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Guidance and Tips

From words to sounds: Turning an academic monograph into an audiobook

I started the process of turning one of my first monographs into an audiobook six days after the publisher informed me the book had been published in hardback and ebook formats. In retrospect, I realize now that was too late, for I had signed away almost a year earlier, “the exclusive right to publish and sell, including the right to permit others to publish and sell, the work, in whole or in part, in any and all editions whether print, electronic, or audio … .”

Nevertheless, I initiated in November 2019 a conversation with my publisher’s rights department and asked whether it would be possible to also offer the work in audiobook form. One of its staffers responded and suggested I try to approach various audiobook publishers with a proposal in the hopes that they could buy the audiobook rights from the publisher. I worked over the next 11 months to contact potential audiobook publishers but these efforts bore no fruit.

So, I followed up with the head of rights at my publisher again in October, 2020, and put this question to him:

Would you be able to advise if the publisher could support my listing of the book on ACX [which distributes the book to Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes] if I handle the book’s production as an audiobook and we can reach a profit-sharing agreement for any sales? 

We reached such an agreement in November 2020 and production of the audiobook followed thereafter. I share here the nitty-gritty particulars, from selecting equipment to promoting your published audiobook, that might help fellow academics who are navigating the process of transforming their work from words to sounds.

Equipment and location

No matter how brilliant your prose, you’ll need to have appropriate gear and a suitable environment or your audience will stray elsewhere.

Investigate if your institution is already equipped with radio/podcast/audio studios and equipment that staff can access. If so, enquire about scheduling particulars and equipment loan duration.

I made use of some soundproofed audio studios on my campus to ensure a consistent, appropriate recording environment, free from background noise and extraneous sounds.

If you need to source your own gear, do invest in a high-quality external microphone you can use for this project and for other ones, too, such as pre-recorded lectures, news media interviews, and the like.

Here’s a quick checklist of equipment I brought with me to every recording session:

  • An external USB microphone (I went with the Blue Yeti) 🎙
  • A pop filter (I nabbed a Blue Yeti-compatible one from Amazon) 🎶
  • A pair of headphones to allow you to monitor your microphone’s levels (the over-ear style is preferred but you can use in-ear ones in a pinch. In either case, you don’t want to use noise-cancelling headphones) 🎧
  • A laptop (or tablet) you can use to read your text from. Close any unnecessary programs and browsers so that all your computer’s processing power can be dedicated to the recording and to reduce the chance of your computer’s fan turning on sooner. This will depend on your device’s make and model (as well as the ambient temperature in your recording location) but my fan would usually turn on after about 45 minutes to an hour of recording so expect to take somewhat frequent breaks (good for both your computer and you) 💻
  • Audio recording and editing software (I use Adobe Audition, which my university provides for free. You can also use freeware like Audacity) 💿
  • A stack of books to adjust both the height of your laptop and the height of your microphone to a comfortable position 📚
  • A water bottle🚰
  • A green apple (allegedly helps to minimize excess saliva and reduces unwanted mouth noises) 🍏

Concerning the location, if you have access to a soundproofed room on campus, great! If not, find a quiet location that has padded surfaces. Depending on the weather and temperature, somewhere like the interior of a car or a walk-in closet can work well. If recording indoors, try to turn the A/C and fans off and dress accordingly (for both temperature and by removing jewelry and selecting apparel that doesn’t make noises when it moves).

One of the most important things in sound recordings is consistency and this applies to everything from equipment and settings to the environment. Ensure you’re recording everything in the same location, with the same angle, positioning, settings, etc.

Preparing your text

If you’re like me, you might have used in your book some foreign-language terms or proper nouns that you’ve written but possibly never pronounced. (Mine included ones like Niépce [njɛps], one of the seminal figures in photography’s invention, and Ojai [OH-hy], a city in Ventura County, California.) Highlight these, look each one up, and ensure you have the correct pronunciation before starting to record.

