Have You Done An Audiobook?

[M_K_Babalon]

If you have, does anything need to be changed or rewritten for it?

 

[Lifestyle66]

If you have, does anything need to be changed or rewritten for it?

I've tried using artificial voices to produce audio versions of my stories. Each character would have a distinct voice. But it took a lot of editing out the dialog tags, so the character isn't saying "she said..."

Also, since I write first person, I found it tough to use the same voice in his dialog as when he's thinking/narrating his story.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

I've tried using artificial voices to produce audio versions of my stories. Each character would have a distinct voice. But it took a lot of editing out the dialog tags, so the character isn't saying "she said..."

Also, since I write first person, I found it tough to use the same voice in his dialog as when he's thinking/narrating his story.

That sounds like a lot of work. I watchba number of anime and manga recap videos on Youtube, and there's words those ai voices just don't get right. I once played around with Words text to speak, and it didn't either.

 

[AG31]

If you have, does anything need to be changed or rewritten for it?

Hubby did. Didn't change a thing. But not fiction.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Hubby did. Didn't change a thing. But not fiction.

Someone has read one of my pieces here, not quite a whole book though.

She might have changed a few words here and there to make it easier to read, I left that down to her.

Someone else read another thing and posted it on her own website. I can't remember what the story was, nor where it can be found. I should try to find it - a Google search might find it.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I have three of my stories here posted on Audiomack as audio books. These are are first person POV and required very little editing of the text prior to conversion to AI speech.

I have also published an audiobook of my middle-grade chapter book that will soon be on Audible. It required a bit more editing since it starts in one POV and changes to another at a certain point.

If the audio book is simply a single-voice narration of the of the story being read, the text should not require much change. If it is made into a multi-character voiced "program", then significant effort will usually be involved in creating the script.

 

[oneagainst]

What services have people found that do a good job of manuscript-to-audio?

 

[BobbyBrandt]

What services have people found that do a good job of manuscript-to-audio?

I have used Amazon Polly and found it to be pretty reliable, depending on the settings selected. I have also used Lovo but didn't find it as good. Revoicer is hyped as being quite good and I'll play around with it some next week. You need to verify that which ever app you use doesn't restrict how their conversion can be used. (Commercial use, etc.)

As far as my experience has shown, all of the apps have character limits for the conversions. (Polly limits you to 3,000 characters for conversion at a time.) This leaves you with multiple audio files that you will need to recombine cleanly. I use Audacity to mix and render the individual audio files into larger ones, and to add sound effects, pauses, music, etc.

 

[MillieDynamite]

No, haven't gone that route. I'm not going to be the one to narrate my stories. A few of the stories have been featured on Dirty Bits Podcast. The narrator is good, but sometimes she mispronounces words. Like my name, Milie, not Millie, and I am not going to be the one tell her. It does bother me though.

 

[oneagainst]

Good info... from my market research (which is obv quite limited, since "how do you choose to consume your smut?" isn't "polite conversation" apparently) it sounds like there's a lot of people who like audio versus reading... walking in the park, commuting, etc.

I guess a podcast is exactly that, if you've got a 2k story for them to narrate. I've heard Lovo and it sounded almost human, but not quite. I guess you need to pick voices that fit too. The BBC Announcer voice (British Broadcasting Corporation, not the other acronym, though maybe those guys do need announcers too) doesn't really scream "sexy"

 

[nice90sguy]

This might seem trite -- but... a sexy voice helps, if it's meant to be erotic.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

I have three of my stories here posted on Audiomack as audio books. These are are first person POV and required very little editing of the text prior to conversion to AI speech.

I have also published an audiobook of my middle-grade chapter book that will soon be on Audible. It required a bit more editing since it starts in one POV and changes to another at a certain point.

If the audio book is simply a single-voice narration of the of the story being read, the text should not require much change. If it is made into a multi-character voiced "program", then significant effort will usually be involved in creating the script.

I have no intentions of using ai, and multiple voices isn't something I wanna tackle off jump street.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

This might seem trite -- but... a sexy voice helps, if it's meant to be erotic.

