A finished hour of audiobook is not an hour of work. It is closer to six once you count recording, editing, mastering, and the final check against a retailer's file spec. That ratio is why audiobook quotes surprise first-time authors, and why this work gets priced by the finished hour almost everywhere.
This article gives our range for audiobook production, converts it into the per-hour figure you will see quoted elsewhere, and lists what moves a book up or down inside it.
The published range
We produce a typical audiobook for $2,500 to $8,000. Typical here means 8 to 12 finished hours, which covers most novels and most trade nonfiction.
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| SCIQI audiobook production | $2,500 to $8,000 |
| Typical finished length | 8 to 12 hours |
| Common industry framing | $150 to $500 per finished hour |
That range is published in the estimator on our connect page, next to the rest of our pricing. Every quote we send is specific to the manuscript. The estimator exists so you can build a budget before you talk to anyone.
You can estimate your own finished hours from your word count. Narration runs at a steady pace, so a manuscript twice as long produces roughly twice the audio.
Doing the per-hour math
Industry pricing is commonly framed per finished hour, roughly $150 to $500. Multiply that across an 8 to 12 hour book and the band runs from about $1,200 at the bottom to about $6,000 at the top.
Ours starts higher and ends higher. The difference is what the number includes. A per-hour narration rate usually buys the reading and stops there. Our range covers recording, the editing and mastering passes, and delivery in the shape each retailer expects.
So compare scope before you compare prices. A quote that ends at "narrated audio files" leaves the mastering and the platform specs with you, and those are the steps where a first audiobook sits unfinished for months.
Four things that move the number
Manuscript length. The largest driver and the easiest to check. Everything downstream scales with it, from hours in the booth to hours in the edit.
Narrator choice. One voice for the whole book is the baseline. A second voice for dialogue, or a full cast, multiplies both session scheduling and edit complexity. Author narration is its own case; it can be the right call for memoir and for nonfiction where the author is the reason people are buying, and it costs whatever the coaching and the retakes cost.
Editing and mastering passes. Every book gets a pass. Books get expensive when they need several: a proof listen against the manuscript, corrections punched in, then a re-master. Fiction heavy with dialogue and nonfiction heavy with unfamiliar terms both tend to need more than one round.
Retail platform specs. Retailers publish technical requirements for the files they accept, and an upload that misses them is rejected. Meeting the spec is routine when it is planned into the session and painful when it is discovered after the mix is signed off.
What we are recording now
We are producing John Sandbach's novel Azoth and a collection of his haiku, both narrated by Adam Elliott Rush, the studio's founder.
Recording happens in an acoustically treated studio. The mixes are done by the same team that scores films and directs game audio at Mjolnir Software, so an audiobook here goes through the same signal chain and the same ears as scored work.
Prose and verse are different narration problems. A novel needs continuity held across ten hours of reading, so the voice you use in chapter one has to still be available in chapter thirty. A haiku collection needs the pacing right in the silence around each poem, where a quarter second either way changes the reading.
If you want narration on its own, without the production around it, that sits under voiceover and narration.
What to bring to a quote
Four answers get you a tight estimate:
- Your word count, or a page count and trim size we can convert.
- Who narrates. You, one of our narrators, or a voice you want cast.
- Where it will sell. Retailer specs differ, and distribution changes the deliverables.
- Your date. Studio time is scheduled, and a fixed launch narrows the options.
With those we can place you inside the $2,500 to $8,000 range for audiobook production and tell you what would move you down a tier. Going from a full cast to a single narrator moves the price more than anything else on the list.
Send the manuscript, or the first chapter and a word count if the manuscript is still moving. You can start a project and we will come back with a price.