Talking about talking books!

I really enjoy listening to a book as I'm working. Preferably one I've read a few times so I don't have to concentrate too hard. Trouble is they are quite expensive and sometimes they are abridged. I'm thinking of having a go at recording some myself for my own amusement. If I'm going to do that, do you think I could sell them? And how best to go about it?
I've got as far as downloading Audacity and recording a little sample, just to prove I can....

If you decide to give this a try --- I promise to stir my lazy patooty and sign up with PayPal or some other thingy, so that I can order!!

If the books are out of copyright or public domain, there are many potential places to sell audiobook versions or make a little income from them. But you need to check that copyright issue carefully!

Deane Adams wrote:If you decide to give this a try --- I promise to stir my lazy patooty and sign up with PayPal or some other thingy, so that I can order!!

That's very kind Deane, but I'm not sure my taste in reading material will suit! As Jane points out - I'll have to be aware of copyright, and as it happens one of my favourite authors is Georgette Heyer who started writing in 1922 I believe, so her early works should be OK to use now, also Jane Austen. Both write historic romances - easy reading and I think amusing, however if I get going I might consider requests - Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stephenson and others will be free to use.

I love Georgette Heyer, too, the mysteries as well as the romances! But I think you might find her books are still in copyright in the UK. The US versions of of her earliest books like The Black Moth and These Old Shades are public domain in the US where copyright automatically expires 49 years after the author's death plus is complicated by the US not recognising other country's copyright law as applying to the US published editions. But the UK works on 70 years, plus my understanding is copyright can be renewed by the copyright holder, starting another 70 year term. It's whatever the legal term for copyright is in that country after the date of the author's death, not the date of publication. She died in 1974.

I doubt you would run into any problems selling recordings of her books from a private website in a small way, but they couldn't be listed as audiobooks on any of the main sites like Spotify, iTunes, or Audible, because those require a statement of the copyright holder's permission. One place some authors I know have made extra income is putting audiobooks up free on YouTube for the ad income, but the income can be very low, and they also require a statement about copyright. Other options like a Patreon or Substack with the chapters as podcast episodes behind a paywall might be somewhere you could get away with it, as a fan reading her favourite stories out loud.

But things that are definitely public domain in the UK would be much safer and shouldn't present any issues.

Thanks Jane for clarifying, I had thought it was the date of publication of the books, so I'll have to check carefully (or maybe get permission....) I don't expect it will be worth doing for books I wouldn't have wanted to do anyway, since the time involved will be pretty significant, so an up front investment. I did think though that they may make quite good gifts for friends and family (copyright permitting....)

I found a link for copyright as it applies in the UK :uk duration of copyright - so 70 years from the author's death for published books, so I've another 20 years to go for Georgette Heyer's books.
Interestingly 'Peter Pan' is an exception:

in 1988 Parliament introduced a perpetual right to royalties for the use of the Peter Pan play, payable to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

It appears Penguin/Random House owns the GH audiobook rights for the UK, as all the audiobook versions for sale on Amazon are Penguin. They can afford big lawyers!

If you did them as personal gifts it would be very unlikely to raise any copyright problems, unless someone you gave a copy to started passing it around or tried to publish it.

Doing it a chapter at a time as podcast episodes behind a paywall is technically breaching copyright but probably also unlikely to cause issues, especially if it's presented not as an audiobook but as a fan reading a chapter at a time to promote discussion of the stories, which could be a lot of fun. Substack would be good for this, and it's free to the writer. I recently switched to using it for my regular author newsletter, and will be putting my audiobooks up as podcasts there as an additional bonus for my supporting subscribers (LOL, all two of them!).

I'm on substack for "going to seed", but I haven't warmed to it yet. I think I'll stay away from dubious copyright, There are still plenty of books that will be no issue whatsoever.
I was thinking I could make the first chapter free, and then pay for access to the other chapters if you liked my voice/reading style. I have listened to some Jane Austin online, (I couldn't get on with the accents, however), and really want something I can play like a CD....Maybe I'll start with Persuasion and see how I get on with that.

