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I know I'm late stepping into this conversation, but I thought I'd throw my 2c in there. Is it worth converting your books into audiobook? Well, let me ask you this. Have you looked at book sales states in the past 2 years? We all know print books are dead, save for specialty printing (cookbooks is still a strong seller of dead tree books, along with certain shop manuals and the like) applications. However, did you know that the sales of digital ebooks is actually going down? Yeah, overall sales are actually dropping. Now, here's the interesting part. Audiobook sales have been growing at a rate of 38% on average for the past 5 years consecutively.
Does that mean ebooks are doomed? No. However, I think they will soon find themselves neck and neck with audiobooks. Myself, I've already gone to the expense of converting 3 of my books to professionally read audiobooks and they're selling surprisingly well. My larger titles that I can't afford to convert ($1000+ to have a large novel turned into an audiobook) I ran through a very good quality text to speech tool and made into a mechanical audiobook. Not as good as having a professional reader do it, but it gets the job done for a lot cheaper. Like free kinda cheaper.
But yeah, in the end it's worth it to do audiobooks. Now, one thing I will say, the quality of your audiobook will be just as much a deciding factor on whether people listen or not as will the quality of your writing and the quality of your book cover. So, either go professional, or don't go at all. Mechanical audiobooks will get you over the hump if you can't afford to get one professionally done. But, like a cheap book cover, they will hurt you. Myself, I go to ACX to have my stuff done and I've found several really good readers so far who have done a bangup job on my books. However, be aware that you won't get the professional quality readers until you hit the $250/hr price point. I lucked out and got two really good ones at the $80/hr price point, but only because the three works I put up on their site caught their attention. But most other really good narrators won't even talk to you for less than $200/hr. And when I say per hour, that's per finished hour, and not per hour they work on it. So if your book takes 8 hours to read at a reasonable pace, and you do $100/hr you'll end up paying $800 for the final product.
Anyhow, that's my 2c. So yeah, if you haven't jumped on the audiobook band wagon, then by all means strongly consider it. As I said, I have a mixture of styles from professionally read to machine generated. But which one is used per book is, at least in my case, determined more on what I can afford rather than what I think is best. I've also gone and tossed some of my choice to the readers. On the longer, more expensive works I've given them a machine read audiobook and said, "If you like this title, and you want it read, here's my patreon and go fund me pages. Toss me some peanuts and I'll get them professionally done." So far nobody has sent me a dime, so all they get is the mechanical audiobooks. But I figure that'll change in the future as I think I'm a bit ahead of the curve on the idea of group funded audiobooks. But we'll see. Anyhow, again, just my 2c.
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