Blank

(Please send document end for Chamberlain-Rose Credits)

C. Steven: Hi. Today, "The Writer's Mind" is welcoming Chris Chamberlain and Marie Rose, both of Chamberlain-Rose Productions. And they are audiobook producers, actors, designers. I don't know what else they do. I think they build booths. They are pretty much the whole thing. So, Chris, welcome. Marie, welcome. Good to see you guys.

Marie: Nice to see you.

C. Steven: So, audio books. I mean this is really where the future is, isn't it? I mean, everything I've been reading talks about how it's been a better year for audio books than the year before. And next year they're producing, or they're predicting rather, that there's going to be a huge, you know, rise in audio books sales. So how does...I mean, you guys must be happier than that. How did you get into audio books? I mean from...you know, Chris I know you were in the Marines. I mean, how does one go from being a Marine into audio books?

Chris: Well, actually, Marie got me started in this, you know, on a lark. She had invited me to try to help her finish a project that would sell in a studio in Burbank. And I didn't know anything about audio book production or, really, how to put the nuts and bolts of a project together. So really a baptism by fire is a quick answer.

C. Steven: Really? Do you consider yourself kind of a "do it yourself" kinda guy?

Chris: You know, I guess I would consider myself a bit mechanically able and a bit of a go-getter.

C. Steven: Yeah?

Chris: And certainly, you know, I was doing a four-year tour in the military might spark an idea or two. But, you know, how do you go from being in the Marine Corp to being an actor? Actually, you know, there's been a number of well-known celebrities that have started off in the military and who became, you know, big names. Certainly, Elvis Presley is probably the most thought of figure when it comes to that.

C. Steven: Well, thank you very much. Sorry I couldn't resist.

Marie: That's good.

C. Steven: Yeah. It's just me. Sorry. So all right... Well, I got tons of questions for you guys. Let's talk about audio books. First off, what have you guys seen... How long have you been doing this, and what have you seen in the time that you started doing it?

Chris: Hey, C. Steven, we're having a tech issue here.

C. Steven: Oh, okay.

Chris: I don't know if it's pausing because of our link. We're seeing a pause on screen there. Is our video staying clear for you?

C. Steven: Yeah, absolutely.

Marie: Okay, let me just resume then. So to your question, basically, I've been doing audio books since...well, I've been doing commercial voice-overs for a long time. Audio books are basically a marathon read. You know, it's like a commercial. You go in to the studio. You know, you'll be booth directed to do maybe a 30 to 60 second spot that's pretty easy in terms of your time investment. Audio books can take 77 man hours to produce depending on the length of the source material. And when you have two narrators as we do, it's even more complicated because you have to layer in all those characters, two different artists... It can get really complex and crazy.

C. Steven: When you guys started, did you start with two characters?

Marie: No. No, initially I was offered an audiobook. My first audio book was "Somebody Tell Aunt Tillie She's Dead" by Christiana Miller, and it's available now.

C. Steven: Oh, wow.

Marie: It was a very long book. I initially hired somebody else to engineer and booth-direct. And we had a parting of the ways, and the book wasn't quite done, and we're on deadline because ACX, which is Audible's, you know, production arm, expects you to meet the deadline. We were able to get it done thanks to Chris who reverse engineered it, figured it out, and was able to help me finish the book and deliver.

And then after that, we found that the dual narration, male-female reads, just were growing in popularity. Chris has been on 200, 300 sets before. He can act. And he already had, you know, the natural ability and a great speaking voice in my opinion. So we went ahead in and started reaching, it was Chris's idea like I think a couple Christmas's ago, to start reaching out to authors and get some interest in a dual narration and boy they love it. So far, authors really like it.

C. Steven: I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off.

Marie: It's okay.

C. Steven: Chris, I know that you talk about, you know, you being a "do it yourself" kinda guy and I'm pretty sure you didn't really, you know, go and study audio engineering or anything like that. I mean how did you get the knowledge that you needed to pull all this off?

Chris: You know, in an earlier life in my 20s and 30s, I actually pursued music. That was my primary passion. So I had tons of experience...

