Audiobooks ... Agh!

I would so love to be able to offer audiobook versions of my books. It's a huge market that, unfortunately, I can't even touch right now. 

As an indie author, I don't have a big publishing company behind me with the funds to market and promote my work to the public. On top of that, I absolutely hate marketing myself. I've tried. I'm terrible at it and I hate it. I just want to write. This leaves me with a real challenge when it comes to audiobooks.

The cost to produce one novel with a human narrator can range from $3000-$5000. I'm simply not clearing enough in sales to cover that. Now I could record it myself and save some of that money, but that presents other challenges. I need a soundproof area to record. I currently don't have that. I live on a busy street with loud motorcycles and noisy mufflers going by all day long. I would be perpetually re-recording. I could record at 3:00 in the morning, but that's not practical. And believe it or not, noisy cars still go by at that time. The other factors are time, which for me is limited, and cleaning up the audio after recording, which means I either learn to become an audio engineer or I hire one. It's a lot. 

I was tempted when I saw Amazon offered Virtual Voice through Audible. At first it seemed like it might be a great option for me because it's free. So I started trying to do my first book, Black Pawn. Let's just say the AI generation is less than desirable. I played around with it and ultimately decided against it. 

Now, ElevenLabs offers an AI narration service that can use your own voice and you have much better control over how it sounds. I tried it out and it sounded amazing! So much better than the Virtual Voice. The tone and inflection was spot on. It sounded like I was reading it!

So, now I could produce a high quality audiobook for closer to $100-$300 a book. Awesome! Well …. not so fast. There's still a stigma against AI narrated books and the reception from readers is mixed. It takes away a human job for one. But also a lot of the AI narration is just terrible. Another hurdle, many vendors do not accept AI narrated books, such as Audible. 

But wait, you say. Doesn't Audible offer a free AI narration service? Yep. It certainly does. But that is your only option with Audible. Their terrible AI narration or nothing at all. Sigh. They're not the only ones, though. 

There are places I could try to sell an audiobook created with ElevenLabs but I just don't see getting enough sales from obscure outlets to cover the cost to create the file. Especially considering my struggles to market my work. 

So for now, sadly, audiobooks just aren't on the menu. I'm hopeful the audiobook market might become more friendly towards AI narration in the future to help indie authors like myself. So maybe in the future you'll see some audiobooks from Mel LeBrun. :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Expanding Distribution

Many years ago, when I first published Black Pawn , ebooks were gaining momentum. But for a first-time, independent author, publishing it felt like a daunting task. Amazon made it super easy. Which was good, and bad. Good because now you could publish your work without being at the mercy of a publishing company and you could do it for FREE! (It was a no-brainer.) Bad because literally anyone could publish anything. With that said, Amazon had some great tools and help for indie authors and I was grateful for the help and initially sold many of my books on Amazon. Black Pawn and Forced Move both spent 4 weeks in the top 100 spy thrillers on Amazon, even making it to the top 10! I couldn't have been happier.  Over the years though, sales dwindled. Mostly my fault. I'm terrible at self-promotion and hate it with a passion. (This blog is an attempt to correct that failing.) At any rate, I think the market has changed and so I've decided to break away from exclusively publishin...
Read more

My Beef With Plot Holes

Part of the reason it takes me so long to write one of the Cailen thrillers is my strong detest of plot holes. I find movies hard to enjoy sometimes because so many of them have such giant plot holes I can't even get past it. Haha. Watch a couple "CinemaSins" or "How It Should Have Ended" (HISHE) videos on YouTube and you'll know what I mean. Just keep in mind, "What has been seen, cannot be unseen." Once your mind is opened up to plot holes, you might just see them everywhere. It's a curse.  Because I am overly aware of them, when I write I agonize over the story and events, endeavoring to make them both plausible and logical, which is not always easy. Sometimes I make a huge mistake and end up having to rewrite small, or sometimes large, portions of the book because the events don't make sense based on one tiny detail that can't be changed or ignored. I'll give you an example of one. **Spoiler Alert!** In Critical Play , Jessica i...
Read more

I Wanted To Have Some Fun!

Not that writing spy thrillers isn't fun. It is. But sometimes it can get a little dark since there's usually bad guys doing something bad and the good guys must stop it. I had this story in my mind for a while and it was fun, cheerful with bits of tension and suspense woven through and I decided to go for it and get it on paper. I'm really happy I did. I had so much fun writing it! It was just the break I needed to regroup during this difficult time. My latest books, What Can't Be Bought: Part 1 & 2 are about two people who meet quite haphazardly and are forever changed in a good way. Viktor thinks he's all set in life until he meets Amanda while she's vacationing in Europe and he's there on business. They spend some time together and he immediately realizes she's the piece that's been missing in his life. There's only one problem. She's very vocal in her disdain of wealthy people and Viktor is super wealthy. So he tries to hide it from...
Read more