How to Record and Edit Your Own Audiobook

This post is meant to be used in conjunction with the following video to show you how I recorded, edited, and sold my audiobook, and how you can too.

This Reedsy guide is a great place to start:
https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/audiobooks/recording/
It will give you a sense of some of the major considerations.

THE NUMBERS

I created my audiobook for about $160 dollars, in about 200 hours. My novel is 100,000 words long. My audiobook is slightly under 11 hours.

However long it takes you to read a chapter, plan on double, triple, or even quadruple that to record it. Plan on triple to quintuple the length of the resulting recording in editing time. So if I can read a chapter in 15 minutes, it probably takes me 45 minutes to record it and 90-180 minutes to edit it.

CONSIDERATIONS

EXTERNAL SOUNDS

External sounds are a major concern. A decent microphone will pick up these sounds. You need a relatively quiet location with soft surfaces to deaden echoes. Or consider buying a microphone isolation shield:
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/buying-guides/best-microphone-isolation-shield

EQUIPMENT / THE MICROPHONE

You’re going to need a decent microphone. The best microphones cost around $3000 but good-enough is a lot cheaper.

In my microphone research I used the following websites:

Best Microphones for Recording Audiobooks

Best Microphone For Audiobook Recording, Voiceovers And Youtube

Pretty much everyone agrees that for the price, the Blue Yeti USB cannot be beat. I went on Amazon and got the whole kit, including Blue Yeti Microphone (Blackout) with Knox Boom Arm Stand, Pop Filter and Shock Mount Bundle, for $160

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T1DJTL8

HOW TO USE THE BLUE YETI

There are three knobs on the blue yeti: volume, gain, and pattern. The gain is how much the mic picks up. It’s basically sensitivity. Volume is how loud the mic outputs what it picks up. I don’t fully understand pattern, but the one you want for audiobook narration is Cardioid Mode (the heart shape).

The best way to get a sense of these settings is to plug good headphones directly into the audiojack on the bottom of the yeti and listen as you speak into it. Note this is also how you’ll want to do your recording so you can hear how you’ll sound.

I was surprised by the gain in particular. This microphone is incredibly sensitive.

This is a great video on how to get the most out of your Blue Yeti:

You can learn more about the microphone settings here:

https://playthetunes.com/blue-yeti-settings/

Note: I recorded with my volume knob at about 70% (between 1 and 2 o’clock positions). I set gain to minimum (7 o’clock position).

HEADPHONES

I used a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones. I didn’t include this in my costs because I already owned the headphones, but YIKES they’re actually over $300, more expensive than my microphone.

Worth it.

COMPUTER SOFTWARE SETUP

I used Audacity. Here’s where to download it.

https://www.audacityteam.org/download/

There’s a support page explicitly for audiobook mastering:

https://support.audacityteam.org/audio-editing/audiobook-mastering

Go to that support page, then go down to “Custom Tools”. Get and install Acx-check. Here’s the download link:

https://wiki.audacityteam.org/w/images/2/2b/ACX-Check.ny

This is a plugin that will determine if your audiobook files meet ACX standards. ACX is Amazon/Audible. https://www.acx.com/

Still on the wiki.audacityteam webpage, click on “ACX Check”. Then click to download “ACX_Check.ny”

Next get a plugin for normalizing your audio. Go to this forum post:

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/rms-normalize/45334

Scroll down to the latest version and download rms-normalize.ny

Instructions for installing plugins can be found back on the support page.
https://support.audacityteam.org/basics/customizing-audacity/installing-plugins
See “Installing Nyquist plugins”

Next open Audacity, and go to Tools > Nyquist Plugin Installer. Browse to the plugins. Mine are in my downloads folder. Click Open, then Apply then OK. Restart Audacity.

Confirm successful installation by opening up Audacity and navigating to the following:
-“ACX Check” should now be at the bottom of the “Analyze” tab.
-“RMS Normalize” should now be at the bottom of the “Effect” tab.

I recommend plugging in your mic, opening audacity, clicking the big red button and doing some test recordings. Play around with things, listen to how they sound.

You’ve got plugins installed, next let’s set up all the Audacity settings:

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_audacity_settings_for_recording.html

Edit -> Preferences -> Audio Settings
You DO want to use mono (not stereo) for audio book recording.

Edit -> Preferences -> Recordings
Check Detect dropouts.
Nothing else should be checked in that menu.

Edit -> Preferences -> Quality
Set everything to the highest quality:
44100 Hz
32-bit float
Set BOTH sample rates to highest quality

Transport > Transport Options
Uncheck “Software Playthrough”.
Uncheck “Overdub (on/off)”.
In fact, just make sure all the transport options are unchecked.

