Indie authors may not commonly use the word “bespoke” to describe their businesses, but for an industry built on creatives paving unique paths for themselves and their work, the term is as apt as any other. Authors’ creative decisions, from the genre and tropes they select to the formats they offer and how they market them, strike a careful balance between fitting in and standing out. And as new authors and AI-generated content saturate the market further, that balance is more delicate than ever.

It’s a balance Marnye Young and Denise Black, of Audio Sorceress, understand. They embrace the term “bespoke” as they describe their work—both for how it describes the authors they serve and for how it describes their own work at the company.

“Everything [at Audio Sorceress] is tailored,” says Young, founder and CEO of the company. “Instead of, ‘Everything is mass produced, and AI is mass produced, and these audiobooks are done by virtual voice, and we send out hundreds and hundreds of them at a time,’ this is humans. This is our blood, sweat, and tears, and we're all working together to ensure the success for all of us.”

The audiobook production company specializes in audiobooks that feel like “performances rather than recordings,” according to its website. Using SAG-AFTRA–contracted voice actors and incorporating music and sound effects into the narration, those performances have been enough to land authors in the Top Ten on Audible for fiction. The company’s newest feature, however, looks beyond the production stage of publishing to the marketing stage.

“There's all these wonderfully talented indie authors that write these books that no one ever hears about—in this case, audiobooks that no one ever listens to—because they don't even know that they exist,” Young says. 

She and Black hope Audio Sorceress’s discovery portal, which launched earlier this year, will change that.

Giving Authors a Voice

Young, a voice actor herself, started Audio Sorceress in 2018, and Black joined a year later as the company’s managing director—“and the bestie,” Black jokes. The company is small; alongside the two women, the company employs just one graphic designer and five engineers. But the small company means the Audio Sorceress team can dedicate themselves fully to each new project. 

“We kind of do it all,” Black says. “If we don't do it, then we say yes and we figure it out as we go along.”

For one project, that meant Young scrounging on social media to learn which agency represented a specific voice actor because the author had requested that actor specifically. “I remember I spent, what was it, a week trying to find that guy?” Young asks Black. “But it’s like a dog with a bone … because it’s the joy of being able to tell your author, ‘I got him.’”

Although some audiobook production companies employ in-house narrators, Audio Sorceress has a roster of hundreds of SAG-AFTRA–contracted voice actors from which authors can choose—or Young will work to contact a specific actor, if the author has someone in mind. 

“We want to be able to provide our authors with whoever they want as long as they have the budget for it,” Black says. 

Audio Sorceress offers single, dual, duet, and multi-cast narration, as well as immersive audio—most recently heard in David Viergutz’s Scaremail: The Drift—in which sound effects and music are incorporated into the final recording. The company offers options for recording in Spanish and German as well; in February, the company began work on a project for the German translation of a best-selling LitRPG author whose series has sold more than a million copies. 

“We kind of do it all. If we don't do it, then we say yes and we figure it out as we go along.”
—Denise Black, Audio Sorceress managing director

More recently, the company has added a new feature meant to help authors market their work—not just the audiobooks created by Audio Sorceress, but other formats as well. The company’s discovery portal provides each author with a landing page that includes information about their books, including blurbs, tropes lists, and content warnings; purchase links; links to the author’s social media accounts; a book trailer created by Audio Sorceress; reviews; and interactive elements for readers, such as quizzes. “It’s like a completely separate website, every one that you click on,” Black says. 

Authors work with designers in two one-hour sessions to design the page, which costs $50 a month and is available to anyone who has produced at least one audiobook with the company. Like with each audiobook the company creates, the landing pages are fully customized to the author’s preferences. 

Audio Sorceress worked with design company Godot to create the discovery portal and advertises it to bring readers to authors’ landing pages. From there, readers are recommended other authors, from across genres. Audio Sorceress already provided its authors with a book trailer and social media promotion along with each audiobook the company produced; however, Young says the discovery portal supports the company’s mission even more. 

“Our whole focus is about community, about human voices, human connectivity,” she says. “Our company really focuses on empowerment, and these indie authors who don't get the exposure that they should have and deserve—this is empowering for them because this is another way for them to get out there.”

Audio for All

Audio Sorceress is a woman-owned and women-led company, a distinction listed on the homepage of the company’s website; both Young and Black consider that an important responsibility as mothers of daughters. They also recognize the role they can play for others in the industries they work with most. 

In the audio industry, that means ensuring female narrators are paid equal rates to their male counterparts. “Some of the pay discrepancies, like the ones that exist in Hollywood, exist in the audio industry too, and we are trying hard to fix that,” Young says.

“Our whole focus is about community, about human voices, human connectivity.”
—Marnye Young, Audio Sorceress founder and CEO

On the author side of their business, the company offers scholarships for authors who aren’t able to afford the cost of audiobook creation on their own. The company started the scholarship fund after raising money via Kickstarter in 2023; now, the scholarships are funded by donations from other authors who’ve worked with Audio Sorceress. 

“One of our prolific female authors said, ‘Hey, I want to pay for a scholarship for a Dark Romance author once a year. Rather than pay more in taxes, I want to put the money back into the community, which is what we're so huge on,’” Black says. Audiobook production prices vary based on several factors, including voice actors’ individual rates, the number of narrators used, and the length of the book. Since the first scholarships, however, another author has donated to fund an author’s first audiobook each year, and others have helped fund one-time scholarships for other authors. 

“It just kind of has a ripple effect,” Young says. 

Authors interested in applying for a scholarship with Audio Sorceress can learn more about the program at https://audiosorceress.com/scholarships. To be eligible, authors must be self-published or planning to self-publish, own full audio rights to their manuscript, have a final formatted manuscript ready for audio production, and be willing to engage in the promotion of the audiobook once its complete. 

Creating Space

In the audiobook industry, where narrators are increasingly wrestling with the impact of AI, Young and Black celebrate that Audio Sorceress, at its core, is built by and for human creativity. Between the company’s willingness to fully customize authors’ projects and experiences and the support authors in their community are willing to offer, they hope they can continue that trend.

“It’s always been successful when we work together,” Young says. It’s a message she and Black repeat often; they hope the discovery portal can help bring those words to life for their customers. 

“We've run into a lot of authors that want to help other authors,” Young says. “This [portal] is not just recognizing their generosity but making it happen, putting it out there for others to partake in and be a part of developing an ecosystem where all these creatives are coming together and working for the benefit of each other.”