Frequently Asked Questions

Not all books are destined to be bestsellers. It is not only the quality of the writing; the marketability of the book plays a significant role. Sometimes, there might just not be enough demand. The only way to know if a book has bestseller potential is to market and promote it—the right way. This means before any resources are spent attempting to make sales, ensure that the book has the best chance of succeeding by ensuring the book's presentation is professional and attractive, and it is available in the formats and on the sites/devices where the prospective readers are. Then we focus on exposure, and then sales.

Creating audiobook-ready files is not easy, and any deviation from the below requirements will cause the files to be rejected. Audible.com has very strict standards in order to maintain quality.

• Opening and closing credits audio files. Two separate files are required to begin and end your audiobook.

    Opening Credits:

    [title of audiobook]
    Written by [name of author]
    Narrated by [name of narrator]

    Closing Credits:

    This has been [title of audiobook]
    Written by [name of author]
    Narrated by [name of narrator]
    Copyright [year and name of copyright holder]
    Production copyright [year it was recorded] by [company name]

• All recordings must be human-voice -- no computer-read books accepted.
• File type accepted: MP3 (192 kbps or higher)
• Files must be CBR (constant bit rate) as Audible does not accept VBR (variable bit rate) files.
• Submitted audiobooks may not contain both mono and stereo files. Stereo files must not be joint-stereo. Mono files are strongly recommended.
• Each audiobook should be encapsulated in its own folder or directory. The directory should match the full title of the audio.
• Each file must be comprised of a single chapter, episode, or story (unless otherwise not possible). Note that each file will typically become a “track” that a customer may use for navigation.
• If the audio has no chapters, please split the audio into segments that are no longer than 2 hours each, but no shorter than 30 minutes each (when possible).
• Each file should be preceded by a three digit number that denotes the order in which the files should appear. The file names should appear as: 001_title.mp3, 002_title.mp3, 003_title.mp3.
• Provide a sample file that is named, “title_sample.mp3.” The sample audio must not exceed 5 minutes in duration and it must be longer than one minute. It should start with narration, not opening credits or music, and must not include explicit material. This sample is used by customers to preview your audiobook.
• “Ripping” audio CDs is strongly discouraged as errors can often produce skipping and other audible glitches in the audio.
• Each file must be free of extraneous sounds (mouse clicks, mic pops, mouth noises, etc.)
• Each file must measure between -23dB and -18dB RMS and have -3dB peak values and a maximum -60dB noise floor
• Each uploaded file must have between 0.5 and 1 second of room tone at the head, and between 1 and 5 seconds of room tone at the tail.

Audible does for Audible.com, and Amazon*. You do for the other retailers.

* and iTunes if you are not going with full distribution.

Audible is very strict about the image, so it is best to have the person who designed your ebook/printbook cover also design your audiobook cover image to these specs:

• Images must be no smaller than 2400 X 2400 pixels in size.
• The resolution of these images can be no smaller than 72 dpi.
• Images must be squared. The squared cover must be a true squared cover and cannot be rectangular with colored borders on the side. (ex. CD case cover/jacket)
• Images should be at least 24-bit.
• Images cannot refer to physical CDs or media other than the audio presented.
• Pornographic and offensive materials are not allowed.
• Image types allowed: JPEG, TIFF, PNG
• Each image should be labeled as the full title (ex. Book_title.jpg) or ISBN (ex. 1234567890123.jpg)
• Images must contain both the name of the title and author(s)
• Images cannot contain any borders. Audible considers borders any kind of "filler" used to make an ebook image into a square.

 AI narration through AuthorVoices.ai costs roughly 1/10th of traditional human narration. For example, a 50,000-word book (~5 finished hours) costs about $398 with our done-for-you AI service, or even less if you do it yourself on AuthorVoices.ai. The same book with a professional human narrator through SelfPublishing.pro would run about $1,100. Human narration is priced at approximately $220 per finished hour (with a $220 minimum for books under 10,000 words).

 AI narration can be completed in hours — the done-for-you service typically delivers a proof within 24 hours. Human narration takes weeks to months depending on narrator availability, book length, and the revision process.

The vast majority of retailers accept and distribute AI-narrated audiobooks. Apple Books has explicitly embraced AI narration technology. However, Amazon/Audible/ACX does NOT currently accept audiobooks with AI voices. If your primary sales channel is Audible, human narration is the way to go — or you can produce an AI version now for other retailers and submit to Audible once their policy changes.

All of them, without exception. Human narration is universally accepted across every audiobook platform including Audible, Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo, and all others.

