“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
Robert F. Kennedy
I did it! I just created my first audiobook and hit publish on Google Play. I’ll be starting book 2 tomorrow.
I have to admit, though, I’ve gone against the grain in launching my first AI (artificial intelligence) produced audiobook. Google and almost every ‘expert’ suggest that AI is best used for non-fiction books. I have chosen to ‘go wide,’ which means I want my books available in different formats (the next thing I work on is ‘large print/dyslexic’) and available across multiple platforms. But it costs between $2-6,000 to develop a traditional audiobook. To recover those costs (the sales platform takes about 30-50% of the sales price for their fees), you have to sell a lot of audiobooks at high prices ($15-$30). I’m not selling that many books yet, because I haven’t begun to market, so it would take me the rest of my life to recover the costs (if then). So, I went the AI route and am selling at a much lower price than most audiobooks - $4.99.
Here are some of the things I learned.
General Learnings.
- Read the instructions! Imagine that! I found when I only skimmed over the instructions, it didn’t work right, and I had to redo about a week’s worth of effort. And guess what? When I did follow the instructions, it worked.
- You can hear mistakes and stilted word choices so well as you edit that it becomes painful to listen to at times, and you can’t ‘unhear’ the problems. As a result, I updated my manuscript as I went along, so I’ll have a clean copy when I’m ready to update my book in the future.
- The AI voice was much better than I anticipated. Currently, Google has 16 American and British voices (I didn’t consider the Australian and Indian accents).
- I chose ‘Michelle.’ She was a little faster than most of the other voices, but she seemed to have the most emotion. There were better sounding voices but dull. Also, I’m trying to push ‘girl power’ in my books, so it made sense to pick a female voice.
- The pronunciation of difficult words was far better than I expected. It even got some really hard-to-pronounce words right, including Ollamaliztli. As I was editing, I learned I’d been pronouncing a bunch of words wrong for years.
- To hear what it sounds like, go to The Palantir. You can listen to the first 10% of the book for free.
This next section is more for writers than readers.
Technical Learnings.
- This is such a powerful feature that I’m changing my final editing & book launching process to take advantage of it. From now on, instead of listening to Microsoft’s voice editor as my final edit, then launching it on Amazon, I will launch my e-book on play.google.com/ first, then create an audiobook and edit both the audiobook and the manuscript. Then I’ll launch on other platforms and formats.
- It took me about ten days to edit my audiobook. I found it mentally draining, so be prepared.
- Google Play is easy to create e-books on – the easiest of the three sites I’ve used. The only drawback is that its viewing feature is not as good as Amazon’s.
- One difference in creation is that you get an unlimited number of choices of genres. Take advantage of it.
- If you want to create an audiobook, you must first upload an epub file for your e-book and launch it. You can use a PDF file to create an e-book, but it won’t work for audiobooks.
- You need to give Google permission to allow you to edit words.
- They have two ways to change individual word pronunciation. The easy way is when the words are homonyms, and they give you a choice between pronunciations (e.g., bow, dove, wound, read, etc.). You’ll have to listen closely because some words almost sound the same but are different (e.g., closer).
- You have to ditch some of your punctuation rules to get the right voice. For instance, I changed a lot of question marks to commas when I had something like ‘he asked’ after it. Otherwise, it treats the question mark as the end of the sentence and creates a long pause before finishing the sentence. The program could insert the question inflection into the sentence even if I substituted a comma. You just have to play around with it.
- You can’t sell these AI-created audiobooks on platforms such as Amazon, but you can sell it directly. I haven’t taken that step yet.
Now, onto book two and trying to sell these things.
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