There is no single human service for this, so the honest comparison is a composite: a research assistant at £150–£400 a day to work through the archive, plus a developmental editor to work out what the book in it is.
What it costs
What working through an audio archive costs — and what you're actually buying
What good looks like
- A written map of themes with episode references
- Honest about how much was listened to versus skimmed
- Identifies repetition as material, not as waste
- Suggests a structure rather than an episode order
What your book will actually cost
Four questions — genre, length, what you have already, what you want at the end — and we send a costed plan for your book.
What you are actually buying
Working through an archive of recordings — episodes, sermons, interviews — to find what actually recurs, and what shape a book could take from it. Normally a research assistant or a developmental editor doing a lot of listening.
Why it costs that
There is no single human service that does this, which is why the price comparison is a composite: a research assistant to go through the archive, plus a developmental editor to work out what the book in it is. A day rate plus an edit is the honest equivalent, and for a sixty-hour archive it is a substantial piece of work before a word of the book is written.
How to spend less
Do not transcribe first. Transcribing an archive before you know what the book is produces an unreadable document at full price — you will use perhaps 10–15% of any archive, so the saving from analysing first is most of the transcription bill.
What good looks like
- A written map of themes with episode references
- Honest about how much was listened to versus skimmed
- Identifies repetition as material, not as waste
- Suggests a structure rather than an episode order
Questions to ask them
- How much of the archive will you actually process?
- Will you work from transcripts or audio?
- What do I get at the end?
Red flags
- A promise to process hundreds of hours cheaply
- An output that is an episode list in a different order
- Any claim to have heard audio that was not transcribed
Honestly
It finds what recurs. It cannot tell you which theme you care most about, and that judgement is the book. Expect to override the ranking at least once — the theme you are tired of is often the one readers want.
What Your Book Pro does here
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
These prices are here to be used, not to sell you something — brief a freelancer with them, sanity-check a quote, or work out what you actually need. Where Your Book Pro changes the arithmetic, the page says so; where it does not, it says that too.
It finds what recurs. It cannot tell you which theme you care most about, and that judgement is the book. Expect to override the ranking at least once — the theme you are tired of is often the one readers want.
What it costs
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Research assistant, hourly | £25–£45/hr | UK freelance research rates, at or above CIEP substantial-editing minimum |
| 40 hours of recordings, themed and indexed | £1,000–£2,500 | Roughly 1 hour of analysis per hour of audio, plus write-up |
| Developmental editor doing the same job | £42.66/hr | CIEP suggested minimum, substantial editing |
CIEP suggested minimum rates effective 1 March 2026; Books.by; publishing.co.uk; The Ghostwriters Agency. Dated 9 September 2026.
Upload your archive
Get my costed planQuestions people ask
- What does thematic analysis of an archive involve?
- Reading across everything at once and reporting the recurring themes, where each is stated best, and where material repeats — which cannot be done by listening back linearly.
- How big does an archive need to be?
- Ten hours is enough to be useful; sixty hours is where doing it by hand stops being practical at all.
- Is this the same as transcription?
- No, and the order matters. Analyse first, then transcribe only what serves the book.
- Can I do it myself?
- With a small archive, yes, with a spreadsheet and patience. Past about twenty hours, remembering your own material stops being reliable.