C. Steven: I never knew that.

Chris: ...setting up studios in Los Angeles, gigging, writing music. I can say I probably had... My studio has incarnated at least a dozen times over the years, not only in Los Angeles but up in the Bay area where I've lived for years. So many years ago I started with the idea that I could write a hit song and I'm still trying to do that too. But, you know, if you spend a good amount of time with like-minded folks, if you buy a lot of gear and, you know, you immerse yourself in a studio environment, you'll start to understand, you know, what mics work, and what gear works.

Marie: As a matter of fact, when we met we didn't even know that we were capable of doing what we were doing. But I found out he happened to have a brand new microphone that was the perfect kind of microphone that's in our booth now.

C. Steven: Is that a dating thing? You know, "Hey, I just want you to know I think you're cute, and I've got a microphone." No pun intended.

Marie: And it just worked out that he also has a background in construction and knew how to build the booth. So I think that it was just sort of meant to be. And I had the acting ability and understanding the entertainment industry from my background because I have a masters in theater. And I, you know, have had a background in commercial voice-overs, that when we found out about audio books, we jumped on it.

C. Steven: Okay. Well, let me ask you this then. You know, the world is changing. But when I take a look at a lot of the books on Audible, I still see that they're produced by like the big five publishers. Is that changing at all? Have you seen that change, or is there direction? Do you think the pendulum is swinging one way or the other?

Marie: No, there's always gonna be independent authors. The democratization of writing online through Amazon's, you know, independent writers has really boomed. And the publishers that the content... The audiences are voracious for content. And the big five publishers couldn't possibly put out enough books per year, audio books or otherwise, to satisfy the content hunger out there. So I think what we're seeing is you're seeing just an amazing amount of material. And on the ACX website, which is where we primarily deal for Audible, those are typically independent authors. But I like working with independent authors. Not that we're closed off to working with publishers because we're certainly gonna pursue that too. But we've been so busy with the independent authors we haven't had a chance yet.

C. Steven: Well... Go ahead, Chris.

Chris: One thing, just to add to that, is part of the promise of having both of us do this would be additional interest that audio book listeners might have in, you know, hearing a live, a real male doing male roles and a real female doing... And we hadn't heard of... When we first started this we had not heard a lot of that yet. This was a bit of a novel idea. You know, I liken it now, you know, a couple years later, we've done eight books, is the difference between black and white TV, and the color TV experience. You know, you don't wanna go back to black and white when you've done color.

C. Steven: Well, unfortunately, I do remember that. But I like to say that I was very, very, very young. And I do remember my dad's excitement when he came home with that RCA Victor Color TV. And I remember my parents would just tune into the peacock, you know, spreading its feathers and that was like, "Wow, the world has changed." So I'm sorry. Back to audio books. Forget about my past. Back to audio books.

So one of the questions that I have then is, you know, in terms of independence, you know, somebody is not published by one of the big five, somebody's doing it themselves, somebody's got an e-book, they've got through Create Space, they've got a novel. And they say, "You know, I think I would like to make an audio book." What do they have to do? I mean, how do they even get started? And before you say the ACX word, are there other avenues besides ACX?

Marie: There are, but we're more familiar with ACX. So you can certainly go to Read a Book, you know, read... There's all kinds of smaller ones but ACX just happens to be the bigger swimming pool as far as the independent published world goes for audio books. And so, you can certainly google around and find out but the larger distributor is ACX, and they are the technical arm of Audible which was acquired by Amazon. So, basically, the first thing an author would want to do is please proofread your material really carefully first and lock your... You know, make sure you invest in proofreaders. We come across some very interesting typos that slows down production and...

Chris: Well even more than typos, we found, in a recent work, an issue with structure. So...

Marie: Well, yeah. There was maybe a plot gap or something. So make sure you've written the tightest version of your story that you can. Then go to www.acx.com, the ACX word, and you can claim your title if it's on Amazon. It's very easy to just type in your title, you see it, you claim it. And then you create your own little...you rights holder account, is what you will do. And then you start searching for... You know, know what you want. Do you want dual narrators? Do you want a male? Do you want a female? Do you want somebody who can do Cajun accents or can standard American do? Or does it have to be a British accent?

