I wasn’t planning to jump into this topic, though it’s been on my mind for a year or two at least and I’ve watched other authors get ahead quickly, by offering direct audiobooks on YouTube or other ebook platforms. Basically, hiring a professional narrator through ACX to narrate your book costs an average of $150 per hour, and most audiobooks are around 8 hours (average).
So you’re looking at over $1000 for one audiobook; which is why even though Amazon is crushing the ebook space, it’s losing market share to Spotify or other platforms, because authors can’t afford to make audiobooks for most of the stuff that’s on Amazon. So of course it makes sense, that Amazon would add a “click to narrate this book with AI” option, and they have, it’s called “Virtual Voice.”
How can I convert my book to audiobook for free?
Google books / Google play has had an AI audiobook option for quite a while, and iBooks and many other big players have their own AI voice narration tools. You *can* go into your KDP now and 1-click your book to an audiobook; it’ll even make the audiobook cover. And you can set your own prices, unlike Audible.
It’s unclear what the distribution is like, and the voices currently aren’t great – but it’s free and easy. A lot of readers don’t like the idea of AI narration and it’s unclear if they’ll pay for AI narration, but that has a lot to do with quality and the quality is always improving.
Publish an Audiobook With Amazon Virtual Voice (Audible)
It’s separate from ACX, currently, and goes through your KDP dashboard.
It automatically makes an audiobook cover too, which saves a bit of hassle. This isn’t a surprise move, since Amazon has been working on AI narration and has the API available for several years; iBooks already has something similar, and Google not only allows you to turn your GoogleBooks published ebook into an audiobook using their voices, they also now allow you to upload your own audiobooks even if you created them elsewhere.
I tested it out, and right now, they only have a few voices, and they are all *older* voices, from 30~40.
This is pretty useless, since all my books are YA and I need a teenage girl voice.
But I tested it on a couple of my urban fantasy projects and I’m hoping that they soon add more options, and that it will be just as quick and easy to update the whole book to a better voice as soon as one is available.
The advantage would be, it’s easy, it’s inside of your KDP dashboard, and it makes a version of your book available that wasn’t before, at no cost. Plus since it’s new, there will be less competition and it’s possible Amazon will heavy-promote some of these to prove the concept before expanding. While I’m not *first* it’s still pretty early, and my books already have some reviews, so maybe they’ll do something.
Also on Virtual Voice (AI Audiobook Narration on KDP) you can set your own prices, something you can’t do through Audible. I set mine to $3.99, about the same as the ebooks. I don’t expect them to earn much, but they might boost visibility.
Audible Exclusivity
Previously, I had hired narrators with ACX – which gives you the option of an exclusive contract, like KDP Select. If you go exclusive with Audible, you get 40% of the list price of your audiobook, and the book should appear on Amazon and iBooks. You also get special coupon codes you can distribute so people can check out your book for free, basically “ARC” copies, which can boost rank and reviews.
However, in my experience, it’s pretty hard to market an audiobook; a good rule of thumb is that you’ll sell something like 15% of your ebook sales worth of audiobooks if it is available but that depends on a lot of factors. This means, spending the average $150~250/narrative hour doesn’t make a lot of sense if your aren’t already selling a lot of ebooks.
If you choose not to opt-in to the exclusivity, you only make 25% without those coupon codes, but then you can use or sell your audiobook in other places, either direct on your website or through another distributor like Draft2Digital (I think?) or Findaway Voices, which can get you on Spotify.
Findaway Voices currently only accepts AI narrated audiobooks through Google Play – so you’d have to publish a book there, I think, then get THAT audiobook file. I’ll test that out later.
Can I use AI for an audiobook?
The AI narration on KDP’s virtual voice is something different from ACX/Audible. Right now currently, I don’t think you can upload your own AI narrated audiobook to many other platforms, though I expect that will change in the near future. There’s a lot of gray area right now.
The short answer is, yes you can make an AI narrated audiobook, but your options for distribution may be limited.
Eleven Labs + Youtube Audiobook Publishing
One option I’m exploring, is using ElevenLabs, which has much better voices and much better selection. If I pay to use ElevenLabs – at the cost of roughly $99/book – I can put those audiobooks anywhere (except Amazon). I think I could upload them to Google, but only if my ebook are wide and on GooglePlay/GoogleBooks. I might be able to get them on Spotify with Findaway voices but I’ll need to check if they accept AI narration.
But there are many authors, and even a dedicated Facebook support group, to producing Audiobooks straight to YouTube, with the incentive of possibly earning money by injecting “ads” every 15 minutes or so, over an 8~10 hour audiobook. For this to work, I need to figure out which YouTube Channel to put them on. I could also host them on my own website, either for free or behind a paywall.
