Maine Crime Writers

Rob Kelley here, talking this month (and next!) about producing and publishing the Audible audiobook edition of Raven.

Because my contract with High Frequency Press allowed me to keep my audio rights, I had the choice of whether, and how, to produce an audiobook. If they’d kept the rights or I was agented, we might have shopped it around to shops like Trantor Media who will pick up a project and create an audiobook. In that case I might get a very small advance and some royalties. But this was something I wanted to have control over so I went a different route.

It’s a pretty detailed process, so I’m going to break this blog posting into two parts: Part 1 (December 2025) will cover the setup decisions and the process of selecting voice talent to narrate the work. Part 2 (January 2026) will cover the collaboration between myself and my voice actor partner to make the audiobook and send it out into the world.

Setup

Amazon/Audible has created a service called ACX, the Audiobook Creation Exchange. Once you have a Kindle ebook posted (even if it’s still forthcoming) and you can prove you are the “rights holder,” you can claim your title and start the process of creating your project. You have a number of decisions to make about how the audiobook will be sold, how it will be made, and how you might pay your audiobook producer.

Distribution

You have two distribution models you can choose from. If you select exclusive distribution for your audiobook, you will get a 40% royalty from sales on Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. If you select non-exclusive distribution, you can sell your audiobook through other channels in addition to Audible/Amazon/Apple, including independent ones like Libro.fm  and get a 25% royalty. I went with exclusive for this project.

Deciding How to Produce Your Audiobook

Now you need to create your audio! You can record it yourself if you have those skills, but it will need to meet certain audio quality standards to be accepted by ACX. I’ve talked to authors who have done this, and they tell me that it’s pretty grueling if you’re not used to that kind of voice work. And it’s a lot of work, taking between 5-7 hours of work to produce one finished hour. Since I don’t have those skills or that equipment, and as I have a female main character, I wanted to find a professional a female narrator for the book.

So I chose to work with a “producer,” a professional voice actor who would narrate my book. In order to do that, you upload 3-5 minutes of text, about 2-3 double spaced pages that will serve as an audition. Since this book ultimately has 6 different points of view, I chose small snippets of internal monologue and dialogue to help me judge whether they could differentiate between characters in dialogue exchanges, giving them unique voices that translated my prose into performance.

At this step you have another set of decisions to make. How will you pay your producer partner? You have three choices.

1) Pay for Production, in which you pay a flat fee per hour that the finished audiobook runs. For reference, ACX estimates that most producers can narrate 9300 words per hour. Raven is 80,000 words so the finished book was estimated to run 8.6 hours. Per-finished-hour (“PFH”) rates run from $100 to $1000 for professional actors. If you choose PFH you give the producers auditioning a sense of what PFH rate you’re willing to pay.

2) Royalty Share, in which the producer splits royalties with you only when the book actually sells.

3) Royalty Plus, in which you pay some PFH then take a little more than the producer on the subsequent royalty split.

After doing my research, I went with Pay for Production. Yes, that was expensive. But everything I read said that as a debut author without an audiobook sales track record, I’d have a very difficult time attracting quality talent.

Auditions

ACX then lets you open up auditions for your book. This part was pretty cool. Every day for about 10 days I’d get a few new auditions, some from folks early in their career as a producer, some with more experience. Those voice actors who had done a large number of ACX projects had a badge letting me know they had produced a lot of audiobooks. I received over 40 auditions during my open call, and got some really great auditions.

Two things stood out. First, there was a pretty wide range of quality. Some were very professionally recorded, clearly volume mastered and produced in a studio (most of the professionals have home studios they’ve set up), while some sounded like they were recorded on an iPhone. I got a few bids from producers who would bring a cast, dividing up the male- and female-voiced characters. Those, no surprise, were often very expensive.

Second, was whether I wanted any special accents. At my own peril, I let them know that a few characters in the book would have Boston accents, specifically Southie. Here’s the thing about actors doing Boston accents: if you didn’t grow up in Boston, you’re very unlikely to pull it off, and a bad Boston accent is like fingernails on a chalkboard. So I got some whoppers.

In the end, I found several narrators I liked, and then made them offers with my proposed PFH rate and the timeline in which I’d like to complete the book. I was extraordinarily lucky to have my offer accepted by the very talented and extraordinarily professional Nicole Fikes.

Next month I’ll finish the story, describing the process of collaborating with Nicole to produce the book and launch it into the world!

Currently reading: The Proving Ground: A Lincoln Lawyer Novel, Michael Connelly, 2025

Next in my TBR list: The Emergency: A Novel, George Packer, 2025

Finally, a reminder that once again, in December, one lucky Maine Crime Writers reader who leaves a comment on the blog will win a bag of books!

Rob Kelley here, at the end of a revision cycle for a manuscript due to my publisher in January. This is the book Critical State, which is now planned as the first in a series of at least three books featuring the journalist protagonist Olivia Wolfe. This book will release in fall 2026 (and the next two in 2027 and 2028, respectively, which seems far away until you owe a manuscript!).

My publisher (High Frequency Press) had some heavy edit suggestions to the draft of the novel they’d seen a few months back, which meant I needed to rethink some major plot points. That resulted in adding three characters and deleting one, and replacing two POV characters with two others. Pretty big changes that required some major surgery. So, how do you do that and not have it end like the classic kid’s game Operation where if you touch the sides of the “wound” you lose, or in this case just end up with an editorial mess. Or a dead patient/book.

Reverse Outlining to the rescue! I’m more of a plotter in the plotter vs. pantser dichotomy. Were I a full-on pantser, I’d absolutely need to do a reverse outline at this stage. I’d have a huge mountain of prose from which I’d need to extract a throughline, identify arcs for characters, plots, and subplots, then take that pile of prose and fit it into a logical model.

But as more of a plotter, I only had to do half a reverses outline, taking my original outline and revising it to match my new goals. For those sections of the book that needed to be rewritten, I needed new outline points that addressed: 1) what had to happen in what order to make the plot work,  2) what characters would move that plot forward, and 3) whose POV would the resulting scenes be in?

I knew how the book had to end, and the big beats that needed to be hit, so I could insert placeholders that said something like: Riley needs to confront her superiors in the White House. Things X, Y, and Z happen. And this will be in Riley’s POV.

I use Scrivener to write my drafts, not moving to Word until I’m copyediting. I color code each scene by whose POV it is in, so I can move scenes around and consider rewriting a scene in a different POV if it gives it more punch (I just did that to a scene this week!)

Here you can see what my manuscript looks like in Scrivener, each scene named in the sidebar. (I don’t hold on to the chapter titles in the final manuscript but give them titles when I’m drafting so I know what goes there. Plus it’s fun.) If you squint hard enough you can also see that I use a three act structure with a midpoint as a large scale framework to help me think about character and plot progression and velocity.

Because I do it this way, when Riley character showed up, I knew what she had to do, and when she had to do it. I was able to use Scrivener to help me re-outline the book, then begin filling in where I needed new prose. Some things were changed by who Riley is and how she interacts with other characters, but those I fix when I get there.

More from me on Friday when I’ll be sharing my experience in producing the audiobook of Raven!

And a reminder that once again, in December, one lucky Maine Crime Writers reader who leaves a comment on the blog will win a bag of books!