Does anyone here know if there’s a standard or recommended range of fees for the technical overseeing, editing, assembling, and mastering of audiobooks as a freelance activity? I’m in the UK but I’d be interested to know of US rates as well, as a guideline.
As mentioned in my other threads I’ve been doing this for an author/narrator friend: a sixty-minute single-voice piece which we’ve been working on in a piecemeal fashion for several months. She is anxious properly to reimburse me for the job but neither of us knows what an appropriate fee would be.
In case the information might be of use to anyone else, I’ll add that I found this very comprehensive UK page, How to quote accurately for an audiobook production:
The fees given are in line with those in the ACX article, though since the UK site is dated 2017 it would presumably be reasonable to expect an increase since then.
or given the massive increase in people producing audiobooks, and the many heavily discounted audiobook sales, maybe not. Either way, there is a lot of variation in costs per finished hour, and like many other creative jobs, the fee that you can get depends largely on reputation / demand.
The article goes into difficulties with post production processing, de-breath, etc, but the first thing I thought of was that one forum poster who was hired to read a book with bad English. Not regional dialect and not foreign translation, just rotten command of English.
I wonder if that is why ACX demands the book be available for purchase on Amazon.
Koz, that’s interesting: a situation like that must pose quite a moral dilemma: do you take the job and risk associating yourself with terrible quality writing, or refuse it and lose what might be a lucrative source of income?