You also likely write differently for the eye than you do for the ear. You don’t need to completely revise your text but pay special attention to attribution. In writing, we often tuck this in the middle or at the end of quoted material. When recording for the ear, this attribution usually needs to appear first to introduce the quote. Also consider how you’ll handle footnotes/endnotes and parenthetical phrases. Sometimes it makes sense to include them in the text and other times, they become clunky and are best removed or need to be re-positioned to work effectively in an audiobook context. 

In places, I highlighted attribution and re-arranged it for the recording. In this case, I introduced Robert Hughes before I began speaking his quote.

Keep in mind that, if you go with ACX and want to take advantage of its “WhisperSync” or “Immersion Reading” features (the latter of which highlights words on the eBook version as the narrator reads them) then the Kindle/eBook version of your text and the narration will have to achieve a minimum 95-percent match in order to be eligible. You can read more about these features here.

Review your publisher’s submission requirements and make note of any other information you’ll need to record. As an example, ACX requires you to speak opening and closing credits that contain certain elements, such as the phrase “The End” at the recording’s conclusion. You likely haven’t written this in your book so go ahead and add it now as a comment or a sticky note so you don’t forget.

Lastly, also review figures, tabular material, and other material that might not be written or might be hard to translate into audio form and decide how you will approach these.

Recording

Refer to your publisher’s technical specifications regarding file type and attributes. As of 2021, ACX requires, for example, that chapters are submitted as individual files that are:

  • no longer than 120 minutes
  • have room tone (the environment’s ambient sound without speech) at the beginning and end
  • are free of extraneous sounds
  • measure between -23dB and -18dB RMS and have -3dB peak values and a maximum -60dB noise floor
  • be a 192kbps or higher MP3, Constant Bit Rate (CBR) at 44.1kHz

Make sure you’re using the right mode, such as cardioid rather than bidirectional (if offered on your mic), and that you note things like mic position/distance/angle so you’re consistent with these each time you record.

Have a passage prepared at the beginning with a variety of dynamic ranges: is any of your dialogue or text to be whispered? Is any of it to be spoken emphatically with a raised voice? Record this section first to test levels and ensure they’re appropriate for this range.

Speaking of dynamic range, to achieve it, it’s not always appropriate to simply vary your volume. You might also need to vary your position to account for the changes in volume. For example, if you’re whispering a line, move closer to the microphone. If you’re shouting a line, move further away so the recording can still benefit from the dynamic range without wild modulations in volume.

Don’t try to record more than one chapter per day. And, ideally, don’t try to record chapters on back-to-back days. If you do, your voice will take a hit and you’ll be able to hear the strain when listening back to your recordings.

Pace yourself. Try to give yourself at least a day in between chapter recordings. You can work on editing during your non-recording days to ensure both tasks progress in tandem.

Pay great attention to pacing. You’ll likely have to speak much slower than you normally do or think is appropriate. You’re intimately familiar with your text and its arguments but, for someone who is hearing it for the first time and isn’t used to your accent or vocal qualities, it can take time to process what is being said.

Ensure you follow best practices and store your files in triplicate. I saved them as I went through the process locally on my laptop’s hard drive, on an external hard drive that I would sync every few days, and in the cloud. 

Editing

Don’t be tempted to do all the recording first and only then turn to editing. Keep the recording and editing tasks together as the latter will inform the former. You’ll get a sense of your pace (and whether it’s appropriate), certain mouth noises or sounds you make, or whether you slur or blur certain words or phrases together and this can make for cleaner future recording sessions, saving you more editing time if not a complete do-over.

Edit to ensure you have consistent spacing. For example, between section headings in your chapters, have an equivalent amount of space each time to indicate a new section. I used a nearly full view of my 13-inch laptop screen to roughly estimate this, which turned out to be about 3 seconds of silence. Similarly, have a consistent amount of spacing after quotes or dialogue so your listeners can confidently know when that quoted material ends and when you as the author have resumed speaking.

Also take the time to edit out breathing sounds (to be clear, don’t delete this time as the pause is necessary but just remove the waveforms themselves) and any clicks, pops, or other distracting mouth noises that are present. You can do this in Adobe Audition by highlighting the offending sound on the timeline and pressing Cmd+U (or Ctrl+U on a Windows device) to “heal” that section and remove the offending material.

