How to Make an Audiobook with AI and Clone Your Voice with ElevenLabs

Your book is done and you want to create an audiobook version of your book in your voice without recording it yourself. Thanks to technology, you can do it. It's a little creepy and it's not currently accepted on very many platforms, but you can do it. And I will show you how today. So if you want to produce an audiobook using AI in your voice, well, this video is for hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad, Founder of Book Launchers. Today I'm going to share something with you that isn't going to work to sell your book on Audible or a lot of other places. At least as of this very moment. I do believe that's going to change, and it already is changing, but it's a way you can produce an audiobook for a low cost and with much less time than narrating it yourself. This will allow you to give it away on Book Funnel or even sell it on on Book Funnel and a couple other places too. There's not very many that will let you upload it for mass distribution. I'll test it with Kobo and maybe Google Play. I don't know if it's going to work. Some have said Apple will accept it, but I don't know if it will. Plus Apple's interface is so horrific to deal with, so I don't really want to play in there. If you've done it, let me know in the comments below and maybe I'll just have you on Book Launchers TV to show everybody. But first, you need your manuscript fully ready clean, so only do this when you have your final version. Images won't translate, so you'll need to write in the text that you want to be used where the image was. This will take you a bit of time, but you'd want to do this even if you're narrating it yourself, unless you're really good at doing it on the fly, which is what I do. But I'm used to creating a ton of content speaking without having all the words in front of me, like I'm doing right now. And also you want to deal with URLs in your manuscript because they sound so funny when a bot version of you reads them out loud. Listen to Julie bot trying to read a URL from my book. More than cashflow. It sounds like such a glitch.

HTTP, cbc CA News oh my gosh.

That is so, so bad. Second, you will need to choose the platform that you're going to use to clone your voice. There are more and more coming on the Market all the time. Be human. 11 labs and descript are the three big ones I've played with and they're all awesome. But I've spent the most time with 11 labs and, and we used it for pickups on my audiobook, Self Promote and Succeed and our clients audiobooks. And recently it's updated and oh my gosh, it's doing really, really amazing things. But other people have produced their audiobooks with Descript and swear by it. But I'm going to focus in on 11 labs now. First, you have to create an account. I'm not going to take you through that. I'm confident that if you're someone who's keen enough to clone your voice and you are skilled enough to do that, you're going to figure out how to create an account. But I do want to note that you will need to get their Pro account for $99 per month. I had to upgrade mine because you won't be able to produce your whole audiobook with the creator plan and you won't be able to use the quality of the version that is audiobook ready. So I had to upgrade to do this project for you. Now you've got your account. Step three is to clone your voice. So we've played with this a lot. The best results came from three samples, but they've also added this new professional feature where you can upload three hours and have it clone your voice. And I've heard from one person that that worked really, really well. But what we did, I uploaded three samples. One is recorded in a studio with exceptional sound quality and I read for 10 minutes as though I was narrating an audiobook, but it was unedited. I put extra emphasis on words and took care to pronounce everything clearly. Another file shown as untitled here, I recorded in GarageBand with just a headset and I recorded my side of a phone conversation. So that's me speaking naturally. The third file was me narrating an audiobook, so it's edited and fully clean. This combination got us to something that sounds not 100% natural, but darn close. And it's a little more than 30 minutes of my voice uploaded in toto. Again, this newest feature is professional voice and you should use a studio. It gives you requirements there and you can upload up to three hours of content for best results. And like I said, I know one person who cloned their voice and produced their audiobook with this and is thrilled with the result. As you can see here, they give you clear instructions to upload at least 30 minutes of clean and professional audio and up to three hours. The more you give it, the better trained it will be. Again, not exactly what we did, but that feature wasn't there when I cloned my voice. After you upload this, you can then play with some of the settings to change the replication and the depth of voice. This does make a difference, so take a bit of time to play with it, download samples, and then hear what the sample sounds like. Here, just take a quick listen to this sample.

Chapter one in the hotel room where it all began, Dave and I had just moved across the country from British Columbia so I could pursue my MBA at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

