wherever, whenever…

Question: But how much can a bibliophile take in their portable music player in the form of audiobooks?

Answer: Depending on audio quality, a 1GB MP3 player can store anywhere between 125 to 250 hours of audiobook playback.

This means that the largest iPod currently on the market, the iPod Classic 160, can store between 20,000 and 40,000 hours of audiobook playback! Based on an average of 30,000 hours of storage, you could listen to audiobooks for

• 1250 days without taking a break, except to recharge the iPod battery.
  

Breaking it down, that’s about

• 179 weeks, or
  
• 41 months, or
  
• 3 and a half years.

Although the length of an individual audiobook varies from book to book, the average audiobook provides between 10-12 hours of listening, meaning you can fit over a dozen audiobooks per gigabyte of storage.

• That’s nearly 2000 audiobooks in a single iPod Classic.

Looking forward - What if I run out of Audiobooks?

The number of audiobooks recorded is expected to grow exponentially through the end of the decade, so there will always be something new to fill your iPod with.

Also, there are thousands of public domain works available free of charge for download to your iPod, so be sure to take advantage of the classics that are available to you, as well as new releases to the literary marketplace.

Photo: Andrew

Just like a good doctor, a trusted lawyer or an inspirational music teacher, a good audiobook narrator is hard to find.

So what it that makes these “good” narrators so elusive and what makes them any different from the thousands of voice actors listed online?

Simply put, there are a number of elements that go into the preparation and recording of an audiobook - some that are obvious and many that are tucked away between the pages. Audiobook narration is a specialty skill and a herculean effort that comes with a lot of heavy lifting, presenting heightened demands unmatched in other niches of voice acting.

When it comes to narrating audiobooks you need a good storyteller who is…

• is capable of going the long haul,
• is dedicated to the project, and
• has invested themselves fully to the telling of the tale
  

Narrating audiobooks is a marathon that requires the ultimate balancing act of artistic and technical endurance coupled with the ability to continuously suspend the audiences’ disbelief.

Here’s 10 skills a good audiobook narrator will be able to display:

1. Engage the listener
2. Make and keep a contract with the listener to suspend their disbelief
3. Give a consistent performance
4. Have intuitive timing
5. Develop multiple convincing and separate character voices
6. Be an authentic narrator with an independent voice
7. Interpret the author’s intent
8. Transport the listener to a different time and place
9. Maintain a solid presence
10. Bring the story to life

Those 10 criteria, when matched, will ensure that your audiobook has a not only good, but great narrator, and by virtue of that fact, will assure that your audience connects with the story, relates to the characters and has full confidence in the narrator’s ability to captivate, amuse and delight.

One of the most important factors that you should be concerned with is:
Will my audiobook go the distance?

I don’t mean going the distance purely from a revenue point of view, I’m thinking of something much bigger that will help you with getting those bigger rewards in the finance department.

Before your decision to publish a particular audiobook is chiseled in stone, you’ll need to discern how each book on your short list of selections performs regarding quality, plot and writing style
Immediate variables include:

1. Plot
2. Writing Style
3. Narration

To delve a little deeper..

1. Plot
Is this book worth publishing? Is there a market for this story and an audience that will enjoy the plot?

2. Writing Style
A major factor has to do with the ease in which the words flow. Will the words jump off the page nicely when being read by a narrator, or is it a trickier, less agreeable writing style that makes phrasing difficult and listening a chore?

3. Narration
Once you’ve got everything else down you need to hire the right voice for the job. That person, aside from being talented, needs to:

* be a good storyteller,
* have good timing
* be able to suspend the audience’s disbelief
* journey with them throughout the audiobook.

Once you’ve evaluated whether or not a book is worth recording at all, that there’s a market for it and have found the right voice to narrate your audiobook, go for it! When done professionally, you’ll have an audiobook product that’s valuable, salable and desirable.

When picking a voice talent to narrate an audiobook, it is very important that you consider the genre of the story and do some research on the author’s intent before sending out a casting call or contacting a voice talent to record for your project.

Let’s say you have a contract to produce one of the Canadian award-winning author Margaret Atwood’s books and need to pick a voice talent to record for “The Blind Assassin”.

What you need to do at this point is start classifying the book by asking yourself a few questions:

1. What kind of book is this (drama, mystery, sci-fi, romance, comedy, etc.)?
2. How is the story told (first-person narrator, third-person omniscient narrator, etc.)?
3. Which type of voice best suits the narrator (gender, age, accent, voice type)?
   

When examining “The Blind Assassin”, we can say that the book is a mystery that has a darker color to it exuding intrigue, passion and deceit.

The voice of the narrator is written in the first person. The narrator is in the midst of compiling memoirs for publication in her old age, traveling back in time and returning to the present to provide context for the memoirs. At times, other voices serve as first-person narrator to give perspective and add more layers to the story, but the dominant voice is that of the protagonist.
What kind of voice best suits the narrator?