View -> Show Clipping – On. This allows you to clap close to the mic to get a red line to appear in the recording so you can identify and fix mistakes.

Transport -> Transport Options -> Turn on “Pinned Play/Record Head”
This makes the audio scroll to the left as you play it, and, I think, makes editing easier. I ended up going back and forth on this. Sometimes I wanted the scrolling and other times I didn’t. Try it both ways to see which works best for you.

SETTING UP MACROS / PROCESSING PIPELINE

There are a variety of processing steps that should be applied to every clip you record so it’s convenient to set up what’s called a “macro” to do all those steps in sequence with the click of a button.

Once you’ve recorded a test chapter export it as a WAV. It’s always wise to save your work.

Next I’m going to show you how to manually perform all the processing steps that will be bundled into the macro and subsequently run automatically. I think it’s valuable to show how to do them the tedious way first though.

First select your whole clip. Control-a is the short cut to do so. Then go to “Process” on this webpage…
https://support.audacityteam.org/audio-editing/audiobook-mastering
…and complete all the steps.

In Audacity go to
Effect > EQ and Filters > Filter Curve EQ… > Presets and Settings > Factory Presets > : Low roll-off for speech > Apply.

Then
Effect > Volume and Compression > Loudness Normalization…: Normalize RMS to -20dB > Apply.

Effect > Volume and Compression > Limiter: Soft Limit, 0.00, 0.00, -3.50dB, 10.00, No > Apply.
There’s some disagreement about this setting. Some places say it should be -3.00dB but others say -3.50dB. I set mine to -3.20dB and that worked fine for me.

Effect -> RMS Normalize -> Target RMS -20.0

And lastly:
Analyze > ACX-Check
You’ll hear a “ding” and a message box will pop up.

According to the ACX technical requirements found here:
https://www.acx.com/help/acx-audio-submission-requirements/201456300
The numbers are supposed to be:
Peak -3dB
RMS between -23dB and -18dB RMS
Noise floor: -60dB

The first couple times I tried this, I did not pass my ACX check.

Finally I realized I needed my gain set to absolute minimum setting and I was able to get the ACX check passed.

But now we’re going to bundle up all those processing steps we just went through into a macro.

Go to Tools > Macro Manager > new. Then insert all the above effects. To run the macro: Select the audio clip > Tools > Apply Macro)

You can create your own macro, which is what I did, but since I recorded my audiobook, a macro for these steps has been created and posted to the Audacity audiobook support page under “Process”

Go here:
https://support.audacityteam.org/audio-editing/audiobook-mastering#process

and look for: Audiobook-Mastering-Macro.txt

I wasn’t able to download it, but was able to copy the text into a new txt document and save it, then import the txt doc as a macro in Audacity.

I did then edit the macro through Tools > Macro Manager, to add the ACX check at the end because I like to always end with that check for peace of mind.

TRIAL RUNS

Try again a test recording. Do as many of these as you need to do to get comfortable with the process and the settings. It will save you time in the long run.

Do a trial run of one chapter, from first draft recording to perfection to make sure you and your equipment are ready to commit to the whole book.

HOW TO SPEAK INTO THE MICROPHONE

Speak perpendicular to the mic. To the side, like you’re licking an ice cream cone, not to the top, like you’re eating a hot dog.

Speak off to the side of the microphone rather than directly towards it to reduce popping.

Pace yourself while reading. Don’t read too fast. Listen to other people’s audiobooks to get a sense of how the professionals do it.
Regular breaths and partial exhales before speaking. Don’t read like your chest is about to burst, but also don’t try to squeeze out words with your last bit of air.

I read with a Breathe Right or nasal dilator, while standing up to be able to take in air and expand my chest.

Have water handy. A dry mouth makes more clicking, popping, mouth noises that are annoying or outright impossible to properly remove.

If there’s background noise or you screw up, breathe, and take it from the top of the sentence or paragraph. Don’t stop the recording. Just keep going.

Some people recommend snapping or clapping to get a visual cue that you need to edit at that location, but I found the need to relisten to the entire recording anyway so I stopped clapping because it was redundant to me, but some people swear by it.

Do a practice read (which can be silent to save your voice) of each chapter before reading into the mic.

Identify words you don’t know how to pronounce and figure out how to pronounce them before hand!

ACTING

Figure out something consistent to do when reading each distinct character. For instance:

-Bright open face while reading Fife. Mouth stretched in a smile.

-Bit of a growl, channeling Dick Cheney-meets-Harrison Ford while reading Beryl.

-Nesh is eyebrows up, but mouth hanging open, innocent, eager, expectant.