 Today's cloned AI voices are virtually indistinguishable from human narration. AuthorVoices.ai offers dozens of voice options across multiple accents and age ranges, plus the ability to clone your own voice. That said, if your book requires heavy emotional acting, more than four distinct character voices, or very nuanced dramatic performance, human narration may still be the better choice.

 Yes! AuthorVoices.ai offers voice cloning — you upload samples of your voice and the AI creates a narration that sounds like you. This is a great option for authors who want a personal touch without spending days in a recording booth.

Yes, with both options you retain all rights to your audiobook.

 Both! You can create the audiobook yourself on AuthorVoices.ai (it takes about 1 minute per minute of audio, with 75% of the time spent proofing). Or use the done-for-you service where the AuthorVoices team handles everything and delivers distribution-ready files.

 For AI narration, you'll need a valid .epub, .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .pages file (not PDF — it causes line break issues). For human narration, the project management team will work with you on manuscript delivery.

Here is our current list of retail and library partners for ebook distribution. A few notes about distribution:

• Not all the partners have a retail website where you can search for books. Many are back-end distributors that provide the books to many smaller retailers
• Not all of the partners are obligated to accept all books (although most do). Some accept academic books only and some are country specific. A few are selective based on undisclosed factors.
• If you are searching for your book, try a combination of title, author, and ISBN. Keep in mind that many retail sites do not have great searching functionality.

We do provide you with an ISBN, if you don't have one, with our ebook distribution service. If you are using your own ISBN, it must be a 13 digit ISBN, and it must be unique for the ebook version (only one ISBN is necessary no matter how many different ebook formats, e.g., .pdf, .epub, .mobi). The ISBN is under our brand "SelfPublishing.pro" and must be returned if your book is taken out of distribution by us.

You can opt out of any of the retailers that are in bold the list above (the major retailers) or opt out of all of the retailers that are not in bold. You specify this in the project form.

The ROI greatly varies from service to service. Before we go into more detail, consider the parable of the bucket and the pipeline. Here is the 30-second version of the story:

A village was in need of fresh water, but the only source was a stream miles away. Every day, villagers would have to make the hike to get the water. Two local entrepreneurs decided to do something about it. The first entrepreneur used a large cart that could hold several buckets to store the water and would make daily trips to the stream and return to the village to sell the water. This entrepreneur would earn 10 coins a day. The second entrepreneur invested in building a pipeline from the stream to the village. Although this took both time and investment, once the pipeline went live, the second entrepreneur would make hundreds of coins a day and not have to do any work. He put the first entrepreneur out of business.

We don't expect all authors to build pipelines and forgo the instant returns and immediate sales, but we do strongly believe that a solid marketing strategy should include both short-term and long-term investment. The goal isn't to endlessly dump money into ads and promotions and hope that the positive return continues indefinitely (spoiler alert: it won't). Nor is the goal to tirelessly search for new promotions that promise high returns on investment, only to lose money on countless "duds" before finding one that works for your particular book. The goal is to "build a pipeline" by making a name for yourself as an author and/or your book. This requires exposure and branding. However, because we know most authors typically don't have deep pockets, we mix in some promotions with short-term (one to three months) profitability potential so sales can justify continued longer-term investment in the book.

Although almost certainly, any of our services will lead to more book sales, we cannot guarantee it. There are too many factors outside of our control. For example, if you are selling ten books a month on average due to some regular promotion that you do, then you stop doing that promotion; even if our efforts increase your sales by nine books per month and would be considered successful, you are selling one fewer book per month. If your books are seasonal, or even if you happened to have a great month prior to the promotion with us, overall sales could go down despite a successful campaign. The criterion of "sell more books" (understood as more books per month) would be a flawed measurement criterion.

You can expect that, for at least an hour on Amazon, your book will be listed as an Amazon Best Seller. Amazon's "Best Seller" designation is given to the top 100 books in every category based on the sales that hour. You can read more details about this on Amazon's site: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201648140.

What this means: Once an Amazon Best Seller, always an Amazon Best Seller. But this doesn't mean your book is "currently" a best seller. Be careful how you represent your book. You will only see the "best seller" flag attached to your book, and on Amazon's Best Seller lists when your book is a best seller. With our service, this can last anywhere from an hour to over a day, depending on the competition in your category.

The "Amazon Best Seller" is a marketing gimmick, make no mistake. However, it is still an accomplishment that very few authors get to experience. It is impressive to the layperson who doesn't know how Amazon's Best Seller status works, which is virtually everyone. This is why this service is so popular with authors.

