I can actually answer that (due to random quirks in my life).
1) Opposite my office there used to be an audiobook company. Whole office of people built around a sound-booth where an actor would spend a week or so recording a book. I used to see the famousish coming out for smoke-breaks day-after-day. Maybe a dozen people, for a fortnight, to make 'an audiobook'
2) My wife used to work for a publishing company for hire (used to knock out Disney branded books for supermarkets and the like). Books cost practically nothing to print in China. Then could be shipped around and sold at the lowest of rates/margins.
Saying an audiobook costs nothing to record, is like saying a band could just publish their sheet-music.
So what's the approximate cost of recording an audio book then? Is it a lot more than preparing the text for print? How much does distribution cost compared to the paper version? My uneducated guess is that the profit margin on audio books are much higher than paperbacks, maybe hardbacks as well.
> An average audiobook created with Findaway Voices has about 50,000 words and costs between $1,000 and $2,000. We can estimate the cost of your audiobook by multiplying a per finished hour narrator rate with the estimated length of your finished recording. The longer the book, the higher the estimate will be.
Playing with the sliders, they seem to estimate that a 50K-word book will be 200 finished hours. Their narrators charge a $250-$500 rate per finished hour. ("Narrators charge by the length of the delivered audio, not how many hours go into preparing, recording, editing, mastering, proofing, etc.")
Famous actors can cost arbitrarily more, of course.
200 finished hours for a typical book seems very high to me. I'm listening to a lot of audiobooks from the library (free) and most non-fiction books are between 10 and 30 hours.
I've read and recorded books for fun in my free time for friends and the best I could manage (on my own) was about 2 to 4 hours per hour of completed recording. From sentences I had to re-record over and over again (either due to me not being able to get it right, or the cat intervening) then cutting, re-listening whether the pauses are okay, etc. For a professional recording six hours sounds about right.
Titus Welliver has started performing the Harry Bosch novels from Michael Connelly. The first half of his first performance was pretty rough and sounded like an in-store reading. Over the course of that book and the first bit of the second he really found his groove.
With this in mind, I never would have guessed that it took this long for the full process, but once its broken down into pieces, it makes sense and doesn't seem like a lot of time at all.
A little off-topic -- years ago This American Life had a short piece about an audiobook performer who used a closet in her hotel with a bunch of pillows as a booth... and she found herself locked in.. alone.
>Carin Gilfry explains how she once accidentally locked herself in a hotel closet, and because today’s show is being broadcast from an opera house stage, Ira is able to take the story to a place he never usually can. (18 minutes)
1) Opposite my office there used to be an audiobook company. Whole office of people built around a sound-booth where an actor would spend a week or so recording a book. I used to see the famousish coming out for smoke-breaks day-after-day. Maybe a dozen people, for a fortnight, to make 'an audiobook'
2) My wife used to work for a publishing company for hire (used to knock out Disney branded books for supermarkets and the like). Books cost practically nothing to print in China. Then could be shipped around and sold at the lowest of rates/margins.
Saying an audiobook costs nothing to record, is like saying a band could just publish their sheet-music.