You’ll quickly be able to visually identify problem spots, such as clicks or pops, by consulting the spectral display, which sits below the waveform editor (in green, which provides a visual representation of sound waves). The spectral display reveals audio frequency. Low bass sounds show up as dark blue and high treble sounds show up as bright yellow.

After you’ve done this initial micro editing, make time to listen to the entire chapter for more macro editing, such as the appropriateness of pacing/pauses, and to notate any sections that might need re-recording because of incorrect intonation, pronunciation, or sounds that can’t be fixed through Audition’s healing effects and tools.

Use a separate track (that you can later copy and paste into your other timeline) to record any edits or do-overs. Don’t try to record the edits in the same file as your other audio. Also, don’t try to just re-record one word (or sound). Re-record the entire sentence or sentence part.

Publishing and promoting

I chose to publish through ACX because it holds the audiobook market’s biggest share as of 2021 and it was a platform my publisher agreed could be used; however, it is important to note this option is only available, as at March 2021, for scholars with an address and bank account in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada or Ireland. Thus, your choice of publisher might be influenced not only by market share or the publisher’s terms but also by the country you’re living in.

Once you’ve decided on a publisher and as part of the production and promotion process, you’ll have to design some cover art that, ideally, complements your monograph’s cover even though the two are almost certainly in different orientations and have different aspect ratios. This can be a tricky part of the process for non-designers.

My book’s cover was designed by Katherine Ha based on a rendering I sent her through my publisher’s editorial assistant. Through the assistant, Kathy then presented me with three options and I workshopped one with her to further refine.

But when it comes to the audiobook cover art, the aspect ratio is square (1:1) rather than vertical (an aspect ratio of roughly 3:5). Since I picked out the cover’s background image, I still had the URL and could download my own copy but I still needed to figure out which fonts were used. I relied on the “What The Font” online service to help me with this investigation and was able to subsequently re-design the cover from scratch, using the same fonts and colors, as are used in my book’s original cover design.

My book’s cover design began with a rendering (frame 1) I provided to my editorial assistant, who relayed it to one of the publisher’s designers. I was then provided with three options (frames 2-4) to select one for further workshopping. I chose frame 4 and then requested the designer reposition my name below the subtitle and remove the stroke from the word “seen.” Frame 5 became the cover of the hardback edition, which I re-designed from scratch in frame 6 to fit the 1:1 aspect ratio of the audiobook edition.

After this piece of art had been designed, I was able to pick out the up-to-five-minute retail sample that prospective buyers can listen to to get a sense of my voice and the book’s content. I went for a segment from the book’s introductory chapter that included some of my key arguments for the book’s relevance.

Then, it was just a matter of uploading the files to the ACX site and waiting up to 30 business days for a determination on whether my files passed the organization’s quality assurance (QA) process, which, for me, took 18 business days. Thankfully, mine passed QA on the first try and I was notified on 6 March, 2021, that the book was now live on Amazon and Audible and would be available on iTunes within a couple days.

Here are a few things I did to help publicize the audiobook and expand its reach:

  • Made use of ACX promo codes. You get 50, initially, and they provide free access to your audiobook. ACX suggests giving them to: professional audiobook reviewers, your “street team” or beta readers, your fans on social media via a giveaway or contest, or peers so you can “trade reviews for each other’s books.”
  • Uploaded the first chapter to Soundcloud. ACX limits your retail sample to five minutes but the entire first chapter of my book is freely available online so I wanted to have the first chapter of the audiobook equally as available.
  • Updated my email signature. I had already been linking to the non-audiobook versions of my book; however, once the audiobook came out, I wanted to link to this, too, but didn’t want my signature to be too long or to become too link-heavy so I used LinkTree to create a single URL that directs users to all the formats, platforms, and languages my book is available in.

Overall, while the recording and editing were grueling, at times, it’s definitely a rewarding and enriching experience and one that’s entirely doable for the savvy academic-turned-narrator. Speaking my work made me more thoughtful about how I write and will doubtless influence the process for my next book.