Hi Nancy,
You might check out https://librivox.org/

These are free public domain audio books. I know from experience that some are just as good as the paid ones on Audible, while others are pretty horrible. I think selling what you do would be great, but if you wanted some practice... perhaps participating with that group might be a good place to get everything set as far as mic and volume and whatnot?

Definitely safest to stick to books you can be sure are copyright free or public domain!

I have a terrible idea.
When I was a kid I was disturbed to find out that Victor Appleton the 3rd , creator of Tom Swift  Jr ,was not a real person , but a pseudonym for a bunch of people who cranked out stilted dialogue and tired old cliches.
Then I got over it and continue to love cheesy  scientific adventure serial novels to this day.

So the idea is:
Use AI to write a book using copyright lapsed material as the source material.
Then read it aloud with your own voice, to create a product that you have rights to.

Serialized stories of all kinds lend themselves to this.
I've read early work by  esteemed science fiction authors that clearly copied one another other or even themselves.
If you start with disposable, formulaic, hackneyed fiction that people enjoy , allowing machine learning to copy it should be easy and not really problematic.
Your own delivery of the material will be the real selling point.

If you are looking for things to record and an audience that can give you feedback if you request it and a way to build up an eventual paying customer group, you might want to look into "podfic".

Lots of people write fanfic, or retellings/remixes of existing works, and put them up for free. They can't charge, if the works are still under copyright, but they can be posted. People also stuff this isn't under copyright too, but it's a smaller group. ( for example, there are almost 3500 works under "Jane Austen- Pride and Prejudice")
Quality varies a HUGE amount, from significantly better than most official published/produced works to completely unreadable. They also can be all over the map in terms of subject matter and style. Also much is, shall we say...spicy*. ( and sometimes deeply weird)

All that being said, it is pretty easy to filter out things you don't want to see and sort so you are more likely to get good stuff. There are also lots of ways to find stuff that interests you and lots of different lengths of works. Stuff can be as short as a page or two or longer than the Lord of the Rings!

Did I mention that all this is free? ( I read around 100 novel pages/hour so a pretty much endless source of free reading material has been amazing)

Many of those "fic" writers are fine with their stories being recorded and most will add a link of your piece to their story. The stories are called "fic" and recordings are "podfic". You have to put in your posts that you are looking for feedback since it is considered rude in these kinds of fandom spaces to give unsolicited criticism, ( again, it's done for free) but so long as you say you want it, you may get some helpful reviewers. ( and unhelpful too, this being online and all)

While you can't charge directly for anything based on stuff under copyright, you can charge for early access to your recordings, custom requests and it can help you build up an audience for later paid works.

I'm not sure if this is of interest to you, but it is one pathway to doing audio work so I wanted to mention it. If you or anyone else is interested in dipping a toe into the world of (FREE!) fanfic reading/listening then I can give a quick basic intro on how to find and sort stuff. Moosage is fine or I can post here if people want it.

*by spicy, I mean smutty. And often quite graphic and also very, very strange.

William Bronson wrote: I have a terrible idea.

It's a perfectly valid idea (if pretty scary). Not for me though, as I'm really thinking of monetising something I want to do anyway. You're right that for some authors, once you've read three or four of their books you pretty much don't need to read the rest. But for escapist enjoyment, when you know what is going to happen so don't need to concentrate too hard, they are easy reading.

Dian Green wrote:If you are looking for things to record and an audience that can give you feedback if you request it and a way to build up an eventual paying customer group, you might want to look into "podfic"..

Thank you Dian for that idea. I have come across fanfic through a friend, but haven't tried out any myself. It might as you say, be a good way of seeing whether people like me to read to them as a next step - I'll definitely check out podfic!

Nancy Reading wrote: You're right that for some authors, once you've read three or four of their books you pretty much don't need to read the rest. But for escapist enjoyment, when you know what is going to happen so don't need to concentrate too hard, they are easy reading.

You are so right on that. But some of it is also the genre or the publisher. Harliquinn Romance Novels are hardly anything to promote, but they got it figured out so well that they made their authors abide by certain plot changes at certain page numbers. For instance, a kiss that leads towards something by page 3, but then something happens and nothing serious happens. Then at page 150, it does, etc. Literally every novel is that consistent because their readers were looking for just that consistency.

