You should know that the only clean, pure room or background noise in your piece is the last half second or so. All the rest of the pauses have you breathing or other noises. That’s why the recommended production for forum posting has a 2-second hold-your-breath-and-don’t-move at the beginning.
http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/TestClip/Record_A_Clip.html
Go down those blue links. It’s not terrible.
Yes, I know. One of these days I’m going to pull this stuff into one place.
Anyway, it’s enough to pump very gentle noise reduction (6, 6, 6) in there and pass with very handy specs.
Fuzzy rule: any noise better than about -65dB should be good enough. People who struggle to pass the -60dB noise spec at -60.1dB are doomed. There is an actual ACX response where they say, Yes, you pass noise now see if you can do a lot better.
So now it’s between you and ACX.
I don’t have an illustration for this yet, but MANY people read from a noise-free tablet. You could read from your cellphone. Maybe you can do that, but I can’t.
The fuzzy rule for a stand-alone recorder is two weeks. If you’re still struggling with the computer past about two weeks, give up. You see those two, three and four chapter postings on the forum? Those are the people struggling with Everything that can Go Wrong with a Home Computer and a USB Microphone.
This is a Patched Posting with an actual poster response and me filling in extra info for how to post a test.
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-send-a-test-to-acx/49588/1
I agree the voice should not be a problem, but it does have to pass Human Quality Control, so that part, at least, is not a computer program.
Koz