And you can filter your search for producers based on your criteria. So the producer, narrator, handles everything. You've already written the book. All you have to do is basically sign the agreement that ACX provides when you find your producer and make your offer, and they either accept or they pass, depending. And then from there, you as the rights holder, get to sit back and just listen to and approve chapter by chapter as they put your book up on a dashboard that only the two of you can see until you're both ready to hit the "I'm done" button. Then ACX will do their quality assurance. They'll make sure it hits all the peaks and valleys that it's supposed to for technical assurance. And then it goes live retail. Then you better be ready to promote, promote, promote.

C. Steven: So in terms of, you know, taking your book, claiming the book, are you guys producers? Are you talent? Are you both?

Marie: We're both.

C. Steven: So do I see a list of producers that I can choose from and then say, "Okay. Well, with these producers, they also happen to come with their own voice talent." Or are there producers who don't come with voice talent as well, and will go about and help you find that voice talent if you're looking for it, especially if you don't know what you're looking for?

Marie: We happen to believe that we're all you're gonna need. But as far as...

C. Steven: Yeah, of course.

Marie: But there are producer/narrators who also will farm out, you know, a role here or there to make it more of a multicast book. And they basically have talent that they know and can draw from. Or they'll put it out on a Facebook group for narrators, "Hey I'm looking for a male who can do a Slovenian accent. It's $100 per finished hour for your role. Submit your sample."

C. Steven: So the cost, I would imagine, you know, is multiplied by the number of actors you have, right? I mean, you know, I'm a poor independent writer struggling to get my book out. You know, I don't really have enough money to pay for two actors or one actor. Do you guys do kinda two for one deal or anything like that? Or how does that work?

Marie: We can do hybrid deals. It's basically, a hybrid deal is a royalty share. You know, we split the rights holder's royalty share 50-50. Basically, ACX takes 60% of your book.

C. Steven: Wow.

Marie: For the Audible rights. I'm sorry, I have a little frog in my throat. And the rights holder gets the remaining 40% percent that he has to then either split with the talent 50-50, so each gets 20% of the book royalty for 7 years because that's how long the agreement lasts. And on top of that, usually, to entice the better producers, narrators, you have to add a per finished hour rate like a $100, $200, depending on what it is.

Chris: Or more.

Marie: Or more.

Chris: Or more. Top talent is probably $300 to $400 per finished hour.

Marie: Right. Per finished hour means the final hours of retail read according to Audible. So it's like if your book took 77 hours to make, we don't charge $77 per hour I mean, we don't charge $100 per 77 hours. We charge, let's say it's a 9 hour finished read, it'd be 9 times 100, or whatever it is.

Chris: Right. Times the length in minutes of the actual work. The amount of time you took to make it is totally irrelevant.

Marie: Right.

Chris: Yeah, if you took seven times too long, that's your problem. The product is measured by the actual length of the chapters and the other, you know...

Marie: Just the time code according to Audible or ACX.

Chris: That includes the opening and closing credits, acknowledgments, and preface, any other chapters that you might have.

Marie: Right. So that's usually how it happens. And I have to tell... Usually, I show authors, boy, whatever you think you've made as an independent author on Amazon, it's so much more lucrative. I've made so much more money on Audible than I ever did on Amazon as a writer myself.

C. Steven: Really?

Marie: Oh yes, and quite a bit more, depending on the book. Now we've had books do, some books perform better than others depending on the genre. I think, see, you happen to write in a very popular genre.

C. Steven: Yeah.

Marie: So you... Actually, I think yours is the number one favorite genre among audio book listeners, mystery suspense thriller.

C. Steven: I'm feeling terrible. I haven't done my audio book yet.

Marie: [inaudible 00:16:42] It's like, you need to think about that.

Chris: You need to do it. My prediction, on record here, is I think your two books will do really well.

Marie: Yeah. We've read them. We like them. We're fans.

Chris: You write about what people like.

Marie: Plus you'll find that audio book drives your physical and your e-book sales too. Because there's something called Whispersync that Amazon does which basically bundles the two books together so that in their technology, if you buy the e-book, you can add an audio book for a nominal cost, not as much as you would buy it outright on Audible.

You don't have... The way you can control your pricing on Amazon, you don't have that on Audible. Audible decides your pricing depending on the length of the listen. And so, basically, what happens is people buy your e-book. They have the option to add on the audio book at a nominal rate, and then they can switch off listening and reading through the Whispersync device, their technology, and it remembers your place. So you're reading at work on lunch time and you wanna listen to the rest of it on the way home in your car, you just listen to it in your car and it remembers where you left off, and you can switch that. And that's been a very popular feature. So people will buy to get the, you know, audible book a little bit more cost effectively. They'll buy your e-book, bundle the two together, and have a great experience.

