I’m trying something that I think is ethically unsound. Is that terrible of me? Quite possibly. But I’m doing it anyway and, if you can get around your ethics, you might want to try it as well.
I believe very strongly that AI is overreaching. It is taking over everything—including so much of writing and publishing. Authors are now using AI for ideas of what to write, checking their grammar and punctuation, fixing their word choice, creating their covers, and now creating audio books.
I love audio books. I listen to them all the time. For the past year or two, I’ve almost never not been listening to an audio book in addition to reading another book on my e-book reader (or a physical book). I love being able to listen while I’m working out, knitting, or just playing stupid, mindless games on my tablet.
The best thing about audio books is not only that I can do something else while enjoying a good story, but the voice, the acting. Those who read and record audio books are real actors. They assume different voices for the different characters, they infuse emotion into the words of the story, and they pull you in making you feel everything in the story.
It used to be that a computer could read a book and you’d get a dry, monotone computerized voice. It was awful and, personally, I couldn’t listen to it. I’d much rather read the book myself than listen to an audio book read out by a computer. But now, with AI and advanced technology computers can mimic or use real voices to read books. They don’t do the different voices for the different characters, but they do a surprisingly good job at putting in inflection and even a bit of emotion into the reading.
The best (and as far as I know, only) place to have your book read in this way is through Elevenlabs. They have an incredible number of different voices you can choose from in so many different languages and accents. Some of them are computer generated, but a lot of them are created from a live person spending half an hour recording themselves reading a script. The computer then takes that person’s voice and uses it to read whatever text you put in—and it sounds as if that person was actually reading your work. It’s uncanny.
Now, it’s not 100% like a real person—it is a computer, after all. But it’s damn good. Listen to this recording of a part of one of my books:
This has one voice:
This has many voices:
As I say, I am ethically against not using a real actor to record audio books, but hiring a real person to record a book can cost $2000 or more. Not a lot of authors have that much money to spend on such a venture, and you aren’t guaranteed that you’ll earn that money back. (I’ve made three audio books and I’ve yet to earn back what I spent on one of them.)
Using Elevenlabs to record an audio book costs between $100-200 depending on how long your book is (and how much you play with the different voices). For $99/month you get enough credits to create an audio book of about 75,000 words. I’ve been doing a lot of fooling around with voices and chose to use different voices for each of the major characters in my book so I’m probably going to spend more than that on my first book. (I plan on using Elevenlabs to record three books of a Regency romance mystery series I wrote and published a few years ago.)
Once you’ve listened to the whole book and adjusted the way the book was read through fooling with punctuation and spacing, you can download each chapter as an individual MP3 file and publish it at Audible, Spotify, libro.fm, and anywhere else audio books are sold—oh, and Elevenlabs itself has a storefront for books created with their software. You must disclose that the book was made with AI and that will discourage some readers, but I believe that once they listen to it, they very well may change their minds.
I sincerely hope that if these audio books sell well, I can then afford to hire a real actor to read either these books or some of my others. This option for making audio books is for authors who do not have the funds to pay a live actor. And it also costs you your own time to go through and listen to the book and fool with what you can to make the audio better.
As I say, I strongly believe in audio books read by real actors. They give more life to the story and, well, they are artists and I believe in supporting artists. But if you can’t afford that right now, Elevenlabs is not a bad alternative.