The finished hour
An 84,000-word novel is about nine finished hours — that one number drives your budget, your schedule, and your retail price.
Audiobooks are measured, priced, and scheduled in finished hours: one hour of final, edited, mastered audio. The working rule is roughly 9,300 words per finished hour.
Do that math on your manuscript first. It turns every conversation that follows — cost, timeline, retail pricing — from guesswork into arithmetic.
What it actually costs
Professional narration is quoted per finished hour, and rates vary with experience, complexity, and what the engagement includes. Narration-only is one number; full production is another.
Be wary of quotes that are dramatically cheap. Editing and QC are where budgets hide, and where cheap audiobooks get rejected by retailers or reviewed badly by listeners.
The real timeline
A single-narrator novel typically runs four to eight weeks from locked manuscript to delivery: preparation, recording, editing and proofing, pickups, then mastering and packaging.
The most common delay is not the studio — it is manuscript changes after recording starts. Lock the text first; every edit afterward is a re-record.
Decisions only you can make
Voice: one narrator or several, and what the story actually needs. Distribution: exclusive to one retailer for a higher royalty, or wide for reach. Rights: confirm you hold audio rights before anything records.
A good production partner will lay out these options with trade-offs and let you choose — not choose for you.