C. Steven: Wow, okay. I mean, that's...

Marie: That helps drive sales a lot.

C. Steven. So you think, though, that, I mean, you know, there's still gonna be a minimum cost associated with it. I don't know. Probably, you know, especially if you find somebody who's willing to do a 50-50 deal and somebody says, "You know what? I wanna do the audio book but I don't necessarily think I'm gonna get rich doing it, but I want to use it as a marketing tool,ΓÇ¥ like you suggested. So, but you're still looking at $900 to $1500 to get this done?

Marie: It depends on how long. If it's the length is not [inaudible 00:18:50] it's gonna be $800 to...I think, yeah $800 to $1900 depending. But I gotta tell you, if you're not willing to invest, if a rights holder isn't willing to invest in their career that much for what is potentially tens of thousands of dollars at the right genre, and you market it even a bit, then we're not quite sure what to say to that rights holder because we're investing quite a lot of time.

Chris: If I could [inaudible 00:19:15] your basic question just so listeners understand what we're talking about here, is the notion of production costs. So there's basically two models. One, where a stipend is prepended to the author. And that used to occur with ACX...

C. Steven: Anyway, go ahead, Chris.

Chris: To resume. Basically, in terms of production costs, there has been two modes. Why are we skipping out? We need to go [inaudible 00:19:46].

Marie: Okay.

Chris: Two modes of payment. One is the one where a stipend gets prepended to the contract. And then one without, where it's just the rights holder, which is basically a fancy word for author. The author and the narrator share in the proceeds. So that's called royalty sharing. And if you go with on the ACX platform, it's 50-50.

Marie: Of the author's side of the royalty.

C. Steven: Got it. Okay.

Chris: ACX takes their 60% cut and author and narrator take as equal split of the remainder. Okay. Now, with the stipend, or what is also known as per finished hour, that's where the author actually pays, or ACX would pay aΓÇªbasically, writes you a check in against future sales.

C. Steven: So, I'm sorry, ACX would write you guys, the producers, a check against future sales?

Marie: Well, here's the thing...

Chris: Well...

Marie: Let me go ahead and grab this one. Basically, a few...and fewer and fewer these days, books... Amazon has these amazing algorithms that can apparently tell what the sales of a book is and if it's likely to really payout well as an audio book. So when you put your book up, you never know if you're gonna get this stipend or not. You have to wait a couple of few weeks and see if the algorithm decides your book is worthy in which case, ACX will put a little banner on your cover for narrator/producers to search as a stipend. That means that ACX will, out of their pocket, pay $100 per finished hour to the narrator and the narrator/producer.

C. Steven: On top of future sales.

Marie: On top of royalty share. Now those deals are going by the way, we're not seeing as many of those. And now authors are having to pay the per finished hour in order to keep...

C. Steven: Now I understand.

Chris: Some authors who have a certain level of success can make these kinds of offers if they want to. Some authors, not all.

C. Steven: Not all. Okay.

Marie: No. It just depends on if you wanna get the quality narrators.

Chris: But the thing is after you do this for a while, you begin to see the entry level people that only require $100 per finished hour are not the same. They're just not in the same league as somebody who's well known, or who's even a Hollywood actor who's well known who wants to read a $400 per hour. There's a reason why things are cheap.

C. Steven: Okay.

Marie: Anything you get for free costs too much in other words. You can, accidentally, I mean, your book can get kicked back from Audible. ACX might reject it if it's not done correctly to their technical specs. There's a lot of things that the producer, narrator does, has to be able to do including having the right equipment, and the talent, and the technical ability to edit, and to master, and to EQ, all of these things that you have to be able to do in order to deliver the book.

C. Steven: So can you tell me a little bit about those technical specs? I mean, what is it that they require that, you know, stops somebody from, you know, trying to do this at home by just talking into their laptop?

Marie: Math. That's my short answer. But Chris can tell you a better one.

Chris: Well, what Marie's referring to by the word mass, she's saying, you know, mass is a good way to block sound.

Marie: No I was saying math, M-A-T-H.

Chris: Oh, math.

