How to Choose Professional Audiobook Services?

Hi cecila, and welcome to the site.

I haven't published yet, but hopefully someone else on the site can provide a few answers based on actual experience.

I assume this means you're going the self-publish route? Professional publishers, if you went that way, would normally handle the details for you at their expense. While there are smaller "publishers" that offer "packages" to help you deal with all the details of publishing, beware some of those companies run scams. If they're a true publisher, they ought to handle all that at no cost to you, although naturally you'd still have to be involved. The others should be thought of as service providers, not true publishers. Service providers would naturally charge fees for their efforts (editing, cover design, etc.). Whoever you engage to help you publish your work, be sure to read the fine print of any contract to ensure you still own your work at the end of the process. And google for complaints and reviews against these companies. Also, try to get copies of whatever they produce for you (e.g., cover design image files) in case the service provider ever goes under.

Also, check out Amazon's self-publishing capabilities. They may offer support to help you create audiobooks since they obviously do sell them.

The other place to ask those same questions these days is with one of the major AI implementations (e.g., Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT). The caveat is that the AIs sometimes (too often) give wrong answers to questions, so you need to be careful to verify the information it gives you, either by asking more than one AI, by checking the reference sources that the AI used for the answers, and/or by drilling in with more detailed questions. If you haven't used an AI before, they allow you to have lengthy back-and-forth conversations with them, so you can ask the AI more specific questions based on whatever initial answer(s) it gives you.

Also, there are probably forums on Reddit that should be able to answer some of the same questions. Just be sure the person answering knows what they're talking about. Unlike me. :-)

Hope that helps.
Dirk

If their new model supported access to all audiobooks the way Spotify gives me access to all music, I wouldn't mind paying monthly for access to their collection. But to get only one audiobook per month and not have access to it when you end your subscription is crap, IMO. I'm not sure why that's an issue for them. It's not like any one individual is going to listen to a million books a month. Some will listen a lot, others won't. In fact, I'm far more likely to listen to endless music than I am endless audiobooks, although that's probably not true for everyone.

I'd also be okay paying a different monthly price to listen to more audiobooks than another person who only listens to a few. Why should a person who only listens to a few subsidize someone who listens to a lot? It doesn't even need to be based on the specific number of books; different pricing tiers could have an upper limit on the number of audiobooks per month: one price for 1 - 5 books a month, another price for 1 - 10, etc.

There. Problem solved.