Case Study: I started a new YouTube channel for free audiobooks. I need 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours before I can monetize. It feels a bit weird giving things away for free but ALSO very exciting to watch the numbers go up on a new project… these are some of my older novels that haven’t gotten traction. They are doing pretty well so far, and I’m actually thinking of taking ALL my audiobooks off Audible’s exclusivity to put them up on YouTube… though I might wait a bit and see what happens, and explore other channels like Findaway voices.
I was hesitant because, basically, having one or two audiobooks doesn’t make any money, so the difference between 25% and 40% doesn’t really matter… except for completed series and boxsets, longer than 20+hours, which perform better on Audible.
So my current plan, probably, is to put the books everywhere, some free and some paid, some AI narrated and some human narrated, but keep the boxset bundles mostly on Audible.
I could offer them as optin bonuses, prizes, or other things – mostly I’m interested in attracting all the organic search traffic which will strengthen my blog, and probably build my email list.
UPDATE: my new channel has 4000 subscribers and about 200,000 of watch hours, which blows my mind. It’s not perfect, but it’s *good enough* that people are actually listening, and that’s encouraging. I turned on ads and while I’m not confident it will last, I’m averaging $30/day for about 3000 views.
That’s already rent money, so I’m excited about the possibilities moving forward. It’s actually very annoying that I’m making more money, more easily, from YouTube ads than from actual sales of my real books. But at this point, anything that will encourage me to keep writing really helps: and on youtube people seem to be happier and more grateful for free audiobooks, and more readily leave comments so I don’t feel like I’m just publishing in a vacuum.
How to use ElevenLabs for AI audiobook narration
I kind of mentioned this in my video, but what I finally ended up doing is just using ElevenLabs VoiceDesign and hitting “generate” to make a random, new voice. If you don’t like it, hit “generate” again right away.
Some will be slower, faster, more dramatic etc.
When you get a voice you like, save it by clicking “use this voice” to save it as a voice you can access later. If you do this enough times, you’ll get some really great voices that are just right for your character.
Test a few passages. Is the voice grating or annoying? Metallic or glitchy? Too expressive and distracting? or could you listen to it for a long time. Test prose, conversation and action scenes before committing.
My Audiobook Publishing Experiment
Step One: Convert the ebooks to Audiobooks with ElevenLabs
Step Two: Make them available somehow
Step Three: Boost Traffic
If I don’t plan to actively market, promote or advertise these audiobooks – which would be hard because they’re free – then I need to rely on organic visibility through SEO search traffic. Luckily that’s something I know a bit about. I’m mostly going to use my main fiction platform, which is already ranking for a bunch of fantasy keywords. I made this post: “Free Fantasy Audiobooks!” where I’ll embed the YouTube videos… and then I created a few relevant backlinks from my own bookish sites.
You can also pay to boost youtube videos, so there may be a balance I can keep, like pay $100/day and make $150/day. I’ll test that later. The main experiment was… would anybody actually like this enough to listen to it? Are the voices good enough for free audiobooks? On that, the jury is out.
AI voices are very very good, but not perfect. So there’s this weird thing, when people think they are listening to beautiful human voices but then they can’t pronounce some stupid easy word, and then I get comments like what’s wrong with your narrator!
But those are errors I could edit out or fix, if I were more careful, and of course in the future, errors will be much less common. I was skeptical, but a lot of people have been leaving positive comments about the stories, and the watchtime speaks for itself – people are spending a ton of time in my worlds, which I love.
My YouTube Audiobook Videos
I don’t like sharing my fiction on self-publishing how-to content, because I don’t want to attract the wrong audience or attention, but I do want to share some samples.
Here’s my NONFICTION book where I just cloned my own voice… the quality sounds better than my normal audio, which I keep screwing up, and pretty much sounds like me, but it’s not the best indication of the quality of AI generated audiobooks… for those, check out my fiction audiobook channel – but please be kind, those are a mix of real, professional voice narration and some new AI narrated audiobooks I’m testing out. So don’t assume it’s AI when it might not be.
Multi-voice audiobook narration
One thing elevenlabs struggles with, is character voicing for different characters; sometimes it’ll *guess* who is speaking and inappropriately add a high pitched feminine voice for a masculine dude or something that just sounds weird. Alternating different POV characters is tricky and time consuming though. I think this is what Spoken AI allows you to do, which if I understand it is attempting to be both a concierge AI audiobook producer and also maybe a marketplace for authors and readers.
Derek Murphy has a PhD in Literature, is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and has spent over a decade helping authors write, publish, and sell books through Creativindie. When he’s not critiquing manuscripts or building writing tools, he’s probably in a castle somewhere with cats.
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