So how do you get started on your wonderful foray into this new adventure of audiobooks? The first thing I remember doing is creating an ACX account. You use the same login as you use for Amazon, so thank goodness not another user name or password! Somewhere along in the signup, they will ask for your financial information, just like they did for Kindle. Go through all those legal/technical steps.
So now you have an ACX account. You now know you will be paid when you start selling, and of course you’ll sell! Next, you have to claim your book. Remember Point #1: One Book At A Time. That is my mantra. Decide which book you want to start with. If you have a series, I recommend you start with the first one. Your other books aren’t going anywhere so you can let them sit until you get this book done.
One other reason to do your books one at a time is in case you want the same voice for your books. Since I have 2 linked books, my dream had originally been to have the same reader, but because I didn’t know Point #1 and had the stipends’ 60-day limits, that was not going to happen. You might not get a stipend, but then again, I didn’t know anything about them. Even if I had would never have expected to get one, let alone three, yet I did. If you get a stipend, the 60-day clock starts ticking the minute your reader accepts your offer. Said reader would be justified in coming after you with a meat cleaver if you asked them to do 2 books in 60 days!
You are going to have a page with a chart that includes the following tabs:
Open for Auditions
Offers
In Production
Rights Not Posted
Completed Projects
As you move through the stages, your project will shift from one tab to the next, but after you are in contract with your reader, you will always have numbers in the “Offers” tab. You will need to get well acquainted with this page. It will be your guide through the whole process. As you move along, this is where the submitted auditions appear, and where the chapters your readers are done with show up.
Get familiar with the very top of the page as well. Your login/signout is at the furthest left corner, and next to it are some small words in blue: “Projects,” “Auditions,” “Messages,” and “Account Settings.”
These little blue words become very important as you go along. This is where you will likely first see that you have auditions, and how you keep tract of your “Messages” file. If you want to get into your messages, this “Messages” is what takes you there.
Once you are well acquainted with this part of the process, it’s on to Point 3 – Learning the Terms and Rules.
(original blog date 8/20/2015)