Most of my books are now available as audiobooks on the major audiobook platforms. All of them use "auto-narration" or "virtual voices" for their narrator for the simple reason that my publishing business cannot justify the cost of hiring human narrators at between $100 to $500 per the run time of the book, For a book of 100,000 words the run time is around 12 hours and would cost between $1,200 to $$6,00 per book depending on the skill of the narrator. The fact that I can produce acceptable audiobooks for free, and sell them for that price as well, when the store allows, highlights the appeal of AI to producers of products. The fact that I would never consider hiring a human means that I'm not taking the break out of the mouths of starving audiobook readers. But it does illustrate the appeal of Ai to companies that can replace humans...
In any event...
All of my audiobooks are available on the Google Play Store for free. You can find them here. Google offers the most voices - I used a British voice for my narration - as well as the most options for editing, including text and using multiple voices within the narration. Its audiobooks are available hours after you hit publish.
APPLE
Some of my audiobooks are available on Apple, also for free. You can find them here. Apple offers the fewest choices, i.e. as in none at all. They also take forever to produce. All of my books were uploaded for conversion on the 1st of January, 2024, and of this posting. only 8 of the 13 books I uploaded are audiobooks. I have no idea why it takes so long. Hopefully more will be coming down the pike shortly.
AMAZON/AUDIBLE
And finally all but two of my books are available as audiobooks on Amazon/Audible for the price of $3.99 - the minimum price set by Amazon. You can find them here. Amazon offers a limited choice of voices - and the lability to edit how words are pronounced, as well as adding pauses and adjust how fast a word is spoken. The audiobook appears within hours of publication. Two of my books, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea are too long for Audible, at least for this program. They run 34 hours plus on Google, but Audible is limiting run time to 26 hours or about 240K words. I am thinking of offering them in two volumes just for the audiobook version, though I would have to publish the two volume novels as ebooks, i.e. offering two versions of the same book. I'm still thinking about that.
I am a firm believer in audiobooks, even though I never "read" them myself. The audiobook market continues to grow. And I think, in this multi-tasking world, they will continue to grow, as they allow people to "read" books when doing things like driving to or for work. And I have no doubt that the technology that powers them will continue to improve to the point where they will become indistinguishable from your bog standard human narrator. Of course there will always be better, more dramatic human narrators - the super stars you will find in every field of endeavor - but they will always be rare. And expensive. All in all, I believe I am as well positioned to take advantage of this market, and reach more readers which is my publishing goal. And to that end, I'll keep an eye out for other audiobook platforms like Spotify, should they also offer this service in the future. Stay turned.
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