Zane Gray even admitted that but said it was his bread and butter in the canned western novels he wrote.

Not me; it makes me hurl to think I had to write such cookie-cutter novels.

It is true I typically write thrillers, but have a list of novel types I also want to try. Like I wrote a Femme Fetale just to break away from Thrillers, three children's books, a western, and my Permie Novel I am writing now is actually a legal thriller. I have done others too like a War Romance, and in the future I would like to write a Christmas novel, an animal novel (like White Fang) just to break up the thrillers I often write. Even in doing a trilogy, I might break up the story type. This Permie Novel is the second of a trilogy, the first being a Thriller type novel, and as I said, this one is a legal thriller.

But to get back to your proposal. You can always find out of copyright books at:  gutenberg.org

This is not just fiction, but also non-fiction and you might just find a niche doing Permie type books. Because the USDA has written a lot of information for farmers over the years, say something like "how to keep rats out of outbuildings on the farm", you will find it there. Even if you do not want to read these type of books for money, it is prudent for ALL PERMIE MEMBERS to check out the huge amount of free books they have online in dealing with agricultural problems.

Gutenbergs 70,000 Out of Copyright Books

Project Gutenberg is a fabulous library! But as I mentioned before, copyright issues are important, and different in many countries. Just because a book is out of copyright in the US and available via Gutenberg doesn't mean it's out of copyright in the UK, Europe, or Australia.

It's one thing to download for your own personal use a book that's out of copyright in the US but not in the reader's own country. That could be considered to come under fair usage. It's another to try to monetise it in some way. If the copyright holders are guarding their rights in the UK, it could lead to all kinds of unpleasantness.  

Thankfully, there's plenty of wonderful fiction also out of copyright in the UK that Nancy can use for audio. Her voice and how she brings the book to life for the listener becomes the selling point, more than the story itself.

Jane Mulberry wrote:Project Gutenberg is a fabulous library! But as I mentioned before, copyright issues are important, and different in many countries. Just because a book is out of copyright in the US and available via Gutenberg doesn't mean it's out of copyright in the UK, Europe, or Australia.

It's one thing to download for your own personal use a book that's out of copyright in the US but not in the reader's own country. That could be considered to come under fair usage. It's another to try to monetise it in some way. If the copyright holders are guarding their rights in the UK, it could lead to all kinds of unpleasantness.  

Thankfully, there's plenty of wonderful fiction also out of copyright in the UK that Nancy can use for audio. Her voice and how she brings the book to life for the listener becomes the selling point, more than the story itself.

I don't think that is fully correct.

There are treaties in place by the World Trade Organization that includes almost every country in the world who have agrees to Intellectual Rights that include Copyright protection. (Section 13 of the TRIPS Accord) That was the whole purpose of this treaty, to ensure that all countries (or almost all countries) were on the same level playing field when it comes to copyright protection.

Unless you live in the 16 countries that are NOT part of the WTO, then anything Gutenberg has is out of copyright and available for commercial use. Even then, considering who these nations are, since they do not abide by this treaty anyway, then it is doubtful living in one of those sixteen countries they would allow one of their own countrymen to be sued in court in their nation.

I LOVE audiobooks and great radio productions (BBCRADIO4 is fantastic and free)..

I find I don’t like many readers though.

I pretty much will only buy audiobooks with great readers/narrators.

A good reader/narrator/actor is hard to find. It’s surprising how difficult it actually is to be good at it — just as difficult a job to be really good at, as anything else one pursues, career-wise.

tuffy monteverdi wrote:I pretty much will only buy audiobooks with great readers/narrators.

A good reader/narrator/actor is hard to find. It’s surprising how difficult it actually is to be good at it — just as difficult a job to be really good at, as anything else one pursues, career-wise.

Yes, I agree. I didn't like to say it, but the 'wrong' accent can be off putting to me, and the whole acting-with-your-voice thing can make a lot of difference. I find Steven Fry is wonderful reading the Harry Potter books for example. I have had experience reading to children, but never as a recording or for adults, so I may be rubbish at it. That's one reason I thought a 'try before you buy' would be fair. Now my head cold is better I can take a stab at a first chapter and see how I get on.