The Sleuthy Story
How a narrator’s frustration became a platform for the audiobook community.
It Started at the Microphone
I narrated my first audiobook in 2017 and moved to recording full-time in 2019. Like most new narrators, I struggled to find paying work and get noticed by the big production houses and publishers. I knew from decades of running my own small businesses that we can’t wait for the work to find us. We have to actively seek out opportunities.
It took years of trial, error, and some costly mistakes to find the winning formula. But it worked. I’ve now made 100,000 royalty share sales on Audible alone, and my monthly revenue continues to grow. Best of all, these projects will keep bringing in royalty income for many years to come. I’ll still be earning from this work long after I’ve left the booth.
Learning from Failure
From my first days as a narrator, I was warned that Royalty Share projects don’t pay, with only low-quality titles available. Like many of you, I spent hours looking at titles on ACX, books with ghastly covers and sales ranks that showed they barely sold into double digits.
But I knew there were thousands of high-selling books listed on Amazon that had yet to be produced on audio. There had to be a way to tap into those opportunities: to build a simple framework to maximise the prospects for success at every stage of a narrator’s career.
Between 2019 and 2022, I tried many different approaches to “Amazon Prospecting.” And I failed a lot. But each failure gave me another piece of the puzzle. By 2023, I made the decision to stop auditioning almost entirely and focus my energies on developing a new formula for finding and winning projects.
Although many projects I’ve found through sleuthing have led to royalty share contracts, a good portion have been contracted for a Per Finished Hour rate. Many authors know they have a winner and don’t want to share the rights. Either way, that’s a win for us narrators.
The Biggest Challenge
Finding potential prospects on Amazon is a long and tiresome process. Amazon is built to sell books to shoppers, not to help narrators find available titles. It can be incredibly difficult to find the gold hidden within the massive, cluttered depths of their catalogue.
But after months of turning it over in my head, I was certain there had to be a way to make the search easier. The information was there. All I had to do was find a way to extract it and present it the way we narrators actually need it.
Building Sleuthy
Before I turned to the microphone, I had spent twenty years building websites. This was the expertise I would use to take the framework from my head to the screen. I had to go back to the drawing board twice before I finally cracked the first pieces of the puzzle. But eventually, the system for finding and listing books came together.
It was my wife who eventually named it “Sleuthy,” after months of my simply calling it “my Amazon project.”
Sleuthy works around the clock to find and catalogue books that have no audio version. It allows you to sort and search by the factors that help determine potential for success: genre, sales ranking, ratings, reviews, lead score, and more. Since launch, Sleuthy has discovered tens of thousands of potential leads, and it adds new books every day while keeping existing records up to date.
More Than a Database
Finding leads is only half the challenge. The other half is knowing how to choose which books are right for your voice, and knowing how to approach different types of rightsholders in the way most likely to seal the deal.
Blitzing large numbers of titles and rightsholders with a single approach doesn’t work. The key is knowing how to focus on the very best books for your talent, and how to tailor your approach to each title. This is the secret sauce of audiobook sleuthing.
I’ve created training and resources to help teach this framework, and I’m always happy to work with subscribers to answer questions and offer guidance.
The Mission
My mission is to make audiobook sleuthing easy, effective, and even enjoyable for every narrator willing to give it a try, and to offer a new stream of business and a fresh edge in a highly competitive market.
Each week, I add further functions and refinements to make the system better. This has always been a platform built by a narrator, for narrators. My hope is that Sleuthy helps hundreds of independent narrators find a new way to generate business and build a successful career.
Hannibal Hills
Creator of Sleuthy