-Ohnsy is the paranoid, arrogant, and gossipy neighbor. The person comparing flower beds and spying out her window all the time.

Get into the mood of the scenes.

There’s some great advice from professionals in this video:

One key takeaway is, don’t exaggerate gender differences too wildly. Men, don’t read women in falsetto. Women, don’t read men like Gimli the dwarf.

EDITING

So you’ve got your recording, now it’s time to edit.

Export your recording as a WAV unprocessed (because saving your work is important!).

I changed the export to be signed 32 bit instead of the default 16. I figure it can’t hurt to have more precision. This does make the files larger.

WAV is a lossless format. That means that all your data is perfectly saved, but it also make the files larger. At the end you’ll actually upload in the MP3 format, but you don’t want to be doing that now because MP3 is a lossy format. The compression of the file changes the data in order to make the file size smaller.

Add metadata when exporting files. I recommend saving a metadata template then editing it a small amount for each chapter.

After saving the unprocessed audio, I run my macro. I do this BEFORE editing because I want to hear what the final draft is going to sound like.

Some breath noises weren’t visible until after the macro boosted the audio! So I definitely wanted to run the macro before editing.

PUNCH COPY / PASTE

You want to copy-paste the background “noise” of room silence over any sounds you want erased, rather than truly erasing them to zero for two reasons:

1. you won’t meet the ACX requirements with dead silence on your audio track
2. dead silence actually sounds strange compared to the background room noise throughout the rest of your clip.

To do this copy pasting, I use a handy tool call punch copy and punch paste. This is another plugin to install.

Download the plugins here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/punch-copy-paste/28906

Then in Audacity under “Effects”, at the bottom under “n/a” you’ll have new options: punch copy and punch paste. There’s a typo such that it reads “puch copy” and “puch paste”, but it does work.

Copy some room silence. I like to grab any amount over one second long, then highlight the section you want to erase, and paste the room silence over top of breath noises or other segments you want to get rid of. The punch copy-paste will trim or repeat the copied portion to make sure it covers the amount of audio you want to paste over.

Once you paste once, you can repeat it with: Control – r

You WANT to learn shortcuts because you’re going to be doing this A LOT.

Another great shortcut is spacebar to pause and unpause playback.

I typically kept my left hand over the control-r keys. I didn’t use delete because the later step “truncate silence” will remove long stretches of silence for me automatically.

TRUNCATE SILENCE

After you paste silence over all the breath noises and outtakes, you can simply run a truncate silence pass and eliminate them all in one fell swoop.

In Audacity go to
Effects -> Special -> Truncate Silence

I used these settings:
-20 dB This does not go below 20
0.9 sec
Truncate Detected Silence
0.9 sec

Why did I use 0.9 seconds? I don’t know, it just felt right. Again, get some audiobooks and listen to their pauses for comparison.

You can always use a longer interval then later make the gaps shorter if you want, but it’s much harder to make them longer.

Lastly, I put 1.5 sec of silence at the start and end of each chapter. You can adjust this to taste. I read multiple contradictory pieces of advice about how much room silence to put at the start an end of each file, but settled on 1.5 seconds.

REPAIRING MOUTH NOISES

Go through and remove all mouth noises. This step is by far the most tedious editing step.

For mouth noises at the very start or very end of a sentence you can punch copy paste room silence over them, but for most mouth noises, you want to zoom in, select the offending waveform, then go to Effect -> Noise Removal and Repair -> Repair

Make sure to select a small enough section. If you highlight too much, the repair tool will not work and will give you an error message.

I searched for broad, automated fixes to mouth noises. Ultimately I was not willing to tolerate occassional weird glitches in my audio that resulted from them, but here are some things I tried:

First I tried this:
Effect -> Noise Removal and Repair -> Click Removal

I tried this advice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FenEW4Dabs

I also looked into “AI” tools like those advertised by Podcastle:
https://podcastle.ai/tools/audiobook-recording-studio

But ultimately I found those techniques to either be insufficient or problematic.

WHAT TO DO WHEN THE REPAIR TOOL FAILS

One last note on repairing mouth noises: The repair tool works great most of the time, but occasionally it leaves behind an artifact or doesn’t repair the mouth noise. What you can do in this case is transplant a soundwave that has the correct shape over top of the noise, which I demonstrate in the video, but basically, I look for a curve that fits smoothly over top of the jagged mouth noise then copy paste the smooth wave over the jagged one. I used punch copy paste in the video, but honestly regular copy paste might be better.