I hope this post provides some practical guidance to others hoping to turn their scholarly monographs into audiobooks. If I can be of assistance throughout the process or if you’d like a free review copy, feel free to drop me a line.

Categories
Guidance and Tips

How to publish & promote an academic book

Writing an academic book might very well be one of the biggest projects you undertake in your scholarly career. If you’re disciplined and efficient, you might be able to write the text in under a year but, for it to be useful to your intended audience(s), it has to be “rich,” in the words of my research mentor, Jean Burgess. To operationalize richness, ideally a book should likely be based on multiple years (likely between 3-5) of concentrated study and benefit from multiple empirical studies.

I share in the following paragraphs how I published my first book, what I’ve learned along the way, and what I’ll do differently next time. (This article focuses on scholarly monographs rather than trade publications, textbooks, etc. and acknowledges the process can be different for a first book compared to a subsequent one.)

Book proposal stage:

At this point, you’ll have a topic that addresses a gap, misconception, or uses a novel approach to examine something in a new light. Before drafting the proposal, do your research and identify the different presses out there (university [e.g., NYU Press], commercial [Palmgrave], independent [Rowman & Littlefield], etc.) and get a sense of what they publish and what they don’t.

You can ask advisors or colleagues for their perspectives and it’s never a bad idea to triangulate those to get a diversity of opinions and identify recurring themes. Also be aware of book series and collections that might suit your work. Once you’ve identified several publishers, you can begin to assemble the book proposal. Your identified publishers will most likely have a template available on their websites for you to use. 

Most will include the following elements:

  • Working title
  • Brief synopsis or abstract of the book’s central arguments and themes
  • Statement on relevance and applicability
  • Chapter-by-chapter outline
  • Estimated length (in thousands of words)
  • Proposed delivery date
  • Proposed market
  • Information on the main competing titles and how your proposed book is different

If you’re a first-time author, the publisher will most likely also want to see at least a sample chapter or two. If you’ve already had a book published, some publishers will forego this requirement.

I’ll break down each of these elements a bit more below, as follows:

Working title. Don’t worry if this changes throughout the process (mine did). You’ll often find books with a short and snappy title (or even just a word or two) that can work well for display on the cover and that are accompanied by more descriptive subtitles. As examples, my colleague Nic Suzor’s Lawless: The Secret Rules that Govern Our Digital Lives or Jean Burgess’s and Nancy Baym’s Twitter: A Biography.

Brief synopsis/abstract. Just like with a journal article, situate the topic in the relevant literature it’s based on, identify the gap or main contribution, articulate the methods you used to collect/analyse the data (if your book is empirical), and discuss findings and implications.

Statement of relevance and applicability. Put your marketing hat on here and consider why the average person would be interested in your topic. Here’s the statement I submitted for my To See and Be Seen: The Environments, Interactions, and Identities Behind News Images book:

This book is relevant because it deals with the phenomenon of visual communication, broadly, which is a ubiquitous and powerful, though understudied, area. Human behavior is highly visual, for example, as more than 60 percent of all human communication is nonverbal (Kundu, 1976), and humans are increasingly being exposed to more visual rather than verbal mediated messaging (Lester, 2013). Additionally, considering that billions of personal cameras exist globally that capture more than one trillion images each year, this work has profound implications for the experience of being imaged and what it means for self-representation, identity formation, and public policy debate, as, “at any given moment the accepted report [or image] of an event is of greater importance than the event, for what we think about and act upon is the symbolic report [or image] and not the concrete event itself’” (Ivins, quoted in Szarkowski, 2007, p. 3).

Note that the argument is supported by external evidence and, even if the template doesn’t explicitly call for a reference list or bibliography, it would be appropriate to include one along with in-text citations, where appropriate.

Chapter-by-chapter outline. Carefully craft a paragraph for each chapter of your book that discusses what it covers and why it matters. This allows the commissioning editor to get a sense of the narrative flow and structural organization of the work and how everything hangs together (or doesn’t).