So you can just take a paragraph from your book and input it there and then convert it to see how it sounds. That was a couple sentences from More Than Cash Flow's first chapter. Okay, step four. Once you have your voice sounding pretty good, you will create a new project and then you'll upload your book chapter by chapter. Now here's a tip I ran into when I copy and pasted from my Word document. I had page numbers in the bottom which got read by the bot, and of course the URL issue and and images. So I'm not trying to pretend this isn't AI. So a few funky things are just going to be part of the listening experience for a reader for more than Cash Flow. But you do need to go through your file to eliminate things that will sound weird and throw the reading or rather listening experience off. So let me show you what you mean. You create a project. I already have this one going, but they have new options that are set specifically for audiobooks. So I'm going to start a new project and just use the High Level. If I was actually going to try to sell this, I would invest in the best quality. But this is a demo for you all and I'll probably give it away for free at the end if I even use it. So I'm only going to use the High Level and in my tests High Level actually is pretty solid. Now I have a project where I'm going to be uploading the Word file, which is what I think you'll have to do because of URLs and images and just needing to edit it. But they have the option to upload the PDF, so I'm going to call this the Lazy Man's Way and I'm going to upload the PDF of the book and convert it just to see what the final product is. Uploading a PDF is so easy. After you create a new project, fill in the details, and then drop your PDF in here and upload. They also have lexicons in here too, so technically I could mess with this to try to get them to pronounce process the right way for me, but I'm not going to mess with it right now. And I read into it thinking maybe I could finally get it to say process instead of process, but I think it's going to change too much across the whole project. What I mean is it's going to say project, not project. It's going to say process, not process, but it's going to say pronunciation instead of pronunciation, so it's going to change too much. Anyway, the Julie bot is really close now, so I need it to have a tell so you know when it's me and not Julie Bod. Cool. Okay, so let's get back into the PDF upload and see how it all went. Oh, my gosh. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Lazy Man's way is not going to be easier. Not one bit. Look at this hot mess of a file. I can already picture Julie Bot reading every character thing in this. Note that this is not going to work. We're not going to work with that. That just gave me hives at the thought of cleanup that has to go into it. So Lazy Man's process, not actually a good process. So let's go back to working with the Word file, because that was actually a lot easier. So you go ahead, get your chapter, drop it in here, create a new chapter, label the chapter, upload it, and then just edit it like you were editing a Word file. And again, you're looking for removing things like URLs, you want to describe the images that were there, and just look for anything funky like page numbers or any other kind of graphics or icons that might throw the bot off. I can tell you guys this is taking me hours and hours to make this video for you because of all these steps and messing around with 11 labs. So I hope you're appreciating this comment below if you're loving this. And of course, if you're new here, commenting the day a video comes out gets you entered to win books and swag. And it's not just any swag, it's noboringbookswag. So make sure you're subscribed so you can get notified when a video comes out. Now, what I'm doing with the Word file is adding headers, deleting URLs, removing random things like numbers because that copies over like I said. And just making this so the Julie bot can read this like a human. Now, after Julie bot reads it, or while Julie bot is reading it, which is the conversion step, converting these files does take a few minutes. So you can take an exercise break, a drink break, or just start prepping the next file to load over. Basically what you're going to do is upload this chapter by chapter, just like you upload it to Book Funnel or ACX and convert the file, download it and keep going until your book is done. Now, before you go hog wild and do the whole book, listen to what's there so you can make adjustments. And if you want to get really fancy, you can actually change voices or styles paragraph by paragraph. At that point though, my goodness, I feel like you should just narrate this yourself or pay an editor to do this because that's getting intense and you're missing out on the fun part of reading the book, which I actually really do love narrating my audiobooks. Now, you're still saving time even if you go paragraph by paragraph to do this. But you know, that seems like a lot of extra work for a non fiction book. Oh my gosh, it's still converting. I just have to keep talking. I'm just waiting for it to finish converting while I'm talking to you. So what else do you want to talk about? Got any ideas? Well, where do you listen to audiobooks? For me, it's always in the car or if I'm walking the dogs every once in a while. If I walk them alone, I might put in an audiobook and listen. But that's rare because mostly I walk the dogs with my son and my son will talk the whole time we're walking. I learn about his school, I learn about Pokemon and his friends when we walk. And he wanted this little scruffy white critter, so I told him he'd be responsible for making sure she's walked and fed, so he has to walk her every day. But you know, I, truth be told, I also wanted our old girl to have a friend in her last couple of years. So, you know, I wasn't opposed to getting the white scruffy critter. Okay, phew, it's finally ready. Here is the file. Okay, so now you can click versions and download. Okay, Julie bottom, go ahead and read to us, will you?

How to become a full time real estate investor even though you might not actually want to be one. When I announced my intention to quit my job My friends thought it was cool until I couldn't afford to go for dinner or travel to their weddings or gatherings anymore.

So something's a little funky there. Everything sounded great in that first paragraph, but the chapter title something's weird there. Spacing was funky. So let's go. Oh, crumb cakes. I missed removing the hyphen from the chapter title. Okay, now the crappy thing about that, because it's one little mistake and now I would have to have the whole thing go back over it and render a new file. And I will be quickly maxing out my month of characters before I know it. So you need to have an attention to detail, and that's not my strength. That's why I have a fantastic team of people at Book Launchers who have wonderful attention to detail. So if I'm going to finish this More Than Cashflow audiobook, I'm going to have to recruit someone on my team to help me with this. But for now, with all of that, I think you can produce your own clone voice and audiobook. What do you think? I do need a nap though. Bot work isn't as easy as I thought it would be. Now that you have this, you're going to need to know where to upload, so go to Book Funnel. That video right here is all about uploading a audiobook to Book Funnel. And after you watch that, you might like to watch this video on preparing a book for narration. You can, because it's going to give you some ideas of weird things the bot will read. Or if you're going to read it yourself, how to prepare to read your book. Click on over. Both are fantastic to watch. After watching this one, I'm excited to see you there again.