EDITING WORKFLOW

The presentation of my actual workflow is out of order, so to be clear, my editing workflow went as follows:

1. Save unprocessed draft
2. Apply macro
3. Copy room silence over outtakes and background noise. DO NOT worry about breath noises or anything else on this editing pass, just cut it down to the takes you want to keep.
4. Save a backup of this draft
5. Do another revision pass repairing clicky, poppy, wet, dry mouth noises
6. Save a backup of this draft
7. Truncate silence, then pad the start and end with room silence
8. Save this draft. Congratulations, it’s probably your final draft!

ONE FINAL PASS

Once I was finished recording and editing, I did one final listen from beginning to end. I found that my reading and editing skill, as well as my standards, were higher at the end than the beginning and I ended up hating some of the opening chapters and rerecording and editing them from scratch.

What can you do?

I also inserted a small number of dramatic pauses where I felt it was appropriate, so not every sentence had an identical delay of 0.9 seconds between them, but most still do.

At one point while inserting a re-do I got an “Error: Insufficient space in track. There is not enough room available to paste the selection” error.

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/error_insufficient_space_in_track.html

If you run into a similar error, the way to fix it is by going to Edit -> Preferences -> Tracks Behaviors
and turning on “Editing a clip can move other clips”

Doing partial rerecordings of scenes is difficult. You must listen to what you already recorded and mimic your tone of voice. I had to rerecord all of at least one chapter to fix one little mistake because I couldn’t quite get the same tone of voice I had on my original reading.

Perfectionism was an ongoing struggle for me throughout this process.

DISTRIBUTING YOUR AUDIOBOOK: ACX / Audible / Amazon

You’ve almost made it almost to the finish line. How do you actually sell your creation?

You need to create an ACX account.
https://www.acx.com/
Or just log in with your existing Amazon account username and password.

This hooks you up to sell thru Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.
It’s relatively painless: enter your bank info, your already published Amazon book info, upload your audio files, then within one week, the audiobook is available for sale.

The site shows you the recommended naming convention for chapters. It’s straightforward, for example:
Chapter 3: The Best Revenge

I imported the table of contents from the kindle book and then edited it to fit the recommended formatting.

To upload the audio files click on Projects at the top. More than once, the Projects page did not load for and I had to completely close my browser and log in again.

Click on “In Production” then the purple “Upload Audiobook” button. Then scroll down the page. Make sure “Audiobook Manager” is selected.

Now you’ll see purple “Browse” buttons you can click on to navigate to your audiofiles for upload.

Opening credits are provided, which I didn’t realize. So the pull-down menu on the right, labeled “Action” has various options including “remove”, which I use to get rid of the redundant “Opening Credits” that I added.

Notice that you can also use that menu to reorder uploaded chapters if you need to.

When I first tried to upload my audiofiles, I discovered that the upload format is mp3, not wav!

That’s easy to fix, just open up your final draft audiofiles in Audacity and export as mp3. I selected the highest quality. Make sure the metadata is all set up correctly, then complete the export.

You do not want to be saving your audiofiles to mp3 before this final step. mp3 is a LOSSY format, meaning that the quality is reduced in order to shrink the file size.

Finally you can go back to acx and upload the mp3 files.

The opening credits are quick because they’re short. Chapters take longer. You can upload more than one simultaneously.

The total length of the production is updated at the top as you add in more audio files.

After uploading all my audio files, I uploaded my cover art. You need a cover art image formatted in a square, not a book-shaped rectangle.

Opening credits are also needed:
https://help.acx.com/s/article/what-should-be-recorded-for-the-opening-and-closing-credits
For the opening credits I included:
-Title
-Copyright
-Dedication
“Crew of Exiles
Written and read by Neal Holtschulte
Copyright 2022
Dedicated to…”

A retail audio sample between 1 and 5 min must be uploaded as well:
https://help.acx.com/s/article/how-do-i-pick-a-section-to-use-as-the-retail-sample-on-audible
I picked what I thought was a decent section of the book with no spoilers.

Lastly I clicked “Audio Analysis”. It tells me I have no problems. Then I click “I’m done”, then “Approve”. The book shows as “In review”. I get a confirmation message, and that’s it.

Within a week the book will appear on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.

DISTRIBUTING YOUR AUDIOBOOK: FINDAWAY VOICES / Spotify

ACX distributes to Audible, Amazon, and iTunes and if you’re going Amazon exclusive, that’s all you need, but I wanted to go broad and accessible, so I also had to set up an account with Findaway Voices.

https://my.findawayvoices.com/

Findaway Voices distributes to 45 different sellers including Spotify, Audiobooks.com, and more.

Sign in. Then click “start your first audiobook”.