Marie: Because you gotta figure out all of those decibels and things [inaudible 00:23:44]

Chris: [inaudible 00:23:45]

C. Steven: So there's a technical requirement from a sound standpoint? There must be a background or hollowness?

Chris: Only a few things. This is no heavy map here. Your peaks can't be too high, your lows can't be too low, your average energy of the signal coming through has to be around a certain number, and you can't be too noisy. Those four things, if you can get those through, then you're gonna be fine. And the way that we have found to create a constant kind of work is to not vary any of the variables. Once you set everything up in a template, basically you'll have some kind of digital audio workstation. Now whether that's Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Reaper, Audacity, Pro Tools...

Marie: Audition, Pro Tools, yeah.

Chris: Whichever, whichever version. You'll, eventually, if you're doing a lot of this, you're gonna wanna say, "You know, we're gonna use the same template. Our mouth to mic distance is gonna more or less be the same. We're gonna record in the same environment, booth, room, whatever it is." At least don't change that in the middle of your book.

Marie: And rights holders, ask your prospective producers, "Do you have your own equipment? What is it? Do you have a booth? Where do you record?" Because we have seen some people trying to do this on their iPhones. They're recording and trying to send in. And you don't wanna get stuck with that. So ask questions, they should be able to reasonably show proficiency.

Chris: You know, the narrator pages really are a good place for you, the author, to become familiar not only with their sound samples, but they should be hopefully listing their equipment. Because the truth is that just like with, you know, the top of the line ChefΓÇÖn tools that you're very familiar with you're gonna get better results... As I learned the hard way the other day when I tried to make myself a little meal, using a cheap pan will burn your food. So having an investment in a $1000, $3000 mic, there's a reason why those things cost more. They just sound better.

But I think in the end, once you get a template going, you standardize your workflow, you set up what's called game staging where you figure out what levels the mic needs to be, the signal level coming into the digital audio workstation. And then when you bring all those different characters together, you need an output that leaves it so that the listener can clearly hear every character and that there's no jarring moments in the story where they might wanna, you know, get in a car crash, where someone gets in a car crash because they had to turn the sound down quickly. You definitely wanna stay very far away from moments like that.

And we found the easiest way to do that is to use a template. And we work the same way in our booth. Our mouth to mic distances don't change. Our relative energy levels, we know about what we need to do. And the final output we have set with what's called a channel strip. And the channel strip settings include adaptive limiting, EQ, compression, and some other goodies. And then we also use a final [inaudible 00:27:33] plugin which tells us that our signal is below the hottest level that ACX and other vendors allow. You don't wanna be bouncing above -18db.

C. Steven: Got it.

Marie: And this is all stuff that rights holders, even though it's easy for Chris, not so much for me, most rights holders don't wanna monkey with all of that or have to know all of that. And believe me, rough chopping a bunch of bad takes just to find the one good take, it's time intensive. It can be laborious. So that's a great reason to hire out.

Also if you go to the ACX, you know, search field, you can listen to samples to try to hear, you know, what kind of narrators, sometimes just like finding a needle in a haystack. So you do have to put in some effort to search for the right voice. Most authors have a very specific idea of who their characters are and they're on a hunt to cast it. To them, it's almost the movie version of their book. So they're really trying to... And you also wanna find people who know what they're doing and are easy to work with too, or willing to collaborate creatively.

C. Steven: So I think that some of the... I mean, I had several thoughts. First, when it comes to choosing somebody, I would think you'd have to be doubly careful especially if you're an author who has a series because you want to be fairly consistent throughout your series. So the person you pick is somebody who's gonna be with you for more than one book if you've got a series. The other thing was, does ACX, do they get into editorial at all? I mean, do they come back and say, "You know, you guys were little over the top." Or, "No, you guys were too subdued?" Or anything like that?

Marie: No. No more than they actually read your book before they put it up on Amazon. They don't, do they?

C. Steven: That makes perfect sense.

Marie: All they do is check it for technical specification. They stay out of the creative completely, thank goodness. Now the author, on the other hand, needs to be able to work creatively and vice versa. The narrator/producer and the rights holders need to be able to be on the same page about the direction. Some rights holders are very generous about that, we've found. They really give us license to do stuff they even they hadn't thought of with their characters. But at the same time, if they have, "Hey, well, this character, Karen, she doesn't go with that direction. She goes this direction." Oh, okay. Now we understand.