It's not for my smut. I have non erotic short stories with my everywhere else name I thought about reading on Tiktok, and longer stuff maybe on my youtube account, that I can probably tone down or leave out the sex scenes in. I pretty much write exclusively in third person, if that helps in whatever editing I would need.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I have no intentions of using ai,

Even if the AI voice is a clone of your own voice? With the right training, you would be surprised at how closely it could mimic your own tone, inflections, and emotions.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

Even if the AI voice is a clone of your own voice? With the right training, you would be surprised at how closely it could mimic your own tone, inflections, and emotions.

That's what voice actors are afraid of. As a writer and an artist(also somebody who wants to be a va), I don't abide ai. Just like as I typically drive for a living, I don't abide self-driving vehicles--which is also ai. Now we're adding the premise of Wall-E to our possible dystopian future paradigms, along with Idocracy and Demolition Man. No.

 

[oneagainst]

That's what voice actors are afraid of. As a writer and an artist(also somebody who wants to be a va), I don't abide ai. Just like as I typically drive for a living, I don't abide self-driving vehicles--which is also ai. Now we're adding the premise of Wall-E to our possible dystopian future paradigms, along with Idocracy and Demolition Man. No.

The real crushing problem is the economic realities of content creation. Unless you're Matthew McConaughey voicing Greenlights because you also wrote it, who can pay a VA anything like market rate to voice a 30k smut story? Therefore AI voices are unfortunately the only way to go.

Publishing is a nil sum game at best. Spending 2k on a voice actor as an author is vanity publishing... you do it because you want to. You're unlikely to see that money back.

Genuinely: bloody good luck with the VA aspirations. I hope you get a decent crack at it. But, it feels, like a lot of things, we're 5 years late.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

The real crushing problem is the economic realities of content creation. Unless you're Matthew McConaughey voicing Greenlights because you also wrote it, who can pay a VA anything like market rate to voice a 30k smut story? Therefore AI voices are unfortunately the only way to go.

Publishing is a nil sum game at best. Spending 2k on a voice actor as an author is vanity publishing... you do it because you want to. You're unlikely to see that money back.

Genuinely: bloody good luck with the VA aspirations. I hope you get a decent crack at it. But, it feels, like a lot of things, we're 5 years late.

True on that, we're not talking about movies and anime here.

I feel like that with a number of things, like the golden age of whatever is gone. Like when I drove a cab.

 

[flynn99]

I've polled my beta readers for a non-Lit piece to see if they're ready to listen to an AI voice... I even assembled a sample from one of the better tools out there. To a one, they all said "too annoying.". The uncanny valley is still there with regard to the actual voice, but worse are the emphasis issues... And don't even think to add foreign language to your character... Even with specific voice promoting, the English voice can throw in a French word with all the grace of a first semester foreign language student.

I've shopped for voice actors... A novel-length piece is expensive. My publisher has people who'll do it for $4k. There are people in Fiverr who will apparently go as low as $2k. Yes, that sounds expensive, but in reality, my novel would be 10 hours long and assuming the actor has to listen to every segment in editing, takes at least another 10 hours for that, plus editing, plus retakes... Probably 25-30 hours of work?

As @oneagainst says... It's likely just vanity anyway.

 

[oneagainst]

Yeah... it's for the fun of it given the likely returns. Like publishing in general, the main reward seems to be for the line in the resume... doing it "for the exposure".

Interestingly, though, if you look at all the publishing channels, they're awash with hopefuls trying to break through. Audiobooks seems the least crowded, presumably because the cost of entry is so much higher than eg KDP. Chicken and egg though: investment is high to make an audio, but likely the returns are higher if you do due to less competition, though you need the cash in the first place.

Or you can do a @SeraphNocturne and have a good voice as well as penning good stories.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

Yeah... it's for the fun of it given the likely returns. Like publishing in general, the main reward seems to be for the line in the resume... doing it "for the exposure".

Interestingly, though, if you look at all the publishing channels, they're awash with hopefuls trying to break through. Audiobooks seems the least crowded, presumably because the cost of entry is so much higher than eg KDP. Chicken and egg though: investment is high to make an audio, but likely the returns are higher if you do due to less competition, though you need the cash in the first place.

Or you can do a @SeraphNocturne and have a good voice as well as penning good stories.

I intended to do my own voice overs, but ultimately before I even consider a true audiobook, my main concern is what need be done to the stories, because I was just going to do some reads on my TikTok and/or Youtube channels.