Estimated length. I raised some eyebrows here by initially proposing a 40,000-word book. The standard range, I later found, is between 60,000-100,000 words. Any fewer is a mini book, like a Palgrave Pivot, that your university might not “count” as equivalent to a traditional book and anything longer will likely have to be negotiated.

Proposed delivery date. This will vary depending on your field and the currency of the topic; however, for very fast-changing topics, like social media, I’m told an editor would expect a completed manuscript no later than two years from accepting a proposal. It’s never too early to start the conversation with a publisher. Some editors actually prefer you not to have started writing before you pitch them because they’ll want to have a hand in shaping the proposal and what the book covers and/or they’ll want you to be flexible to the reviewers’ feedback, which can be easier to do before you’ve done too much empirical work.

Proposed market. Is your book suited particularly well for one geographic region or country? Is it comparative and therefore relevant transnationally? What specific subject areas/disciplines would be most interested in your book? Are there any particular courses/units where your book could be used? Are you writing for an undergraduate students? Graduate ones? An audience of your peers?

Information on the main competing titles and how your proposed book is different. Perhaps one of the most critical sections, here’s where you will more fully present an evidence-based argument of the gap in the literature that your book fills (as well as how this book compares to the publisher’s existing catalog). If other scholars have called for work that you propose to address and you can include their calls, those would be welcome additions.

Here’s what I wrote for that section:

Scholars have written extensively about visual media’s potency and how images have the power to topple governments, force resignations, change standards, promote justice, form social bonds, and impart significance (see Burgess, Enzle, & Morry, 2000; Goldberg, 1991; Milgram, 1992; Perlmutter, 1998; and Sontag, 1977). However, while much scholarly work and attention has been focused on visual content, the production of and interactions that influence that content have received considerably less attention. 

Scholars, such as Newton (2013) have called for more research on journalists’ subjects and how they behave in front of visual journalists. “We know little about how a photographer’s behavior affects those he or she photographs for the mass media, nor do we understand how people feel when they are photographed in different ways” (p. 67). This study answers that call and provides one of the first empirical glimpses into how people regard the experience of being imaged by such journalists.

This proposal follows on the heels of Ruth Palmer’s Becoming the News: How Ordinary People Respond to the Media Spotlight (published December 2017 by Columbia University Press) and adopts a similar approach, only, instead of examining people who were quoted in the news, as Palmer’s work does, this study examines the experience of people who were visually depicted in the news.

The book complements the publisher’s existing catalogue and titles in it, such as The Mediated Construction of Reality and Media Representation and the Global Imagination; would join the works of other, QUT-affiliated authors, such as Tim Highfield’s Social Media and Everyday Politics, Patrik Wikstrom’s The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud, and Michael Keane’s Creative Industries in China: Art, Design, and Media; and would, along with Martin Hand’s Ubiquitous Photography text (which focuses primarily on image distribution and consumption, rather than production), help represent the visual among the publisher’s current catalog offerings.

You should now have a 10- to 15-page proposal that you can send to the publisher. If they’re interested and if fits within their aims, they’ll send it out for an initial review by two independent scholars who will complete a template that addresses variants of these sections, provides feedback to the author, and also includes a recommendation for the publisher to pursue the proposal further or not. Publishers should specify whether they require exclusive consideration of the proposal or whether you’re free to send multiple proposals (tweaked for each publisher) out simultaneously. There’s no harm in asking if the publisher hasn’t explicitly advised on this.

We’ll assume you receive constructive feedback, are able to incorporate it, and provide the publisher with a revised proposal. They’ll then take that to the publishing board and pitch your proposal to their colleagues, who will vote to determine your manuscript’s fate. If it gets accepted, the publisher will draft a formal contract and share this with you.

