Another Avenue for Creating an Audiobook ~ And It's Free

Spotify has now expanded its audiobook narration service to all authors for free, whereas its program was previously by invitation only. As someone with experience creating AI-narrated audiobooks, I'm a bit wary, but also intrigued. 

When KDP offered free AI audiobook creation, I decided to go for it. My books, eight of which are novellas, never sold more than a handful of copies, so if the narration turned out badly, I really had nothing to lose. The most I ever did to "check" the audio output was to listen to the openings of those books, mainly to determine if the voice I'd chosen sounded appropriate. I did catch a mispronunciation in one, so I fixed that my retyping the word phonetically. I have no doubt many more mispronunciations exist.  

In editing my latest novel, I used Word's text-to-speech function to catch anything funky (a misspelled word, incomplete sentence, etc.), and also to check story flow. While that's not an audiobook, it's still AI and it's Microsoft (which is evil), and its biggest flaw was that it couldn't pronounce my main character's name properly. How difficult is "Leah"? But that wasn't germane to the editing process, so I got over it. The narrator's lack of emphasis—"her" dull inflection—also detracted from the experience. But it was what it was. I still HIGHLY recommend using text-to-speech as one of several editing tools.

Subsequently, I got involved in Spoken Press's beta testing. That was an experience! And not in a good way. I made the mistake of choosing multi-character narration, which literally took days to configure. It wanted to assign voices to characters who had one line in the entire story and thus I was forced to describe characters I had no recollection of. And the text had to be configured a specific way by inserting tags to separate chapters before uploading my manuscript. Truly, the experience was exhausting—and not worth the effort, even for free. Every time it produced an audio version, I'd listen for a bit, find some glaring issue, then have to go back and fix it.

Now that the site is live, its cost is $20.00 per 5,000 finished words, which would translate to $456.00 for my novel. (They also have a monthly plan for $50.00, which halves the cost per finished word.)*

*Not to nitpick, but I find it insulting that the site removed all the beta testers' books once we'd served our purpose. 

Bottom line, unless Spoken has simplified its process, it's a do-not-recommend for me.

But back to Spotify, the site is using voices from ElevenLabs, which is viewed as the industry leader in AI voice narration. Unfortunately, the ElevenLabs website doesn't offer any samples, but one can test out a limited number of voices reading a snippet of text without signing up. (Not exactly what I was looking for.) Google does say that it "...flawlessly renders emotionally expressive speech..." I prefer to be the judge of that. 

While I did use KDP's virtual voice for my backlist, Running From Herself is my baby, and I always hoped to one day turn it into a "real" audiobook. Delusional thinking is one of the hallmarks of indie authors; I could never afford to hire a human narrator. That said, I refused to ruin it. Still do. I'd rather have no audiobook than a bad one.

I'll be checking out Spotify's service. An author is allowed to convert up to five titles, so the smart thing for me to do would be to test it on a less important book, but I'm not the most patient person in the world. 

A few important specifics:

1. It's currently only available to US authors and only in English.

2. Spotify's agreement is non-exclusive. The FAQ's state that wider distribution is available "via our Voices by INaudio integration", whatever that entails.

3. Audiobooks will be clearly labeled as digital voice-narrated (which would hardly be a mystery to anyone listening).

4. An author is required to upload their manuscript as an EPUB (download calibre for free if you haven't already).

5. Nothing goes live until the author gives Spotify her stamp of approval.  

6. It's unclear how royalties work. 

I anticipate issues with pronunciation if the past is any guide, but I'll give it a try. (At least I haven't created whole new worlds and character names that all start with "X".) 

If anyone out there has tried it out, give me a holler in the comments. I haven't been able to find any author feedback anywhere.

When I do try it, I'll post my experience on this blog. And you know me—I'm notoriously hard to please.