Audio versions

[Ooopsiedooherecomesthegoo69]

Has anyone had any experience converting their stories into audio versions. Any suggestions on moving forward on this.

 

[Voboy]

Has anyone had any experience converting their stories into audio versions. Any suggestions on moving forward on this.

I’ve thought about this, though never all that seriously. If I was into it, I’d probably find someone with a likely-sounding username who favorited me, drop them a line, and establish a relationship. Some folks here are into beta readers, so maybe see whether they’d want to be a beta reader or something, then go from there.

I had a buddy on here send me an unsolicited vocaroo link with a fragment of one of my stories, read in as breathlessly sexy a voice as she could manage. It did little for me, but she was game and sounded great, so if I wanted someone I’d probably ask her.

Otherwise, there’s a thread somewhere (PG, I think) called AudioPhiles. A lot of those people would probably be up for it, plus you can listen to how they sound before you approach them. They’re probably not pros, but whatever.

In any case, I doubt I’d move forward with someone unless they genuinely liked my stories.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I have one of mine that's been read. A voice artist started a thread here, a couple of years back, and read four or five stories from different writers. She wanted to practice reading, to get started with audio books. Hearing her interpretation of my words was interesting, the nuances she found.

She did the recording and post-processing. Turned out okay - more listens than the original story had views. Of course, there's no way of knowing how many listened through to the end.

I tried reading one of my own - but had rubbish technology and no editing tools, so it never went anywhere.

 

[Handley_Page]

If you look in the "how to" sections, you'll find some advice about making Audio versions.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Yeah it can be done and sometimes works really well - especially if the prose was really flowing to begin with. And you can and should edit it down so that the audio version also flows AS SOUND; sometimes words on a page are slightly different to when they are read out aloud.

ASMR is a big thing on YT these days and certain kinds of narrative prose works as ASMR audio tracking.

There are a lot of free to download and use audio mixer and editing programs around and some top pro ones can be used with all features available for a trial term - but there are some decent ones just plain free forever.

I think the real 'problem' you're going to encounter is that YouTube engages in A LOT of 'blocking' via their algorithms, which are designed to get you to BUY 'boost' packages to get your viewer numbers up (in other words, lift their own search blocking and filters!). So, getting viewer/listener numbers is your real challenge, not whether or not good prose text can be converted to an attractive audio track/podcast.