Reviewed
Audiobook narrators are rarely paid for their time in the booth. They are paid for the finished hour: one hour of edited audio, as the listener hears it. That unit hides a great deal of work, and a quote that ignores it leaves the narrator paid for a fraction of the job. This page explains what a finished hour is, how to estimate it from a book's word count, and how the common kinds of audiobook deal compare.
What a finished hour is
A finished hour is one hour of audio as the listener hears it: edited, proofed and mastered, with the mistakes, retakes and long pauses taken out. It is the unit most audiobook work is priced in, written PFH, for per finished hour.
It is not the time you spent in the booth. That is the raw hour, sometimes called a studio hour: the time recorded, including every false start. A raw hour always produces less than an hour of finished audio, and a finished hour always takes more than an hour of work.
The calculator's Audiobook job type offers both units. Per finished hour is the usual choice when you deliver edited files. Per raw hour suits a job where you only record and someone else edits, because then your time in the booth is the whole of your work.
Estimating finished hours from a word count
A publisher or an author will usually give you a word count before anything else. The finished length follows from it, because it depends on the words and the pace.
Most audiobook narration runs at around 150 to 160 words a minute. At that pace one finished hour holds roughly 9,000 to 9,600 words. So:
- a novella of 45,000 words comes to about five finished hours;
- a novel of 80,000 words comes to about eight and a half finished hours;
- a history of 120,000 words comes to about thirteen finished hours.
Treat those as estimates. A slow literary read, a book full of dialogue with pauses between speakers, or non-fiction with lists and tables read aloud will run longer. A brisk thriller may run shorter. The voice over script timer turns any word count and pace into finished hours, so you can try a few paces before you settle on one.
If the final length differs from your estimate, a per finished hour quote adjusts on its own, because it is priced on what you deliver. Say so on the quote: "estimated at about eight and a half finished hours, invoiced on the delivered length".
Why one finished hour takes several hours of work
A client who has never commissioned an audiobook may assume one finished hour means one hour of work. It rarely means less than several.
- Preparation. Reading the whole book before the first session, marking it up, researching names and places, and deciding how each character sounds.
- Recording. Stopping for mistakes, mouth noise, page turns and misreads. Most narrators record for noticeably longer than the finished length.
- Editing. Taking out the retakes and the noise, and setting the pacing between sentences and chapters.
- Proofing. Listening back against the text to find missed words and misreads, then recording pickups to fix them.
- Mastering. Meeting the loudness, noise and file requirements the distributor sets.
If you do all of that yourself, the finished hour rate pays for all of it. If a producer edits, proofs or masters for you, part of the work is theirs, and the rate can reflect that. That is the first thing to settle in any audiobook quote: who does which of those steps.
What moves a per finished hour quote
- Genre and difficulty. Dense non-fiction, technical subjects and books with many unfamiliar names take longer to prepare and to record cleanly.
- Number of characters. A novel with a large cast needs distinct voices, kept consistent across hundreds of pages, and a record of how each one sounded.
- Accents and languages. Accurate accents, and passages in other languages, take research and practice.
- Editing and mastering. A quote that includes post-production covers more work than one that does not.
- Deadline. A short deadline compresses the work into fewer days and pushes other jobs aside.
- Series. The first book of a series sets voices you will have to match in every book after it. Ask whether more are planned.
- Use beyond the audiobook. Most agreements cover the book as an audiobook. Use of the recording elsewhere, such as in an advert for the book, is a separate use to agree.
Per finished hour, royalty share and hybrid deals
There are three common shapes of audiobook deal.
Per finished hour. You are paid a fee for each finished hour, usually on delivery or on approval. The payment does not depend on sales. This is the usual arrangement with publishers and production companies, and it is the simplest to quote.
Royalty share. You are paid nothing up front, and instead receive a share of the book's sales for an agreed period. It suits a book you believe will sell, from an author whose earlier books have sold. It is a risk: a book that does not sell pays little for many hours of work. Before you accept one, look at the author's other titles, their audience and how they plan to promote the audiobook.
Hybrid. A smaller fee per finished hour plus a share of sales. It shares the risk between you and the rights holder, and it is a reasonable middle ground when an independent author cannot pay a full fee but has a real readership.
Whichever shape you agree, get the terms in writing: the unit, the fee or the share, how long the share runs, who reports sales and how often, and what happens if the book is withdrawn or reissued. The glossary defines royalty share in a sentence, for a client who has not met the term.
Corrections after delivery
Every audiobook comes back with notes. An author hears a name said the way they never imagined it, a proofer finds a skipped line, a producer asks for a chapter to be re-paced. Some of those notes are your mistakes, and fixing them is part of the job. Others are changes of mind, and those are new work.
Agree the difference before you start. A common arrangement is that corrections of your own errors are always included, and that changes to the text or to an approved performance are charged as pickups. Agree too how many rounds of notes the fee covers, and how long after delivery you will accept them. A book that is still collecting notes six months after delivery is a book that stopped paying some time ago.
Payment timing on a long book
A long book can take weeks to record and edit. A single payment at the end leaves you carrying all of that time, and all of the risk if the project stalls.
Ask for the fee in stages. One common pattern is a part on signing, a part on delivery of the first chapters, and the balance on final approval. Another is payment chapter by chapter as each one is approved. Either way, write the stages into the agreement, along with how long the rights holder has to approve a chapter before it counts as approved. That one clause keeps a project from stalling at the approval stage with your fee inside it.
Union and non-union audiobook work
The union has terms for audiobook narration, and some publishers and production companies are signatories. On that work the union terms set the minimums, the payment timing and the contributions paid on top of your fee. Much audiobook work, including most work for independent authors, is non-union, and is agreed directly between the narrator and the rights holder. Union and non-union work compared explains how the two differ and how to tell which side a job is on.
Questions to ask before you quote an audiobook
- What is the word count, and is the text final?
- What is the genre, and how many characters speak?
- Are there accents, other languages or unusual names?
- Who edits, proofs and masters the files?
- Which distributor are the files for, and what are its technical requirements?
- Is the fee per finished hour, per raw hour, a share of sales or a mix?
- When is the deadline, and are there dates for chapters to be approved?
- Is this part of a series?
- Will the recording be used for anything other than the audiobook?
Quote an audiobook
With the word count, an agreed pace and a clear answer on who edits and masters, you have everything a quote needs. Quote an audiobook in the calculator: choose Audiobook, pick per finished hour or per raw hour, and enter the hours. For the wording of the quote itself, use the quote template.