The protagonist, who also happens to be the principal narrator, is female. She is a wise, independent person, able to hold a grudge, who has lived a long life and has also lived through enough to make for some interesting memoirs. The secondary narrative voice, the protagonist’s late sister, is also female. Based upon those facts it makes sense to go with a strong, versatile female voice actress who can perform both as an aged, somewhat senile woman and as young, vivacious females. Their voice should also be capable of portraying a child and male voices as are required.

Now that the stage is set for what kind of narrator is needed, you can move on to find a voice that meets your requirements as are laid out by clues in the book presented to you by the author. If you are in the good fortune to be working with the author, ask them for their input on what they feel the “ideal” vocal qualities are that the voice of the narrator should possess.

When it comes down to it, the kind of voice that is chosen is truly dependent on the authentic voice of the narrator, however, certain voice types are more favorable when cast for particular genres just like certain actors are cast in movies and opera singers chosen for specific roles that play on their vocal strengths.

Know that by asking yourself three simple questions you can easily make a portrait of the voice you need and your audience would benefit by listening to that is true to the book and author’s intent.

Ever wondered how much voice-overs really cost?

Voice talents, as you can well imagine, were quite passionate about this topic, and eager to help ’set the record straight’ on the median fees charged by professionals working in the online voice-over marketplace.

After a series of conversations, feedback emails, comments on the VOX Daily Voice Overs blog, telephone calls, and live chats, we compiled and averaged the rates, bringing them closer in scale to the rates of organized unions such as AFTRA and SAG.

You may ask “What’s the difference between union and non-union? Shouldn’t non-union voice-overs be far less expensive?”

Well, consider this: Being a member of a union has certain benefits. By charging union fees and following the rules of conduct when contracting a voice-over job, the profits received by the talent contribute to their pension and or health plan as well as protect them from misadventures with clients who fail to compensate them according to their written agreement.

Unions have established fees that are charged for voice-over work, whether it be for broadcast, film, industrial use, and so on.

Non-union voice talent, or, those who are not affiliated with a union, do not have a governing body to provide them with assistance and the perks of benefits. These professional talent who opt not to be in an organized union are in most cases just as talented and experienced as those registered with the unions.

Due to the fact that there was no ‘official’ non-union standard rates card, and also because a significant number of talent getting started in the industry are non-union, the ability to charge random fees crept in, and in many cases, inexperienced voice talent charged far less than they should have been for ‘professional’ voice-over services.

This is where the schism between the two groups occurred.

Professional non-union talent have an uphill climb when it comes to keeping those in the non-union circle accountable, quoting an appropriate rate for work. This is why we have set budget ranges starting at a minimum of USD$100 for posting a voice-over job.

When it comes down to it, a voice-over is a voice-over is a voice-over. Each voice-over is a call to action, whether it be for sales, customer retention, or for educational purposes. The voice talent is your salesperson, and it is their voice that works tirelessly to promote a product or service, raking in the sales for your organization or company.

The voice talent is also your organizations’ audio ambassador and is often the first point of contact between you and future customers. People come to trust the voices they hear and associate them with your brand, building brand equity for you and correlating your offerings with honesty, excitement, or great tasting food, depending on your business.

The cost of a voice-over is calculated by not only the performance, but factors in production costs, how the audio is used, how often it is heard, by the size of the audience, market size (local, regional, national), and also if the audio will be used in perpetuity, in other words, as long as it is available for consumption and you are making a profit off of the voice-over.

Keep in mind that recording voice-overs is how these professionals support their families and make their living. There is a lot of added value tucked into a voice-over not to mention skill and technical savvy acquired over years of career dedication and educational endeavors.

Click here to download the Voices.com Standard Rates Sheet.

Please bear in mind that each talent reserves the right to charge their own rates. The Voices.com Rates are designed as a reference for non-union, dry voice rates (dry voice means no music or sound effects).

If you have any questions or comments, you can contact us via traditional methods or leave a comment on the blog.

Best wishes,

Stephanie and the Voices.com Team

Photo: 1ieve

Are there any variables in your budgeting that are worth more than others?

For instance, when you are hiring a professional, does their talent have more to do with the amount of money you will budget, or is getting a narrator for less money (and potentially, hiring a less qualified person) the deciding factor?

Some other Factors when Budgeting may include:

• Caliber of Talent
• Experience
• Studio Capabilities
• Expertise
• Turnaround Time
• Service Packages (revisions, etc.)
• Specialty Services (character voice acting, multiple talents, translation services etc.)

When it comes down to it, there’s more to a voice over than just its cost!

Think of all the benefits that the best voice over can yield for your campaigns and reputation.

Now, that’s something that money can’t usually buy, but it IS something that a great narrator voice talent can deliver.

Looking forward to your reply :)

Photo:spike55151