2025 Maggie Finalists Announced!

Published Finalists

PrePublished Finalists

MONTHLY

Program

August 16th

Karen White w/a Karen Grey
How to Work with Human Narrators
Without Breaking the Bank

In Person

Talk

20+ year veteran of the audiobook industry and indie author Karen White shares her insights and experience in this practical workshop. We’ll cover:

Evaluating your current sales levels and skills sets to determine which publishing path will work best for you
The evolution of the audiobook marketplace
Finding, choosing and hiring narrators
Budgeting and payment
Distribution options overview

Bio

Karen White narrated audiobooks from 1999 to 2022. With more than 400 titles to her credit, she recorded for Audible Studios, Blackstone Audio, Books-on-Tape, Dreamscape, Harper Audio, Hachette Audio, Highbridge Audio, Penguin Random House Audio, and Tantor Audio as well as indie authors and publishers. She’s a multiple winner of Earphones Awards, Publisher’s Weekly and Listening Journal Starred Reviews, and is a three-time Audie Finalist. She also worked as a director and casting associate for Books-on-Tape, and a producer for Blue Nose Audio. She created Home Cooked Books, a boutique audiobook marketing company, in 2022. There she’s mustered a volunteer army of passionate listeners who promote books across multiple social media platforms as well as review and retailer sites.

Karen served on the Audiobook Publisher's Association PR & Events committee from 2016 to 2019 and was Vice Chair of SAG-AFTRA & Audiobook Steering committee from 2012 to 2022. She has appeared on conference panels for the Audiobook Publishers Association, the Virginia Festival of the Book, Romance Writers of Ameria, Booklovers Con, Heart of Carolina Romance Writers, Georgia Romance Writers Moonlight & Magnolias, Apollycon, Book Bonanza, Chicago’s Spring Fling, and RT Con. In 2019 she created a new course for the UNC-Wilmington Creative Writing Department, Special Topics in Publishing: Digital Formats.

In addition to helping other authors find avid listeners for their audiobooks, she publishes her own writing as Karen Grey. Her audiobooks have won AudioFile Earphone awards and finaled in the Independent Audiobook and Sultry Listeners awards.