by Everyone is talking about AI these days. And while it is maybe a bit too early to really speak of actual intelligence replacing humans on a wide scale, there’s new possibilities coming along in AI’s tide. If anything, machines are designed to enable us to do things normally impossible or simply not cost effective. Which brings us to audiobooks by self-publishing authors.
If you’re a renowned voice actor reading this, don’t despair. AI hasn’t taken your job. It probably won’t for quite some time. Voice acting is a challenging profession. Mastering it takes years of practice and hard work. Add to that the unique character of actors’ and actresses’ voices and you have a successful recipe that’s hard to match. All this, self-evidently, comes at a price. A high-quality audiobook will likely have a production cost far exceeding what any self-publishing author or small publish house could muster out of their own pockets. That’s where AI is entering the game.
I remember buying audiobooks on CD for my grandmother to listen to. Audio and voice actor quality was top-notch, and so was cover design. But there was a catch. Take Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” for example. The audiobook brought the story to life – where it wasn’t cut. There were many cuts in the content for several reasons. One was certainly the permittable run time of CDs. Another one was production cost. While run time isn’t as much of a concern anymore now that we’ve moved on to digital, streamable files, production cost will always be crucial. After all, you have to turn a profit at the end of the day.
Hiring a professional voice actor reading a story for 33 hours at a studio will certainly produce astronomical costs. No problem at all if you’re producing the audiobook to a bestseller. But for self-publishing authors, it’s not an option. Even if you decided to team up with a voice actor and split royalties, it’d be a long shot. Now you might be thinking that you can do this yourself. You probably can. Personally, I have the equipment at home to do a decent job – theoretically. The truth is, I have too many books out and voicing them would take up all of my free time for months. I’m assuming it’d be the same for you.
My detective novel collection “Fullerstone City Omnibus vol. 1” is available on Audible at a listening length of 33 hours and 39 minutes. My estimate is that voicing and editing it would take the total production time to about 100 hours. And that’s just one of my books. Using Audible, you can publish it in a fraction of time. Which means you can keep costs down and charge less for the audiobook. You can choose from a vast array of AI male and female voices in different accents and make adjustments to the delivery, speed and intonation if you please. The results are good. They don’t match the performance of a professional human by any means but that is not the point.
The beauty of Audible’s AI beta function is that you’re not competing with voice actors and big budget productions. Instead, it gives self-publishing authors the opportunity to bring their books to a whole new audience at full length. Podcasts and audiobooks aren’t soaring in popularity without reason, since there’s countless situations in which reading just isn’t possible. On a crowded commuter train. When you’re a trucker driving a 16-wheeler across the country. When you’re doing the dishes. Or for those with deteriorated eyesight or blind people. It’s not a curse AI is enabling them to enjoy stories either free of extra charge with an Audible membership or at prices starting 3,99 $ instead of 14,99 $.
When Amazon added AI features and enabled me to offer my books as audiobooks, I didn’t feel like I was selling out or making compromises. Instead, I saw the upsides. Without it, none of my books would’ve been available to those that can’t read with kindle or the paperback edition. I’m fully aware that the quality of a big budget production with a top-notch voice actor far exceeds what this feature can offer as of now. But that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Or that you shouldn’t give it a try and reach new audiences. In my opinion, you should listen to the sample and decide for yourself if the AI voiced audiobook is fine with you. If so, thanks for listening. I appreciate every reader as much as every listener.