We solve a lot of that with the character break down sheet at the top of the process. We ask the rights holder to, you know, list the character, who they are in the story, relationship, a YouTube video to an inspirational voice, like a celebrity voice that they imagine, not that we do imitations, but it's good inspiration. And the rights holder will tell us the tone that she wants each character to have. And that's very helpful. The communication process is really important.

C. Steven: So you don't have to have the rights holder in the same room, right? You can have somebody from Schenectady, you know, talking with you guys because we live in a global society. So, you know.

Marie: I've only met in face to face one of our rights holders. Everybody else is...lives across the country.

C. Steven: How did that go?

Marie: It went well.

C. Steven: Oh, okay.

Marie: Good book. It was very well reviewed and we've sold tons and tons of copies.

C. Steven: That's so awesome. Okay. So let's talk about the fact that we're no longer doing, or it's no longer in vogue, I guess, to do the single narration. You know, I have a man reading both man and woman, or vice versa for a woman. Although I'm trying to remember... I listened to "Girl On A Train" and I know they had several women doing it. Did they have men doing the men's parts on that as well? I can't remember.

Marie: I actually own that audio book, but I haven't listened to it yet.

C. Steven: Okay.

Marie: But that's a big publisher that could afford, you know, and a big title, they could afford to do a multi-cast.

Chris: And also I would like to probably just state my own opinion about things.

C. Steven: Of course.

Chris: [inaudible 00:31:52] that's been said, but I'm not sure that the single narrator has fallen out of vogue. I still think there's plenty of people out there, both on the production end and on the creative end, authors and narrators, who do feel that that's still an absolutely valid art form. And I don't think we're going to see the demise of black and white TV in a color TV world for a long, long time yet. Because as we found out, there are...there's still, an audience, a core audience out there that doesn't necessarily need the higher level of interest that multiple narrators bring.

Marie: There are different tastes.

Chris: You know, purists. Much the same way that you have purists now who still like listening to symphonic orchestra played on an old turntable.

C. Steven: Right, of course.

Marie: [inaudible 00:32:52] very, very well. Some people...but those are very straight pure narrators. They don't try to act the book necessarily. They'll do a slight tone or attitude shift but they won't really try to do voices, or character voices. We tend to really delineate our characters more into the that we're acting it and performing it. And a lot of our reviews say it's like listening to, you know, a movie or one of the old radio programs, radio dramas, or things like that.

C. Steven: Do you put in sound effects?

Marie: We have for one of our books. We tried it out and we got...some people love it, some people just don't...find it just too distracting. So it's a personal preference. It takes a lot longer to put in the sound effects, though.

C. Steven: No, I bet. I mean, it's a whole Foley set up that you have to do.

Chris: Yeah.

C. Steven: All right. So then the fact is now that I've noticed that the books that are being released are having multiple narrators. I mean, to me, it feels like it's gone to the ridiculous with the George Sanders book "Lincoln." I think there's 166 narrators in that book. Something like that?

Marie: [inaudible 00:34:03] I don't know.

C. Steven: Yeah. So I don't know. I don't even know how they expect to make their money back on that because you have to pay 166 actors and that's worse than "Gone With The Wind" practically, you know. But I do notice that it's a lot. Do you look at the material and say, you know, and go to the rights holders and say, "You know, this kinda lends itself to a male female voice." Do you see that at all, or is that something you discuss beforehand? Or how does that evolve?"

Marie: Sometimes a rights holder will approach one of us on ACX not knowing that we are a dual team. And they'll say, "Oh, we like your voice, would you be interested?" And they don't even know that it's possible to get two for the price of one basically. And so we pitch, we say, "Actually," and give them our pitch. This is what you could have instead. This is what we need. It's not unreasonable by the way. And most people are like, "Wow, yeah." Especially when they hear some samples of what it sounds like to have that back and forth between two people, versus one person answering in different voices themselves.

C. Steven: Okay so...

Marie: No, but once they find out, they get hooked.

C. Steven: So I'm Joe independent, and I'm not, I'm C independent but, you know. I've come to you and I've said, "I need you guys to do it." You guys do a book. Of course, it's brilliant. How do I market it? How do I get it out there and let people know that it's even available to get?

