I Made an Audiobook Between Loads

7 days ago

5 min read

By JR Elrod

Okay folks, listen up. Beth asked me to tell everyone just how easy it was to get my audiobooks developed and produced, so here goes. And just so you know, I use everything I do as a chance to advertise my books, so be aware of that going in. Thanks. Now let's kick this ball on down the road.

I own and operate a trucking company. That is the whole reason Frozen Freight: Iron Reach exists in the first place. I did not think I was a writer. Boy, was I wrong. Sorry, that is a pig trail. Back to the main road.

My target audience is truck drivers. For safety's sake, and because the law frowns on a man reading a paperback at sixty-five miles an hour, I figured the way to get my book in front of them was to let them listen to it during the ten and eleven hours a day they already spend behind the wheel. Most drivers are exactly like me on this. I have over three hundred audiobooks sitting in my Audible account right now.

So if I wanted my target audience to buy my book, I had to figure this thing out. I did not have anybody to ask. Well, maybe Beth. But I am hardheaded and I like to learn on my own.

That is how I ended up on ACX.

Now, before I go on, I need to say something. I am not a smart man. No, really, I am not. I talk the big talk, but everything I know I figured out for myself. Keep that in mind while you read the rest of this, because if I got through it, there is no excuse for you.

Setup took twenty minutes. That is not a figure of speech. You go in and claim your title, and it pulls straight from Amazon, so there is no typing in your own book information like some kind of chore. Twenty minutes and you are done with the easy part.

Now here is the long part, and here is my little secret.

Before you do one other thing, sit still and figure out what your main character sounds like in your head. Not "a man." Not "gravelly." What does he actually sound like when he is tired and somebody just cut him off? Get that fixed in your mind, because you cannot go looking for something you have not decided on yet.

Then go into ACX and use their find-your-talent search and put in what you are looking for. There are a lot of choices in there. That is the best part of the whole thing. You can narrow it down until you are almost picking the man's boots, or you can leave it wide open and see what comes to you. Your call. Once you have that set, send out the talent search.

One more thing on the audition, and this one matters. You have to give them something to read. Do not hand them the opening of your book. I picked a scene out of the middle where two of my drivers are going at each other, because anybody can read pretty narration and make it sound nice. What I wanted to hear was what a man did with an argument.

Then you wait a day or two, maybe three, and the auditions start rolling in.

Now listen to them, and ask yourself one question. Is that the voice I hear in my head? That is the only question. Not "is this professional," because they are almost all professional. Nice equipment, clean pacing, real working people, every one of them. It is whether he sounds like your guy.

And I will tell you right now, you may not hear it on the first one. You may not hear it on the tenth one. But you will hear it. I promise you that.

A word of warning while you are in there. There are scammers on ACX. They are not hard to spot. No photo, no work samples, no profile to speak of. That is your man to skip right there. Takes about two seconds. Easy, I promise.

Then JD Carter's audition came in and I knew. That was my match. No debate about it, no second-guessing, I just heard him and that was that.

Once that happened, then came the money conversation. You can pay a narrator up front by the finished hour, or you can go royalty share, where nobody pays anybody a dime up front and you split what the book earns. I went with the 25/25 split and no money out of pocket. Now, free is a beautiful word right up until you sit down and do the math, because that split runs for seven years. I still took it, because I was already carrying the load on a new series and I did not have four figures sitting around waiting to be spent. But I want to be straight with you. It is a trade, not a gift.

Now production, and ACX has this part figured out for you.

First thing, you tell the narrator how long he has. That is your call, not his. I gave JD thirty days on the first book. Then ACX makes him send you a fifteen-minute checkpoint before he goes any further, which is a smart piece of business, because it means you hear what the book is going to sound like while it is still cheap to fix. Nobody records eleven hours and then finds out you hated it.

JD had that first book back to me in about fifteen days. I gave him thirty and he used half of them. So I sat down and listened all the way through, made some corrections, sent them over, he reread those parts, and boom. Done. After that he was off to the races.

I did most of my listening in the truck. I ran it off my iPad through the truck stereo, and any time I got stuck on a delay at a shipper or a receiver, that is what I did with the time instead of sitting there twiddling my thumbs. I would flag anything that sounded wrong, send it back to JD, and keep right on rolling.

Uploading is nothing. The files go up, ACX runs its quality check, and then you wait. The waiting is the worst part and there is not one thing you can do about it. On the other hand, I have waited on a permit out of Louisiana, so I have been through worse.

Iron Reach went live on Audible on September 8, 2026. Book two, The Fifth Dot, is in production right now and ought to be out by the end of the month.

So here is my advice to the author who has been putting this off because it sounds complicated. It is not complicated. It is a stack of small decisions, and only one of them matters, and that is who reads your book out loud. That is the hard part right there, picking the voice that sounds like your character. The rest of it is a few quick clicks of the mouse and a few decisions.

I ran a heavy haul company the whole time I did this. If I can get it done between loads, you can get it done sitting in a recliner.

Anyhow, folks, listen up, and take this from a truck driver. This thing is easy. Jump in with both feet and sink up to your eyeballs in the project. I promise you the first time will be easy. Well. Mostly.

Till next time, this is me signing off.

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