C. Litka Audiobooks!

 

I never expected to ever be making this announcement. But here it goes. I am delighted to announce that all of my books, except A Night on Isvalar, are now available as FREE audiobooks. You are probably thinking that there must be some sort of catch to it. Audiobooks generally run $20-$30, so how can I offer mine for free? Well, there is a catch. And the catch is that they are narrated by our AI overlords, rather a human voice actor. Now I am not a “reader” of audiobooks, so I am not very qualified to judge how well “Archie,” my AI English narrator, stacks up to a human reader, but, truth be told, I am quite happy with how he reads my stories. Now, I am certain that a good human reader, who uses different voices for different characters and who can put a lot of emotion into the words when it 's called, for would be a superior narrator. However, I think that my writing style is rather laid back, and it doesn’t involve a lot of over the top emotion, so this shortcoming isn’t all that serious in my stories. You may have to pay a bit more attention to follow who is saying what, but the dialog tags in the text are still there, so it should not be a major problem. The way I look at Archie's narrative style is that it's like your dad (since I use a male voice) reading a bedtime story to you. Indeed, I’ve never been good a reading out loud. so that Archie would have done a better job at reading bedtime stories to my kids than I ever did.

So how did this all come about? Well, this is a Google beta program  that is available to ebooks published in the Google Play Store. As a beta program, the conversion from ebook to audiobook was free, though this may change in the future. Since the price was right, I decided to give it a try, even though Google suggests that it would work best for nonfiction books, without dialog and lots of emotions. I gave one book a try, and it sounded good enough to convince me not to miss this opportunity, so I converted all of my books on Google into an audio version as well. Mind you, I should have converted one book at a time and then gone over each of them to make sure everything worked out, but of course I didn’t. When I did go back over them, I discovered a number of minor glitches in the conversion that needed to be corrected. Luckily it is easy to listen to, view your audio text, and edit your audio book.

Let's look a a couple of examples. First, Google's AI automatically eliminated some of the front matter in the ebook – copyright info, dedications, and such, which is fine. But for some reason, the AI also eliminated the last chapter in two of my books! Fixing this was a simple matter of sliding a little switch on the screen, turning those sections on, so it was no big deal – just something  unexpected.

A more persistent issue is that since I am a writer of adventure stories in a science fiction universe, I use a lot of invented words for character names, place names, and other things. For the most part the AI did a very good job of reading these invented words. Being and English English reader, "Archie," my chosen AI narrator voice, may pronounce the words differently than an American would, but I'm quite cool with that. I had my choice of a dozen different narrative voices, English, American, Irish, and Indian.

That said, there were some that, for some reason, gave Archie trouble. Archie would just spell out “K-A-F” for the word “kaf”, a word I used for coffee in Sailing to Redoubt, and all I would get was static for “Batto” a name of a palm like tree in that book. However, as I said, it is edit your audio book. To fix a word's pronunciation,  you just click on a word and then select “Edit.” Now here's a "pro tip." When you do this, make certain that your browser window is opened wide enough, because the editing menu is to the right of the text box. Mine wasn't, so as a result, when I clicked on "edit" nothing seemed to happen. Once I discovered my problem, several days later, it was easy to fix these glitches. You have two choices, you can either speak the word how you want it pronounced, or you can change the spelling of the word to generate the sound you want. In the case of kaf,” all I had to do was change the spelling to "caf,” an apply that pronunciation to all instances of the word in the text.  (Which, it turned out, was  how I spelled the word in the sequel, The Prisoner of Cimlye.  Pay attention to details, Charlie!)  Batto I fixed by changing its spelling to “Bato.” 

Still, you never know. In my Nine Star Nebula stories, I have a character named “Cin,” which Archie had no problem pronouncing it as I intended; “sin.” In those books I also use the word “spaceer” for my sailors – the extra “e” is just a visual flourish and to make the term mean something special. The Archie however, pronounce it “space-e-er” Getting the correct pronunciation simply involved spelling it as “spacer” and applying it to all occurrences. One of the other changes I made, was that the narrator of The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star’s Sea is named Wil Litang. In my head, I always pronounced “Litang” as “Lee-tang” rather than “Lih-tang” as it is spelled. I used the "li" like the modern romanization of the Chinese “Lee,” just to go along with the “Tang,” an English spelling of a Chinese dynasty. While readers can pronounce the name as they care too, I decided that my pronunciation was important enough to me to change its spelling to get my preferred pronunciation.

But enough of the minutia of producing a Google audio book. Suffice to say that I am happy with the results. And the thing is this technology will only get better and better. It is a far cry better, than the old robotic voices. And as it evolves, Google will automatically update the audiobooks to the current best technology, so that jumping on the bandwagon now seemed a no-brainer for me.

So, if you are curious to hear Archie narrate my stories, please give my audiobooks a try. I would love to hear what you think of them, and of course, I would be grateful to learn of any glitches that I have missed. You can download your copies here:

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=c%20litka&c=books&hl=en

And email me at; cmlitka@gmail.com with your thoughts or error reports. Or simply comment on this page. Thanks!