Marie: There's a few things you can do. And one thing ACX, and I hope they never end this program, they do something called gift codes. And the author and the narrator's side, we each get...when a book is finished and out in retail, we each get 25 Audible gift codes so that you can go out and gift the book to people who are interested in reviewing in exchange for their honest review.

C. Steven: Got it.

Marie: And when you run out of those codes, guess what? You can ask for another 25 and so far, knock wood, they've always done it.

It's a good idea not to give those out to your friends and your family and I'll tell you why. Friends and family for some reason, as much as they love us and wanna support us, they're the worst people at getting around to listening to your book and putting a review. And God bless them. But you really want people who love your genre and who actively seek out your genre. Because they're gonna give you the most honest, excited review versus, you know, a loved one who may or may not get around to it. They see it as a chore or as a favor versus something they wanna do.

So the other thing you can do is there's something called audiobookboom.com. And that's a great email list if you know what a BookBub is. It's like BookBub for audio books. And it's a very well cultivated, curated list. And people sign up for your genre and they know that they get a newsletter every week. They can open it up and type in their request for whichever book they wanna get a free copy of in exchange for a review. And that has gotten us quite a number of great reviews. There's also something called LibriVox.org which is, again, like another "A Fussy Librarian" newsletter for Audible.

C. Steven: "A Fussy Librarian" newsletter? What's that?

Marie: "A Fussy Librarian" is another way to...it's like another one of those promo email lists, like BookBub.

C. Steven: Oh, okay.

Marie: So there's a million of those, BookBub, you know, Pixel of Ink. You know, there's a bunch of those. So if you...and then you've gotta get on your social media, tweet it out, join Triberr because Triberr will boost your tweets. And you start following people in the audiobook realm. They follow you back. Listeners start finding you on your Facebook page and etc. And we have growing fans. We now have a following of people who now say, "We wanna listen to all of your books." So the narrator/producer and the rights holder can share the burden so long as there's royalty share involved. A lot of narrators won't really promote that much if they're not getting royalty share every sale.

C. Steven: Wow.

Chris: My couple of cents too. Marie handles the vast majority of promotion tasks for Chamberlain Rose Productions. I have my own personal perspectives about what I find attractive in wanting to buy somebody's book or even the thought of maybe one day having other artists narrate my Sci-Fi and comedy novels which are forthcoming. And that is the professional aspect. Even if you don't have much money from wherever you are in the spectrum, if you just started or you've been at it for a while, is the idea that with whatever you have, you are professional. If you do graphic arts, you do top notch work. If you do voicing, you do top notch work. If you're somebody who's only doing promotion, then I know I can count on you to deliver with whatever hat you wear.

We've actually found some people online as well as made new friends who are very good at one thing. And I think that's ultimately what can help you in figuring out a path because professionalizing everything you do is the key to your emergence as a new artist or a new writer. And insisting on top quality promotion is a function of finding that talent.

Marie: Yeah. One of the things we look for in an author is how many twitter followers do you have? How many Facebook likes do you have? Who's your tribe? You know, who follows you? I had somebody once tell me that they didn't think their book needed any promotion. It was doing just fine. And I was like, "What? Okay. Well, I don't think I wanna, you know, really invest on..."

C. Steven: How is John Grisham?

Marie: I know, right. And they weren't John Grisham. So it's just as important that the author asks, and we've had authors ask us who do promote themselves, they say, "Do you help in promoting?" We're like, "Oh, yes. This represents tens of thousands of dollars over a seven-year period. If we take you on, we throw ourselves behind you."

Chris: We're gonna talk about you. We're gonna talk up your name. On the other end of the spectrum, though, is, as a narrator, I've had people send me emails of interest saying, "You know, I like your set voice samples. Would you be interested in doing my work?" And then we find out how unprofessional they are. They have no likes. They have no Twitter account, no Facebook...

Marie: No reviews, no ranking.

Chris: No reviews anywhere. Nothing on Amazon.

Marie: And then you look at their book and they're usually very...

Chris: The writing...no proofreading.

Marie: The grammar's not great or something. And we've had to pass nicely on those kinds of things because not worth our time. We put a lot of hours in the booth and then editing, and the post production to have a book not get all the promo love it deserves after.

