How Much Does It Cost to Produce an Audiobook?
Audiobook Production Cost Breakdown: Audiobooks are priced by the Per Finished Hour (PFH) rate, combining narration, studio time, and audio editing. A standard 90,000-word novel equals roughly 10 finished hours of audio.
Professional Rates (ACX / Findaway Voices): $300 to $800 total PFH ($1,500–$8,000+ for a full-length novel).
Budget Freelancers (Fiverr / Upwork): $50 to $150 total PFH ($500–$1,500 total, with varying audio quality).
Royalty Share: $0 upfront cash outlay in exchange for permanently splitting future sales royalties 50/50 with the narrator.
How Per Finished Hour (PFH) Audio Rates Work
Audiobooks are priced by the finished hour, not the word count, and that unit is where most authors lose the thread of what they are actually agreeing to pay.
Professional Narration Costs: ACX vs. Findaway Voices
Professional narration through ACX or Findaway Voices runs roughly $150 to $400 per finished hour for most working narrators, with established or in-demand narrators charging $300 to $500 or more. Add studio time and audio editing, typically another $50 to $200 per finished hour depending on how much cleanup the raw recording needs, and a full professional production lands between $300 and $800 per finished hour once every line item is counted. A 90,000-word novel runs roughly 10 finished hours of narration. At the low end of professional rates, that is $1,500 to $4,000. At the high end, with a known narrator and full studio production, it can reach $8,000 for a single title.
Findaway Voices' marketplace tends to run 10 to 15 percent lower than ACX for comparable narrator experience, with no separate platform setup fee, which brings an 8-hour audiobook to roughly $2,500 to $6,500 all in.
Budget Platforms: Fiverr and Upwork Trade-Offs
Budget platforms like Fiverr and Upwork list narrators at $50 to $150 per finished hour. A 9-hour novel at that rate lands between $500 and $1,500, a fraction of professional pricing. The trade-off is real: quality, direction, and post-production polish vary enormously at that price point, and a poorly produced audiobook is a permanent, reviewable artifact in a format where listeners are unusually sensitive to pacing and performance.
The alternative to paying anything upfront is a royalty share agreement, where the narrator takes no payment for production and instead splits the audiobook's royalty with the author, typically 50/50. This removes the cash outlay entirely, which matters on an indie budget, but it is a long-term commitment rather than a one-time cost. Every future royalty on that title is permanently halved. Whether that trade favors the author depends on how long the title is expected to keep selling, which is a harder number to estimate than a production invoice.
None of these figures include what percentage ACX or Findaway actually pays out once the audiobook is live, which changed substantially under Audible's new royalty model this year (covered here in July) and deserves its own read before signing anything.
Map's Edge Media is weighing this exact trade-off for its own upcoming audiobook editions, and will share what it decides.