Producing and Publishing the Audiobook of Raven, Part 2

Rob Kelley here, concluding last month’s Producing and Publishing the Audiobook of Raven, Part 1.

When last we met, I’d selected audiobook narrator Nicole Fikes via Amazon’s ACX platform. There were a few things I was looking for in a narration partner that Nicole delivered as part of her overall package. First, I wanted a partner who had their own social media platform to help get a little more visibility for Raven. Second, I wanted a professional who had a process she had proven over multiple projects with other authors. Nicole had both: a TikTok presence she actively managed and a standard process for how she planned and executed an audiobook.

The great thing about ACX is that it also has a process to ensure a quality book. That process begins with the narrator submitting a fifteen minute preview of selections from your work. This allows you to refine character voices together with your narrator, while getting a feel for the narrator’s pacing and pronunciation.

Nicole supplemented this process with a welcome packet containing three extremely helpful tools. First, she had me fill out character sheets for the primary characters, giving her their name, age, who I’d ideally cast them with, level of education, adjectives describing them, and other attributes. It was a fun exercise; one that made me realize I hadn’t necessarily done that level of visioning for all my major characters when I was writing!

The second part of the packet was a timeline. Here was yet another lesson in publishing my first book: I started too late with audiobook production. I’d wanted it to launch on the same day as the paperback and Kindle ebook, but I didn’t have a sense of how long the process would take. I posted the ACX audition request on August 19, 2025, got auditions every day until Nicole’s came in on September 1, took a little more time finalizing who I liked, then executed a contract with her several days later. From there to a mutually agreed upon audiobook took two solid months. ACX then takes about two more weeks to review and approve the audiobook, so it launched on November 19, 2025, approximately three weeks after the paperback/ebook debut and three months after I opened auditions.

Nicole also provided a pronunciation sheet with test pronunciations of character names and places. Here, again, lessons learned. Despite the fact that she identified 147 pronunciation tests, we still missed a few. One should have been an obvious add on my part. I should have checked that she had all the character names included, but we missed one: Special Agent Paul Ostrowski of the FBI. We pronounced his last name differently and I didn’t catch that until the full audio draft came back to me. The second one didn’t occur to me until I got back the audio because everyone I know pronounces it the same way. In Boston, Massachusetts Avenue isn’t usually called that; it’s “mass av.”

But those two small items aside, her first draft of the audiobook was amazing. Still, my job was to listen to the whole thing and identify any errors in pronunciation or dropped or incorrect words. I found very, very few. And with those corrections (what the narration professionals call “pickups,”) we were ready to go. Nicole mastered the audio for consistent volume and submitted it to ACX for final review.

Here are a few of my takeaways from the process. First, selecting an experienced narrator was absolutely the right call. Folks in my life were trying to convince me to do it myself, but it is clear to me now that picking a professional partner for the job was the right call. Second, it is unbelievably cool to hear a voice actor read your work. Like chills running up your spine cool.

Working with Nicole was amazing, and we got to cap it off with another collaboration. Nicole asked her clients for submissions to read for Human Voices Only, a movement supporting voice actors versus AI narration. Again, what a thrill for me as she read a passage from my forthcoming 2026 novel Critical State on her TikTok channel.

And one final fun collaboration. As part of being a “rights holder” on ACX, you get 25 free audiobook giveaway codes for both the US and the UK. So we held a giveaway of three codes for TikTok users who liked and commented on the post. Great for Nicole’s visibility and mine!

Currently still reading: The Proving Ground: A Lincoln Lawyer Novel, Michael Connelly, 2025. (I owe my final draft of Critical State to High Frequency Press this month, so not much time for reading!)