A 10 hour audiobook (which is about 90k words) requires:
- About 20 hours of a voice actor's time
- About 40 hours of a sound engineer's time
- About 30 hours of a director's time
Plus recording booth facilities. Some basic Googling puts the actual cost in excess of $200 per finished hour of recording.
Books have a broader distribution than audiobooks, on an order of magnitude (or two) scale. That's the primary reason why they're inexpensive. Audiobooks are still a bit of a niche market, though Audible/Amazon are doing a lot to increase the size of the market.
EDIT: I did a bit of research, and it seems like freelance writers can earn between $0.02 to $0.20 per word, which for a 90k novel works out to up to $18,000; less than the finished audio book. Take that how you will.
>A 10 hour audiobook (which is about 90k words) requires
I don't think that word means what you think it means. It's completely possible for an author to record their own audiobook in professional quality audio with a fairly minimal investment. If they don't have a good narration voice then that's going to hurt them, but it can all be done by the author themselves at no extra cost apart from their time, a decent microphone, a computer, and a quiet place to record.
How does the adage go: a professional will cost you less than DIY, for the same quality of work. For all intents and purposes, yes, an author is completely capable of recording their own audio book.
But - and this is a big but - it's most likely going to sound pretty bad. It will have a small dynamic range (lack of an audio booth and quality microphone), the quality of the various voices will typically be poor (voice acting), there will be essess and 'plosions all over (pop screens, high pass filters, de-essing filters), there will be volume and tone changes where fixes are cut in (voice acting experience), and in the worst cases there will be background noises throughout (recording space and post-processing).
It could also take them between 2x and 10x as long - time where they aren't writing - since they don't have the experience required to do efficiently record, edit, and clean up their work.
I've recently been listening to fan narrations of light novels, and these are the kinds of problems that crop up all over these fan works. I don't mind in these cases, because they're free.
You can hire a professional to record an audiobook for $200-$300 per finished hour all in cost, there are some cheaper rates available. A 90k word book, should be about 7.5 hours since the usual reading pace is about 12k words per hour. Recording the audiobook should be about $1500, and you'll need to pay for cover art rights and some modest design work. All in production costs for audible of about $2k.
- About 20 hours of a voice actor's time
- About 40 hours of a sound engineer's time
- About 30 hours of a director's time
Plus recording booth facilities. Some basic Googling puts the actual cost in excess of $200 per finished hour of recording.
Books have a broader distribution than audiobooks, on an order of magnitude (or two) scale. That's the primary reason why they're inexpensive. Audiobooks are still a bit of a niche market, though Audible/Amazon are doing a lot to increase the size of the market.
EDIT: I did a bit of research, and it seems like freelance writers can earn between $0.02 to $0.20 per word, which for a 90k novel works out to up to $18,000; less than the finished audio book. Take that how you will.