Contract and drafting stage:

Congrats on receiving your first book contract. If you’re like me, you’ll view it with a mixture of awe and uncertainty. Without having anything to compare it to, you’ll likely be tempted to accept it directly with a wish that the terms are fair. Temper your excitement at reaching this stage and lean on your colleagues or mentors once more to get their feedback on the terms, which, in my case, included six free copies of the book and between 2.5-7.5 percent of the net receipts, depending on the number of copies sold and the publication formats. I reached out to Jean Burgess and she advised the terms looked standard to her but encouraged me to try and negotiate for at least a portion of the book to be published open access. I asked the publisher whether this would be a possibility and received a favorable response:

We have a “preview widget” functionality on the website, which is a similar thing to Amazon’s “Look Inside.”  I think as we advance through the process we can have a conversation about that but short answer is yes, we like for readers to get a sense of the book and the “Introduction” being online makes sense.

Once you’ve agreed upon the terms, your deadline clock starts ticking so get to researching, writing, collecting data, and analysing. As with anything, bite-size pieces are more manageable than trying to tackle the entire project at once.

Pre-publicity stage:

Once you’re within three months from publication, you should start ensuring your publicity and engagement strategy’s wheels are in motion. In retrospect, I think I started this process too late and waited until I got confirmation from my publisher that the book had been published before I started actively promoting it externally. (Your approach might also be influenced by whether your publisher supports a pre-order function.)

Here is my plan and how I tried to engage the public with my scholarship in this instance:

  • Institutional promotion. One of my first actions was to get the book listed on institutional websites, such as our Research Centre’s, and to work with my university’s media team to craft a news release. Such releases are distributed via a database and can lead to interview offers, such as this one I did with the ABC. I also added an abstract to my university’s institutional repository. Our research centre’s associate director and head of school also kindly organized two book launches for me and some colleagues who had also just published their own books.
  • External academic promotion. I added an entry accompanied by the book’s introduction to ResearchGate.net and to Academia.edu. I added the book to my Google Scholar profile, to my ORCiD profile, and to Mendeley. Several other sites, such as ImpactStory.org, GrowKudos.com, and Scopus, can be linked to your ORCiD and can be updated based on the publications you list on it.
  • Libraries. I reached out to relevant libraries (or, in some cases, their representatives reached out to me) to add my work to their collections. For example, the head of libraries at my alma mater, the Missouri School of Journalism, ordered a copy for the School’s journalism library after seeing one of my social media posts. Many other libraries have recommendation forms that you can fill out and make your case for why the book is relevant for its collection. You can keep track of which collections hold your book through its WorldCat listing.
  • Alternative platforms and formats. I recorded a 180-second excerpt of my book that I published to Soundcloud and then publicized on my social media accounts. I naively signed away the book’s audio rights when I accepted the contract in 2018 but, since then, have been able to reach an agreement with the publisher to allow me to self-publish it on a platform like ACX, which is distributed on Amazon, Audible and iTunes. (I address in this post some guidance for those wishing to produce their own academic audiobooks.)
  • General interest and industry outlets. I pitched an article to The Conversation, which netted several thousand views in 10 countries within a month of its publication. I also successfully pitched articles to specialist publications/outlets, such as the National Press Photographers Association, American Society of Media Photographers, Poynter, and the American Press Institute. I negotiated with the publisher to get a 30-percent discount that I could offer to readers in these specialist audiences and designed a flyer I could distribute at conferences and book launches. I also designed a variety of social media graphics that I could use to promote the book on platforms such as Twitter.
The State Library of Queensland added in 2021 my To See and Be Seen book to its Southbank collection.

Post-publication stage:

Once your book has been published, you should ensure your publisher’s marketing team has sent copies to the journals/outlets listed on the marketing form you filled out and then you should keep an eye out for any book reviews that roll in (creating a Google Alert with your book’s title can help with this). While you’re doing that, also make note of any relevant book awards your title might be eligible for (I was lucky my book netted the National Communication Association’s 2020 Diane S. Hope Book of the Year Award) and gather any evidence that might that might be useful in applying for such awards.

Lastly, to keep the conversation going during production and beyond publication, monitor current events and, as relevant, make connections between those and the topics you tackle in your book.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this comes from my colleagues who wrote Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures. They do a phenomenal job of posting original, relevant content that corresponds with the platform’s latest developments while also amplifying others’ voices to provide diverse and unique perspectives.