Promotion aims to get your books into the hands of more readers with the hope that it catches on organically; that is, people will start to share and write about your book, increasing sales without putting more money into it. Most people forget or don’t know that when a traditional publisher puts out a book, it usually does so with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of marketing to initiate this organic growth. Some books succeed (as measured by growing organically), and even with that kind of investment, most do not. Self-published authors rarely have those kinds of funds for investment. Putting a couple hundred dollars into a promotion or two one time is unlikely to spark any organic growth, but it should stimulate sales and increase readership. The bottom line is to manage your expectations if you are dealing with a small budget. Continued promotion is the way to go, but one needs to know when to accept that the book is not marketable. This is a difficult conclusion since it is essentially giving up on the book.

We submit most books* to both Amazon directly along with Ingram. Amazon has world-wide distribution and retail accessibility, while Ingram deals with wholesale and library distribution. The retailers for Ingram are:

* Some books are only sent to just Amazon or Just ingram based on the covers clients sends, and sometimes books meet requirements for Amazon and not Ingram, or vice versa. We will let you know before distribution if this is the case.

I get this question often, and here is my response.

First, remove all of the services that were already done and we done well. So if you created dozens of social media images that look great, cross that service off the list of potential services for you to use.

Next, remove all the services that don't apply to your book. For example, if your book is not a children's book, then remove the children's book service. If your book is a self-help book, then it wouldn't make the best movie, so remove the "Hollywood Here I Come" service.

Now you can look at our packages. I created these packages with this question in mind... I put all the "biggest bang for the buck" services in these packages. So for example, if you only have $500, the "Under $500" package contains those services I would suggest. You can see the services that each package contains.

I hesitate to list services here because they change and are updated frequently, but I always update the packages. So look at the packages here: https://www.selfpublishing.pro/packages

This might border on a legal question so please understand I am answering this as an author of over a dozen books and publisher of over 5000 books. No, you don't need to copyright your book. In fact, I would guess that maybe 1 in 500 authors actually bother with the official copyright process for their books, because of what is referred to as "implied copyright" that in inherent with publishing and simply declaring copyright with a date in your book's front matter. Now, if you find your book is taking off and approaching "Harry Potter" status, I would go through the expense of an official copyright to make sure all bases are covered. Otherwise, in most cases, the implied copyright is more than enough.

Amazon provides a great tool for calculating the price of your book and shows you your royalty for your chosen price. You can find this at https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GSQF43YAMUPFTMSP  Your royalty shown must be a minimum of $2 per book. We can choose the price for you if you leave it blank. We will also set the Ingram prices based on what you enter for Amazon. Ingram prices are typically about 40% higher because profit is lower due to splitting the royalties with bookstores.

Amazon provides a great tool for calculating the price of your Amazon book and shows you your royalty for your chosen price - you can use this for Ingram as well. You can find this at https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GSQF43YAMUPFTMSP . Your royalty shown must be a minimum of $2 per book. We can choose the price for you if you leave it blank. You can also set the Ingram prices based on what you enter for Amazon. Ingram prices are typically about 40% higher because profit is lower due to splitting the royalties with bookstores.

Payments are made on the 15th day of the month by midnight, Eastern Time (EST) unless the 15th falls on a weekend or US holiday in which case, the payment will be made on the next business day, by midnight EST.

Payments made in any given month are for sales made two months prior.

First, you need to make sure you have a Facebook Page setup—not a just a Facebook personal account, a "page" devoted to you as an author or your book. If you don't let your project manager know and they will set one up for you (and you can ignore the rest of this answer).

(You should do all of this on a desktop device rather than a mobile device).

If you signed up for the Amazon Ads Setup and Management Service, and a) your book is not being distributed by SelfPublishing.pro, and b) you are distributing your book through your own Amazon KDP account (not through another service), then these directions are for you.

There are four parts to this:

1. Sign up for an Amazon Ads account if you already don't have one.
2. Fund your Amazon Ads account if you already didn't add a credit card.
3. Give access to our Amazon marketing specialist.
4. Rename your account to author or book name

Skip to any section if not needed.

