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Audiobooks are the fastest-growing format in publishing, and the most expensive to produce well — which makes them a decision for the calculator, not the gut. Professional narration typically runs $150 to $400 per finished hour, and a standard novel of about 90,000 words works out to roughly ten finished hours, so a quality production commonly costs $1,500 to $4,000 before you earn a dollar. The alternative is ACX royalty-share, which costs nothing up front but hands the narrator half your royalty forever. This calculator takes your word count, narrator rate and planned retail price to show the finished hours, the production cost, your royalty per copy and the number of sales needed to pay the production back — so you can compare paid production against royalty-share on real numbers.
Audiobooks are the fastest-growing format — and the most expensive to produce properly. Enter your word count, narration rate and retail price to see production cost and how many sales pay it back.
A full novel typically costs $1,500-$4,000 with professional narration at $150-$400 per finished hour, plus editing and mastering. Shorter non-fiction can come in well under $1,000. Royalty-share production costs nothing up front but splits your royalty permanently.
Divide the production cost by your per-copy royalty. At a $3,000 production and roughly $8-10 royalty per copy on a $20-25 audiobook, that is around 300-400 sales — a real hurdle, which is why audiobooks usually make sense for books with proven demand or series with an existing audience.
ACX is Amazon's audiobook platform; royalty-share means the narrator produces for free in exchange for half the royalty. It removes the cash risk but halves your per-sale income forever. It suits authors who cannot fund production and are willing to trade long-term income for zero upfront cost.
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