Why don’t you have audio books yet?
I get this question a LOT. I want to have audio. I need to have audio.
But the process of producing audio is a serious one, especially if you have a dozen books out already. I can’t just a few of them, right? I have to do them all or the series would go unfinished for that reader/listener. It’s not fair to them to do only some of them. So I was looking at not only a significant cost but also a serious amount of time to produce the entire series. That was one issue. The second was that I really didn’t like the distribution choices out there. These problems made Audio something I tended to kick down the road.
But things have changed.
Let’s look at the issues involved.
Cost.
Cost for audio narration ranges widely. From my research a quality narrator can run you several hundred dollars per finished hour of work. My novels are long by most industry standards so I was looking at mid-four figures to produce one book. The ROI of that process would take years to make up.
Finding a narrator.
There are several ways to do this. Reedsey has a list of vetted narrators and they all have samples you can listen to. Findaway Voices has a similar “Marketplace”. I played around in both and found some voices that I could see fitting the stories I write. But that led to the next issue.
Availability.
The good narrators are busy. Most of them are booked for months if not years in advance. With a library of a dozen books, with more on the way, it was going to be next to impossible to nail down enough time for one of those narrators to do all of my existing books. And what about future books? Could I publish them in all the other formats and then wait months or even years for that narrator to be available again?
So what to do?
The ideal narrator is one that can produce an audio book rapidly and at a cost that produces a return on investment in a reasonable time. They would need to be available to work whenever the book was ready, no getting sick or worse; dying, and remain in business for the life of the author’s career.
There’s only one person that fits that description: Me.
If I’m going to produce over 20 books in a short amount of time by myself, I need some help.
I’m told I have a distinct voice. One that would be good for audio. Most people don’t know what they sound like until they actually record themselves with good equipment and play it back. So I played around with the equipment I bought for podcasting and determined that yeah, maybe they were right.
(Personally I think I sound like a Gen-X Darth Vader, but if that’s what works so be it.)
So we have the voice issue solved, we just need to solve the time issue. Between writing and ScribeCount I have very little time to record. I would have to find a short-cut.
An author friend of mine directed me to a company called 11Labs. Through them I am creating an AI voice of myself. I never thought I would do this as I didn’t think an AI voice would do justice to my books, but I have to say the samples that I’ve heard cannot be easily separated from the real thing. If I weren’t listening with the goal of separating the real voices from the AI voices I probably would not have noticed for some time.
If I can produce my books with the same level of quality it will solve my problems with getting my entire library out to those of you screaming for audio. I know it’s not your preferred choice, and please understand that it’s not mine either, I would much rather have a real narrator, but for the reasons I’ve outlined this is the best option for getting the books produced and out to you. I would rather have this than no audio books at all.
The bonus in all this is that my AI voice will improve with every new book I push through it, until eventually there will be little to no difference between. My AI voice is also available anytime I need it, all I need to do is upload the completed manuscript to it and push a button. So in the near future Audio books may hit the shelf as fast as the ebook and print versions do. I intend to make them available everywhere I can, including my own website store.
So for those of you waiting for the audio version of my books, they’re coming.
That’s a win for both you and me.