I created my first audiobook recently. Audiobooks are more and more in demand for a couple of reasons.

1. Audiobooks are faster than reading your own book in most cases. If you read slowly, audiobooks might be what you need.
2. Audiobooks can be consumed almost anywhere you are… work, car, running, or church (if you sit in the back!).

Here are the Steps I used to Create My Audiobook: Kicking Smoking’s Ass!

Step 1: Create a written book first. Some will argue this, but I can’t see audiobooks being done any other way. Some have told me that they create an outline and then just start talking, re-recording the audio over and over as they make mistakes, which inevitably you do when you’re just talking off the cuff.

I created an outline of my book first. Then I started adding info to each chapter. Eventually I fleshed out the entire book. Audiobooks, ebooks, books nowadays need not be 80,000 words long. In fact, they probably shouldn’t be. Those that read books are enjoying the shorter length style that ebooks are making popular. Shoot for 15,000 to 30,000 words on average. Kicking Smoking’s Ass! is 25,000 words and 96 pages in length in PDF format.

Step 2: Figure out how you’ll record your book. I began using my Nokia 5800 xPress phone that has a voice recorder option that allows me to go for an hour of audio (speech) at a time. It sounded good, but not awesome. If it’s all you have – you can definitely use that option. A good mobile phone can record audio good enough for an audiobook. I’ve used the voice recorder on that Nokia and on my Nokia e71 for other audio projects and they worked fine.

If, however, you want to up the quality a notch you can buy a headset with earphones and microphone to put on your head and record. My headset has two plugs that went into my computer – 1 for sound – 1 for microphone.

The computer program I used for recording the audiobook is “Audacity”. It’s a freeware program that is not all that intuitive to figure out, but there are a few basic tutorials in the help section you can use to get started.

Step 3: As you record each chapter of your book strive to put some emotion into the audio because otherwise you’re going to bore the hell out of your listener. Why do you not want to bore your book listener? You won’t sell another book to that person, that’s why.

Emphasize some parts of your content as read with pauses. Change the tone of your voice. Break it up a little bit with some notes that are not in your actual book – but that add helpful information. I did this a few times in my book and I think it added considerably, and snapped people out of the trance they were probably in after nearly 2 hours of listening to the book in their ears.

If you reference website URLs or parts of your ebook or hard book that they should look at with their eyes – have that stuff also on a website with an easy url you can tell them to go have a look at.

Step 4: While you record you’re going to make errors – just keep going. Don’t stop and reset yourself and then hit record again. First of all you’re going to waste hours of extra time this way. Secondly, the audio recording quality will suffer because it will sound as if you did just that – stopped, rewound yourself, and started again. When you speak for the audiobooks your voice needs that nice flow to it – like you’re telling a story. Strangeness in the flow is going to make for a very poor listening experience. So, record each chapter in full and if you screw up – leave some time after that screw up – 3-4 seconds so you see it easily on Audacity as you’re editing it out. I also say something like “redo that” so I know to watch for which part of the audiotrack I need to edit out.

Step 5: In Audacity you’ll click on the 2nd track and turn it blue. Then use CTRL+a to copy all of it. Go up to the right of the Track 1 and right click in the space and “paste”. You’ll do this with each track, 3rd, 4th, etc… all the way until you’re done. Close all the other tracks (2nd and all the rest). Save that first track as a project using the File menu.

Step 6: Edit your file, removing all the errors you made, and shortening up the gap of silence that sometimes appears between speaking parts. Remove all strange noises that don’t happen at the same time as you speaking. In my case, the headset was clicking every time I moved my head. I had to remove about 600 clicks of that. They left an easy to see wave in the editor, but still. Make sure you have no clicks when you’re recording, no door slams, no car horns, no kids crying. I also had to erase quite a few mouth noises – as I opened my mouth to say something I guess my lips made a noise because I was breathing in hard at the same time.

Anyway – it’s quite an adventure your first time. You’ll learn a lot about how you sound to other people.

Once you’ve edited out the strange sounds to your satisfaction you export the file to .mp3 format. You’ll need to go find a driver file – a .DLL file but Audacity tells you where to find it. Save it someplace you’ll remember because you have to point the program to the  driver later. You do that one time – it enables you to save files as MP3. Which is probably the file you want to use.

Step 7: Upload that large file, mine was 110MB large, to a server at your website or you might want to burn them to CD’s and sell them that way.

Step 8: You can setup your audiobook at www.e-junkie.com so other people can sell it as affiliates. This means they sell your audiobooks for commission. It’s an easier system than Clickbank.com – but, ideally you’ll be setup at both of these services.

This is the bare minimum scenario you need to take one of your print or ebooks into the realm of audiobooks.

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