We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marnye Young a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Marnye, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

My first client was a woman named Tate James actually she is still our client 7 years later. She is a USA Today and International bestsellling author and I had actually narrated for her in the past through another company. She and her good friend and author Jaymin Eve now a NY Times Bestselling author and the creator of an animated series on Peacock had co-written a series. Tate wanted to cast me as the female main character and she had asked me did I have any men. Now what you need to know is that I didn’t really know anyone in the industry especially not men so I called up a guy I had done a show with at New Harmony Theatre in Indiana named Jared. I knew Jared was a big Voice Over actor in LA and I basically said how would you like to work longer hours for less money. He agreed. Then others heard that we had produced a duet series for Tate and Jaymin and they wanted us to produce their work.

Marnye, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My first touch with the audiobook world is thanks to Jeff Gurner and Penguin Random House who hired me. I had done a Christmas Story at St. Louis Rep with Jeff and he recommended me for this fantasy audiobook. This was back in 2011. I had no idea what I was doing but I showed up and I booked it. I actually forgot about it for a few years as I was really focused on being a stage and screen actor. That all changed just before I broke out into television when I found out I was pregnant with twins. Fast forward two years later and a friend of mine and a phenomenal talent Patricia Santomasso told me I should try audiobooks. She said I had a nice voice and I could do it from home so I could watch my twins who were preemies, developmentally delayed and needed all of my attention. I created a studio space inside my home and taught myself how to produce an audiobook. There are lots of videos out there to help with that and I was given alot of advice along the way. Later I ended up auditioning for a production company and booked that job which led to more work. I was farming out the production because it was too time consuming. Eventually I struck out on my own. It was August of 2018 and it was just me and an engineer. I was the Audio Sorceress (shout out to Sean Macmahon for giving me that name) and then the company really just grew organically. I developed a roster of narrators for our authors to choose from and I had to bring on more engineers as well as a website person and an administrative and social media person (now our Managing Director Denise Black) because I couldn’t do it all on my own. Now we are a team of 8 with 5 engineers on staff, a videographer and our Managing Director. Denise runs 1/2 the company with me which is why we say woman-owned women-operated.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

I would have to say consistency has been the most effective strategy for growth of the company. We establish a trust early on with our authors because we understand they are making a big investment and we want them to know that the work we will produce and the level of care we will provide will be worth every penny. By maintaining consistency in our treatment of our clients and the work we put out always meeting that extremely high standard word gets out and then our clients share with their friends who also happen to be authors about their positive experience with us. In fact, I was just at an author conference called NINC run by these two wonderful women Mel Jolly and Tawdra Kandle. Unbeknownst to. me one of our clients was there and apparently she had been spreading the word that yes we cost money and that the process was easy and seamless for her. I would also add that their must be consistency in the treatment of your team as well because without them consistently providing quality work you either have a mediocre company or if you have nothing and you certainly won’t grow. So there must be consistency in how you work with your team. If you provide a good environment, your treat your team well, you acknowledge all the wonderful things that they are doing, you let them know they are appreciated and you do you what you can to be there for them when times are difficult you get people who want to give their best to you. And that is what our team does over and over again. They always give their best because they know that I know that this company was built on the incredible work that they have done and continue to do. Consistency is key.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Oh boy. That is a hard one and not fun to talk about at all, but I will say I learned a lot from it. Sometimes you have to experience a kind of tsunami in your business to understand what adjustments need to be made and adjustments can mean making extremely difficult decisions that involve other human beings. It’s tough because as a business owner I have had to do things I never wanted or imagined I would do. And they aren’t fun. But after almost closing our doors twice I have learned to weather these storms. Because really that’s life. Things happen life happens and you have to deal with it and dealing with it could mean adapting which on the surface sounds simple but when it is not necessarily what you want to do it is anything but. There are also instances where you get burned maybe a client doesn’t pay or a narrator doesn’t come through for you and all you can do – what you MUST do is move forward and you know why? Because you have a whole team counting on you to do just that. Also you learn from being burned right. We have had to put all sort of things in our contracts I had no idea needed to be there. We have had to armor ourselves in a way I never imagined we would but hey that’s business. And while we learned to keep a watchful eye we also discovered what it means to move forward with reckless optimism and joy. And I know this because we went from nearly closing our doors a few years back to doing well enough to bring on a design team. That design team rebranded us, revamped our website and built an author discovery portal something that no other audiobook production company offers. So yeah we have definitely learned resilience and then some.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://audiosorceress.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/audiosorceress/
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/audiosorceressaudiobookproductioncompany/
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/marnyeyounghull
• Twitter: https://x.com/AudioSorceress
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@AudioSorceress
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/marnyeyoung
• Other: [email protected]