C. Steven: I would imagine you can also cross-promote in terms of, you know, there are Amazon giveaways for your book and then people will click on the page, and as long as they see the Amazon page they'll see that there's also an audiobook available. And so I'm sure that there's some people, some potential buyers, right, who just click and go, "Oh look! It's an audio book too!"

Marie: Well, and what I also do is when I do my Amazon giveaways, you can also direct them to do something for you like, you have to like my twitter, or you can direct them to YouTube to watch your book trailer. And the book trailer... We do audible book trailers as well as regular book trailers. And then, you know, if you've done your book trailer well, they're hooked. And then we're finding sales connected to that.

C. Steven: Oh, that's interesting too. Yeah.

Marie: Now on one of our book trailers that's really nicely done. And we've noticed a spike in sales whenever we do that kind of cross promo.

C. Steven: So what about Amazon, not Amazon, Facebook? You know, I see a lot of people starting to take out Facebook Ads. Have you guys had any positive return on those at all?

Marie: Well, the Facebook ads that he's talking about are where you purchase ads off of Facebook, and then you target it to an audience and for a dollar a click or 60 cents, whatever you set your budget for. I have never ever seen...Please save your money folks. Sorry, Facebook, but that's not good. What I tend to do and what Facebook doesn't want you to do because they would rather have the coin and have you pay them for your ad not going anywhere is I joined a lot of... There's a ton of reading groups on Facebook, and book promotion groups on Facebook, where you can go and you can just you know, 10 a day, I go and I post in Kindle Unlimited Lovers or Audio Book Listener Lovers or, you know. There's specific genres.

I write in the "Werewolf Shifter Romance" area sometimes. There's very specific genres you can go to and they eat it up. They're like, "We want it!" You know, you get a million likes and then you go and they buy your book. It's a little bit more laborious but it actually pans out better in terms of return on investment. And it's free. You can do it yourself, or you can hire a virtual PA to do it for you.

C. Steven: Okay. Well, we're getting close to the end here. So I'm gonna start wrapping it up. People wanna get in touch with you, how should they do that?

Marie: www.chamberlainroseproductions.com. We're also chamberlainroseprods@gmail.com, and we also have a Facebook account, Chamberlain-Rose Productions on Facebook.

C. Steven: And of course look for you on ACX.

Marie: Yes, and that. At ACX right now they won't do dual narrator pages. They have to look at Marie Rose's page or Chris Chamberlain's page, and our dual samples are there too.

C. Steven: Okay. And if people wanna see or listen to samples, or is there a place that they can go? Can you give me some links?

Marie: Absolutely, we'll shoot you some links to post with the podcast.

C. Steven: Okay. I'll do that. And, Chris, go ahead.

Chris: [inaudible 00:45:01] on the ACX.

C. Steven: I missed that.

Chris: The easiest way to find our samples on the internet right now is just to go to acx.com and look up our names.

C. Steven: Oh, okay. Perfect. All right, and anything that you guys wanna talk about that I didn't bring up?

Marie: I think we covered a whole lot of ground.

C. Steven: Yeah. And your voices are exactly better.

Chris: We're excited about the future of audio books. You know, from 2014 to now, we've seen double-digit growth in the audiobook market.

Marie: Every year, yeah.

Chris: I don't think people that are commuting in the world cities are unfortunately gonna have an easier time. It's become evident to us here in Texas that traffic can be as bad here as in Los Angeles. So that might be a reason to tune off the news and listen to a good audiobook, maybe a story by C. Steven Ellis.

C. Steven: I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you guys very, very much.

Marie: Thanks, C.

Chris: Thank you. Have a good day.

CHAMBERLAIN-ROSE PRODUCTIONS CONTACT & SOCIAL MEDIA

Marie Rose ACX Producer/Narrator page http://tinyurl.com/j5348b5

Chris Chamberlain ACX Producer/Narrator page http://tinyurl.com/jnr24tf

Chamberlain-Rose Website www.chamberlainroseproductions.com

Email: chamberlainroseprods@gmail.com

Chamberlain-Rose Facebook https://www.facebook.com/chamberlainroseproductions

Twitter: @chambrlainrose

YouTube Channel http://tinyurl.com/htd4kt7

DIY Chamberlain-Rose Booth Build http://tinyurl.com/zp5owmp