Findaway also has a system in place to connect authors with narrators, but I’m scrolling past that, down to “upload my files”.

Put in your book’s title, then read and accept the legal agreement.

Fill in some more information including the cover art.

You can add in supplementary material like maps for fantasy novels. I have no idea how that works with an audiobook, but there it is.

For the book description I literally just copied what I had up on Amazon.

Fill in publishing company, keywords, and BISAC codes. I used all the same info as I previously used for my ebook and paperback.

FINDAWAY VOICES: ISBN NUMBER

When filling out the info for Findaway, I got confused about the ISBN number. ACX doesn’t even ask for one and Findaway let’s you enter your own, but if you leave it blank they just fill one in for you.

After you submit the project, you can’t change the ISBN unless you delete the whole project and start over from scratch including painstakingly uploading all the audiofiles.

I wish I had used one of my own ISBNs for the audiobook, but I was confused by this and thought I could just fill it in at a later time. You can’t.

Has that been a problem?
No.

Does that give them some kind of control over my audiobook that I would otherwise retain?
Maybe. I have been unable to find information about this one way or the other.

My recommendation is to use your own ISBN and avoid any future trouble, but that’s not what I did because I was exhausted at the end of this process.

Next, fill in the copyright.

Set the retail price. This has limited impact on anything, but you should still fill in what you want.

Make sure to fill in information for: “Add Launch Pricing”
And make sure to set an end date. You can’t go back afterward and change these option and it affects your ability to set up promotions later on. What you set the values to is up to you.

Save changes at the bottom then scroll all the way back up to the top and click the “Distribution” tab.

At time of recording, there are 45 different distributors! I selected all except Audible, since I was distributing to Audible through ACX. I don’t know if selecting Audible would have caused any conflicts, but I figured, better safe than sorry.

Next I went to the “Audio” tab. It’s “404 Not Found” because I haven’t uploaded any audio files yet.

The “Overview” tab is just what it sounds like.

The person icon on the left side is “account settings”, which needs to be filled in. Also fill in bank account and tax info.

It’s straightforward. For the bank I needed account and routing numbers. For the tax info, I needed business status (Individual / sole proprietor) and social security number.

Finally, back to the round red record button in the upper left, I’m ready to upload audio files.

The file format is again mp3, like it is for ACX. Upload opening credits. I skipped “Front Matter” because all that content was already in opening credits.

Body matter is where the chapters get uploaded. I had to change the chapter name after each upload to match what it was on ACX. Otherwise the chapter name will be based on the filename.

Once all your audio files are uploaded, click “Continue to final review and submission” at the bottom.

Review your content then set a release date and street date. If your audiobook has never been sold before, then these will be the same. Set the date to be at least 30 days out because there is no guarantee the book will be released sooner than that.

Back to the top. Click “Review and Submit” then scroll to the bottom of that page and click “Submit for publishing”

It says you can expect to see your book at the distributor sites in 20-30 days. It was 29 days later before my audiobook was available.

At this point, you’re finished!

LACK OF PRICING CONTROL

Unfortunately you as an author have very little control over many aspects of this process, including pricing.

Last I checked, my novel, Crew of Exiles is available on Amazon/Audible for $24.95
but on iTunes it’s $16.99

I have no control over the price on these platforms. ACX roughly determines pricing based on audiobook length. See here:
https://help.acx.com/s/article/can-i-set-my-pricing
My audiobook is 10 hours and 53 minutes long.

PROMOTIONAL PRICING

If you want to set promotional prices on Findaway, first you need to make sure an end date for the launch price is set.

Promotions can only be submitted to Apple, Barnes & Noble, Chirp and Spotify, and the interface differs slightly for each of them.

LESSONS LEARNED

As I practiced reading and editing, both took me more time, because my standards got higher, but so did the quality.

Doing it right the first time will save you time and effort in the long run, so you’re in the right place by reading this text and watching my video, and consider doing some further research to get other insights and perspectives.

However, you aren’t going to do everything right the first time. Be mentally and emotionally prepared for that.

Repairing breath noises is tedious and mind-numbing. Take breaks and be kind to yourself. When you start hearing phantom noises where there are none, it’s time to take a break.

This process is not easy, but neither is writing a book.

I hope I have provided valuable information to you.

If so, may I recommend purchasing a copy of my novel, Crew of Exiles, whether it be audio, paperback, or e-book.

Here is a tiny subset of the places my audiobook available:

Audible

Audiobooks.com

Chirp

Google Play

Kobo

Hoopla

Note that if you’re a new audible member and my audiobook is the first one you purchase using this link Audible Special Deal Thingamajig then I get a big payday!

Woohoo, thanks!