Auto-narrated Audiobooks; "Garbage?"

I recently watched an YouTube video by an angry self-published author/small press publisher, John G Hartness, on the current controversy concerning Amazon's new audiobook royalty plan. Long story short; it will lead to less money for authors. It's a convoluted plan that I'm not going to get into it here. However, in this video he called auto-narrated books "garbage" after trying one that he didn't like; it had wrong pauses and emphases. Plus, he apparently considers it generative AI, which he hates. He went on to paint a picture of AI generated books with auto-narration flooding the audiobook market.

I was tempted to comment, but decided against it, since he said he would delete comments defending generative AI. And well, it's his platform. This, however, is mine, so I'll post what would have said here, though in greater detail.

First, this fear of a flood of AI-written fiction is the "Yellow Peril" or "Red Scare" of book publishing is silly, in my opinion. Publishing a book is easy compared to promoting it. Getting a book seen by the thousands of readers needed to sell even a few copies is a very time consuming, social media focused, and expensive undertaking these days, which only works if the book is laser-focused on a popular sub-genre. How likely is it that people who churn out AI written books will turn around and spend their time and money doing what is necessary to sell those, theoretical, mass-produced books? Few people are likely ever to come across these books, if my brief experience with Kindle Unlimited is a guide, even with four million books the algorism serves up a few hundred, at most.

Though I recently came across a video where someone did review several AI generated books, so apparently some people do find them in the wild. And a few like them. So maybe I'm wrong...

... In any event, whether there are 4 million or 8 million books, it won't make any practical difference to either a reader or an author. If an author has the product, the skills, and the established audience to make money in the current market, that exposure and those skills will serve them just as well, no matter how large the pool of competing books is.

Second, is auto-narrated narration "generative AI?" I don't consider it so. Text-to-speech tech has been available for like four decades, long before generative AI was a thing. It just reads the words it is provided with, generating nothing on its own. I don't know about Amazon and Apple, but the people used for the voices on Google were hired and paid for their work. The fact that the technology has advanced to the point where it can create the impression of a human reading the text rather than a robot, is not a result of stealing anyone's work. No one owns language. It's merely a product of long research and development over decades.

As for the issue of quality, it's clearly subjective. Though I am not an audiobook "reader", I recently sampled the newly released audiobook version of the first Emma M Lion book. I found the sample all wrong. The narrator's voice did not match the one in my head, nor did her tempo, pauses and emphasis match the way I read the passage. These are the same complaints Hartness had with the auto-narrated book he sampled. In the case of the Lion book, Beth Brower, auditioned 70 people for the role of Emma. It is her Emma, and she is completely happy with the choice she made, and in the reviews I looked at, everyone else's is as well. (My daughter, however, agrees with me.) My point being that appreciating narration is every bit as subjective as appreciating a book. People love books that other people hate. I understand that many audiobook listeners speed up the narration by a factor of 1.2X to 1.8X, so it seems that many listeners don't mind Alvin the Chipmunk as a narrator. They value the story over the delivery of it.

Now this author and everyone else is welcome to their opinions. But is it "garbage"? I don't listen to audiobooks, so all i can say what is good enough, though Amazon, Apple and Google apparently feel it is.

While I don't have an opinion on the quality of auto-narrated books, I do have data. My data suggests that for my books, my readership, and my business model it is more than good enough. Over the last three years, I've sold more than 25,000 auto-narrated audiobooks. No one has complained about the quality of the narration. All of my auto-narrated audiobooks' ratings match or are higher their ebook versions. Moreover, on Audible, three of my books have ratings, which are split between the story and the "performance", i.e. the narration. They earned a 5, 4,& a 3, star performance rating, for a 4 star average. A small sample, but still, these are not free books; people paid a modest amount of money for them. A 4-star average performance is not objectively garbage.

But there was one other aspect of this video that actually angered me. In a comment, Hartness said that he wanted to "shame" writers into not using auto-narration for their books. Now, if you happen to be a cynic, heaven forbid, this sounds, well, a little self-serving. It is an example of what I'm calling "shadow gatekeeping" in the indie space these days. It's not just the hucksters, but successful authors, who are telling aspiring self-publishing authors that they really need to spend between $3,000 and $10,000 to publish their book the "right way". They need to hire editors, artists, designers, formaters, and human narrators, to insure a professional quality book. They tell them that they owe it to the readers and well, indie-publishers as whole, to put their best foot forward, otherwise they're letting down the side. Of course, if you're already successful self-publishing author, you're likely doing this already, and if you're rich enough to have that much cash on hand, which you can afford to lose, sure, go ahead, self-publish your book. Chances are you won't be around long... And don't let the gate hit your ass on the way out.

Oh, they might mention that there are cheaper ways to do this, but you don't really want to be one of the unwashed riff-raff of self-publishing, do you? As I said, this sounds very self-serving to me; the message is pretty clear; only the successful authors and the rich should release their proper books and audiobooks.

In my view the advice misses on two main points; books are sold by promoting them, all the editing, covers, etc. does nothing to address this. And second, the ebook market is not the traditional publishing market; it is the pulp fiction market, with different priorities. Story, not grammar rules the pulp market.

Of course, I'm sure that all their advice is good and well meaning. Don't let the cynic in you say otherwise.

A footnote; one comment on the post that original blog, was from a person who makes audiobooks. Amazon offered them a chance to try a beta program that would clone their voice. Presumably an audiobook could be produced with a press of a button in their own "human" voice. And then, I suppose, the human narrator could go through it to edit it to their liking, a process that I would guess would be a lot less time consuming for the narrator, who can spend 5 to 6 hours to produce one hour of narration. With this technology available, we will likely hear a lot more "human" narrators that have been at least partially produced by computers, just as we now have a lot of "human" cover artists who use generative AI as a tool to produce elements of their work and speed up production. Time is money, no matter what you do. A fellow's got'a eat. Art is a very poor career choice. 

It seems that in the 21st century, anything can be real. And anything can be unreal. You have options.