Sign Up for an Amazon Ads Account

Fund Your Amazon Ads Account

Give Access to our Amazon Marketing Specialist

Change Your Default Account Name

If your ebook is also with other retailers like Google, B&N, Apple, etc., then Amazon allows for “price matching.” Since they won’t allow you to set a price of "0.00" for your ebook, you need to change your ebook price with any major retailer to free (I suggest B&N or Google, as these are easiest and take place quickly). Then, you need to use Amazon KDP’s HELP menu to contact them and request a price match. Here I will show you how to do this using Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

/// Instructions for .m4b Files ///

To play an .m4b file, which is typically an audiobook format, you can use various media players that support this file type. Here are some options:

- iTunes or Apple Books: If you're using an Apple device, iTunes (for older versions of macOS) or Apple Books (for macOS Catalina and later) can play .m4b files seamlessly.

- VLC Media Player: VLC is a free, open-source media player that is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. It can handle .m4b files and a wide range of other media formats.

- Audible App: If the .m4b file is from Audible, using the Audible app available on various platforms (including iOS and Android) is a convenient option.

- Smart Audiobook Player: This is a popular choice for Android users. It is specifically designed for playing audiobooks, including .m4b files.

- MP3 Players: Some MP3 players support .m4b files, especially those designed with audiobooks in mind. Check your device’s specifications to confirm compatibility.

- Other Media Players: Other media players like MediaMonkey, KMPlayer, or Winamp may also support .m4b files.

/// Instructions for .zip File ///

To listen to .mp3 files that are contained within a .zip file, you need to first extract the .mp3 files from the .zip archive. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to do this:

1. **Download and Save the .zip File**: Make sure the .zip file is downloaded and saved on your computer or device.

2. **Extract the .zip File**:
   - On Windows:
     - Right-click the .zip file.
     - Select "Extract All..." or "Extract Here" (depending on your version of Windows).
     - Choose a destination folder where you want the extracted files to be saved.
     - Click "Extract".
   - On macOS:
     - Double-click the .zip file.
     - The files will automatically be extracted to the same location as the .zip file.
   - On Linux:
     - Right-click the .zip file.
     - Choose "Extract Here" or "Extract to..." and select a destination folder.
   - On Mobile Devices (iOS, Android):
     - Use a file manager app that supports zip extraction. Apps like "Files" on iOS or "Files by Google" on Android can usually handle this.
     - Tap on the .zip file and look for an option to extract or unzip.

3. **Play the Extracted .mp3 Files**:
   - Once the .mp3 files are extracted, you can play them using any standard media player that supports the .mp3 format.
   - If you're on a computer, you can use media players like VLC Media Player, Windows Media Player, iTunes, or any other player you prefer.
   - On mobile devices, you can use the built-in music player or any other media player app you have installed.

By extracting the .mp3 files from the .zip archive, you make them accessible to media players, which typically cannot play files that are still compressed inside a .zip file.

Here are detailed instructions for unzipping ZIP files on both Windows and macOS:

### For Windows Users

#### Method 1: Using Windows File Explorer
1. **Locate the ZIP File:** Open `File Explorer` and navigate to the location of the ZIP file you want to unzip.
2. **Right-Click on the ZIP File:** Right-click the file, and from the context menu, choose **Extract All…**.
3. **Choose the Extraction Location:** In the `Extract Compressed (Zipped) Folders` dialog box, you’ll see a default location where the files will be unzipped. To change it, click **Browse…** and select a new folder.
4. **Extract Files:** Click **Extract**. The files will be unzipped to the location you selected.
5. **Access Unzipped Files:** Once the process is complete, the unzipped files will appear in the chosen location. You can now view or open these files directly.

#### Method 2: Using Third-Party Software (e.g., 7-Zip)
1. **Download and Install 7-Zip:** Go to [7-Zip’s website](https://www.7-zip.org/), download the installer, and follow the instructions to install it.
2. **Locate the ZIP File:** In `File Explorer`, navigate to your ZIP file.
3. **Extract with 7-Zip:** Right-click the ZIP file, hover over **7-Zip** in the context menu, and select **Extract Here** or **Extract to <folder_name>**.
4. **Access Files:** The files will be extracted either in the current location or within a new folder (if you chose **Extract to <folder_name>**). You can open and view them.

### For macOS Users

#### Method 1: Using the Built-in Archive Utility
1. **Locate the ZIP File:** Open `Finder` and go to the folder where the ZIP file is stored.
2. **Double-Click the ZIP File:** Double-clicking the ZIP file will automatically begin the unzipping process using macOS’s built-in `Archive Utility`.
3. **View the Unzipped Files:** Once unzipped, a new folder will appear in the same location as the ZIP file. This folder will contain all of the extracted files.

These methods should work on both desktop and laptop computers running Windows or macOS.