I hope you're holding out money for paying taxes.On Wednesday morning, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he would be leaving Capitol Hill at the end of the year, claiming, as so many have before him, that he wants to spend more time with his family. Oh, and one more thing- you're a 1099 contractor. So that $50/pfh price tag is attractive, but it's low-wage work. NONE of this PFH discussion even begins to discuss the time you spend auditioning, or WAITING to hear on auditions, or WAITING to get approval of the first 15 minutes, or WAITING to hear from an author that the book is approved, or that there are edits they want made. If this is fairly smooth, maybe another 1.25-1.5x. You realized that despite all your efforts, you skipped or added a word, and you have to re-record THAT LINE, edit it, and plug it into your recording. You found a big breath that just didn't need to be there and edited it out. You're deciding that the pause between sentences was too long, and tightening it up. Then you LISTEN to your book, and as you're listening, you're making the tweaks that require judgment and a discerning ear. Just running the files through the stack of filters and such takes me maybe 0.75x. The automated part of my editing is resource/processor intensive. The more you can automate the technical clean-up, the more it will save you time and get you down to those precious 4-6x total time. Some edits involved me spending minutes and minutes of work in the wave-form of the sounds. It was utterly brutal work, slogging through the title, making edits literally every few seconds. My first book, that 10x title? Almost nothing was automated. You hope to goodness you can automate a lot of it. (My own editing process, for Audacity, will be posting soon as it's own article.) It's boring. Everyone has their own secret sauce on how they edit. This part, once you hit a rhythm, may take you about 1.5x your finished time. Oh, and it goes without saying, record in a format that complies with the technical specs of the platform and do all your work at that sample rate, mono track, etc. And you finally nail the line, only to realize that you'd shut your power to the mic off earlier in frustration and it was still off this time when you nailed it, so you have to do it again with the mic on. There will be lines you try 2, 3, 4, 7 times. (Article coming soon on these.) Here's something amazing- you will not read thousands and thousands of words of somebody else's, without errors, the first time through.
The two primary ways to narrate are the “dog clicker” method and the “punch and roll” method. I'll say this takes maybe 0.5x your finished time. Is this story witty? Is it heavy? Does it take itself seriously, or is every line laden with irony? Inform yourself about what you're reading. Along the way, you're also making decisions about voicing the characters and noting the narrator. So if it's an hour of book, it's 30 minutes of reading. Probably twice as fast if not more than someone can read it out loud. If you know already that Jan is going to be a cheater, you can put shades into lines now that help the reader go with you into her future indiscretions. I listened to a book recently that was narrated well, but near the end of the book they said a character “rumbled” a line, and he hadn't been voiced in a way that could rumble if it was driving of the road, let alone just talking. Make sure that you pay attention to descriptions of character voicing. Understand the whole dadgum thing before you try to share it with the world. Sweet mercy, read the book before you try to narrate it. (See this article for more on choosing how you prefer to get paid.)įirst, you read the book. I've made less than a dollar per hour of work on that one. My first book I was probably more like 10x time, and it was a royalty-share book. Here's a dirty little secret- it takes time to get your system down to the point that you can actually do the work in 4-6x time. It's worse pay than working at Taco Bell, and at least they offer insurance and a 401(k). So it's not $50/hr, something you'll get rich doing in your spare time. If you're at the 6 hours end, it's roughly $8.33. That means, if we're generous, that $50/pfh is really something like $12.50/hr if you're working quickly. That's a lot different from “per hour.” The old axiom is that it takes 4-6 hours of actual work to produce one hour of “finished” audio. Edited, mastered, cleaned up, formatted, made as perfect as it lies in the producer's power to create. “Finished.” Finished hours are retail ready, final, quality work. You're missing one really, really, really key word. Why doesn't everyone do this if it's $50/hr minimum?
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