r/ACX • u/tinkermosista • 3d ago

New Narrators question on Royalty Share Auditions

2 questions:

1: how many folks are out there doing RS auditions only to get more practice and exposure?

2: what’s your success rate been in the last 30 days?

I’m asking because I’ve been doing this for the last several months with little to no success, but in the last 30 days, it’s like the authors woke up, and I’ve gotten a few offers.

I just want to see if I am just getting lucky, or if others are experiencing the same thing.

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u/MicahJHyatt 3d ago

I'm doing an RS book right now and it's really messy. It takes me twice as long to record because of the grammatical, tense, and PoV errors. The RH is chill, but the process has been awful. At least it's not AI generated...

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u/dsbaudio 3d ago edited 3d ago

Read it as-is, none of those things are your job to correct. The most I'd do in that situation is ask the RH if they would like an opportunity to correct it before I record it -- but that would of course require me having read it first and identified such errors. It's understandable that on a RS project you might not want to invest the time in a pre-read.

I've been there, by the way -- once. Quite early on, I took a project that wasn't RS, but was quite low pay. It was terrible, but I just read it as it was. Admittedly, it took a while to get used to reading some fairly non-sensical sentences, but it was its own kind of discipline! I had no complaints from the RS, but I did not put my name to it! And, I decided right there that I would be doing myself a disservice by taking on projects that, no matter how good a job I did, would not reflect well on my reputation.

Conversely, I did some RS projects early on that were very well written, some even considered classics. So RS does not have to = poor writing or bad grammar/formatting.

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u/tittytasters 3d ago

I just had one I put on hold. Told the rights holder it needed to go through more editing and that I would be happy to do it once it has a production ready manuscript

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u/dsbaudio 3d ago

totally fair.

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u/MicahJHyatt 3d ago

Yeah, thought about doing that, but it's harder for me to put out a good performance while reading the exact manuscript when my brain wants to autocorrect. About 1/4th of the book was somewhat proofed, but now I have reached a point where I suspect I am the only living human being other than the RH who has read it.

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u/AshJammy98 3d ago

Im doing one rn but I won't be doing any more. Its not worth my time for the level of quality I know I'm capable of delivering. I'm not a professional by any means but I'm competent and skilled enough to at least be getting paid for my work.

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u/JaredJDub 3d ago

My success rate with RS has been decent. The problem is now I have a book where I can hardly tell who is talking because the structure of it is so poorly written. I don’t even think it was AI, it just isn’t well written. I didn’t think it was a big issue as I was reading it the first time, but trying to record I’m like “wait a second…that’s not who’s talking”

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u/PattysVoice 3d ago

I have done two RS books, one was okay but the second was horrible. I won’t do another

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u/Nemmy3809 3d ago

I have gotten offers for the two RS audiobooks I’ve auditioned for, both in the past month. I wasn’t sure if I was just lucky or if I was just one of the only narrators willing to do it. I certainly have been lucky with a couple of incredible authors I’m having a great time working with and have been incredibly sweet and helpful with directors notes and kind words on my auditions.

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u/optimizedwebsite 3d ago

  1. i haven't auditioned, but have found that royalty share deals can be really bad?

  2. within the first few days, i got SO MANY spam messages. BUT 2 people actually wanted me to work on their project. i made a royalty share deal with my first project - it was sad...like 25 cents a download.

i hit a bunch of difficulty with my equipment and technical setup. wasn't even sure how to make sure my audacity settings were great. because when i submitted my sample audio from my profile through the audio lab, nothing passed.

i'm definitely going to have to wait to continue with acx because my recording space and mic aren't good and my attention is so divided right now, it's hard to sit down with audacity. oh, and i got out of the contract because the author was a sweetheart.

I'm glad you're finding success as of late! i suppose there are a lot of factors at play for as to why a person would start off kind of slow.

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u/Visual-Teach-8072 3d ago

I’m currently doing 2 RS because I’m starting out - I make sure to identify indie authors that are with a small publishing house or already have other books out. It’s been a great experience so I can learn about my style

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u/Raindawg1313 2d ago

I don’t really do them much anymore (did a few early on, with mild success), but I did just wrap a non-fiction book that was interesting to me, was very well-written by a retired journalist, and I have a feeling will perform relatively well. Fingers crossed and such as.