Julie Broad walks through three platforms offering synthetic narration for audiobooks: KDP's new beta that gets books to Audible in 72 hours with 40% royalties, Findaway Voices' Google Play workflow, and Apple Books' speech synthesis. She's tested 11 Labs voice cloning for shorter projects and sees potential in synthetic narration despite quality and policy concerns.
Questions this video answers
Fourth quarter of 2023.
4% (stated in video).
Within 72 hours (as stated).
Prices $3.99–$14.99; authors receive a 40% royalty.
LPF files generated before November 11, 2023 will not work; they must be regenerated in Google Play Books.
Chapters
Hey, have you heard the news? KDP is beta testing digital narration. Draft 2 Digital has had that for a while. Findaway Voices is now distributing digital voice narration in limited reach. So this means you don't have to pay a narrator or be the narrator of your book to create an audiobook. Now this is a really big time and energy savings if you have a book you want to put up an audiobook version for. So if you want to learn more about how this will work, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, a full service self publishing platform that helps you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book to grow your brand and your business. And let me say, any way that you can put an audiobook into the world now is something you should see seriously consider because that market is growing rapidly and if you don't have an audiobook you are missing out on some of the discoverability and potential readers or listeners. But narrating a book takes a lot of time and then it takes a lot of editing and producing and that's an investment of time and money. Now let's be clear. I am still a fan of narrating your book yourself. You get your voice in the head of your ideal reader, which is quite likely your ideal client for your product, service speaking, or whatever you're doing in the bigger picture around your book. You can also read your book and catch things that you may want to change or edit or tweak when you're narrating your audiobook. That said, if you are like me and you have a book that you haven't created an audiobook for, like my first book, More than Cash Flow. And you're wondering if this is a solution? Well, it might be. I have a few questions that I don't actually have answers to yet, and I'm not totally jumping in on this just yet. But here's what I know right now and this is literally changing every month. So make sure you're on the launch letter. For the latest news, go to book launchers.com newsletter but for now, let's talk about the KDP beta program. In the fourth quarter of 2023, KDP started a beta program for authors to produce audiobook versions of their ebooks using virtual voice narration. This is also called synthetic speech, AI voice narration, robot voice. So many different things to say the same thing. A robot voice is reading your book. In that release, the stat jumped out at me of currently only 4% of titles self published through KDP have an audiobook available. What can you say? Opportunity, my other friend. So the KDP program. You have to be invited into the beta program right now, but if you are, you can choose one of your eligible ebooks already on the KDP platform. You can then sample voices, preview the work and customize the audiobook, and then publish after publication. Audiobooks will be live within 72 hours, they say, and will be distributed wherever Audible titles are sold. Now, prices can be set between 399 and 1499, and authors will receive a 40% royalty. I assume this means Audible will set the price just like they do for natural voice submissions, but that wasn't totally clear to me. So all audiobooks will be clearly labeled as synthetic voice. And of course we'll have a sample that readers can sample before they buy. This is really interesting. I am really excited about these developments, but I'm also not excited that Audible is going to take so much of the cut. Audible is not in it to make money for you. I guess it's better to make 40% on something you weren't going to create another way, or that would have cost you thousands to make. So it's extra money on a product you've already created. So it's not a bad thing. But 40% feels really light to me now. More recently, Findaway Voices has announced that you can create and distribute digital voice narration through Google Play. Basically, you have to create an LPF file and upload it to Findaway. So what is an LPF file, you ask? I'm glad you did. I had to look it up. An LPF file is a file provided by Google Playbooks when you download your digital Voice narrated audiobook. It's a bit of a mouthful. LPF files generated before November 11, 2023 will not work. So if you happen to have done this prior to that D it will not work. But if you did that, you just have to log into Google Play Books and regenerate your LPF files. Then you can take that file and upload it to Find a Way Voices by Spotify and off you go. Well, you need your metadata, your price, and then you have to select the retailers that you can choose or at this time that are allowed for digital voice narration. It's a pretty small list right now, but that is likely going to grow. But please note, you cannot edit the narrator's credit and Findaway will automatically set this from Google Play along with the notation that it's a digital voice narration which will go into your description. Digital voice narrated audiobooks are currently Being accepted by select retail partners, you are able to choose which partners you want to sell with. Findaway Voices will then auto assign an ISBN which also brings up some questions for me because if you take an Asin from Amazon and then you want to upload somewhere else, you're in a pickle. So I don't know what that's going to do if you. I mean you can't take that file and upload it somewhere else anyway. So I don't know. But finally the last one I want to mention is Draft to Digital because it's not being left out of this. They've actually had digital narration with Apple Books for a while. Apple Books has speech synthesis synth synthesis Synthesis synthesis. Speech synthesis Synthesis. I know, but try and say it after saying speech, then say it after speech. Speech synthesis. Show off Speech synthesis. Okay. Apple Books has speech synthesis technology and will produce high quality audiobooks from an ebook file. If you have a book for sale on Apple Books directly or via Draft2Digital, you should be able to do this. And they say it's easy. But I've tried a couple times to do it and well, it just keeps saying that I don't have an eligible book. So they say you can easily generate your audiobook with the help of Apple Books Digital Narration, but my books don't show up as eligible and it says it must be in a certain genre. So I haven't been able to test this for you. If you have been able to test it or done any of these, please comment in the comments below and let us all know what we need to know about it. In the meantime, I have cloned my voice with 11 labs and we use it for the pickups in the narration of my book Self Promote and Succeed, which you can also grab the audio version of that by the way right here at Self Promote and Succeed Audio. I recorded the entire book myself as you can watch and I'll link that playlist into the description and at the end of this video. But instead of going back and recording the words I missed or mispronounced, my editor could use 11 labs to replace those mistakes. It saved me half a day back in the studio and also saved my editor time and effort because he could fix it as he was editing. I can't wait until I can record the whole book in my voice with digital narration. But we're not there now. It's not allowed. Although technically, even with my cloned pickups, that's not allowed. But it was accepted because you can't tell what's human and what is digital? Listen and try. You won't be able to find them. That said, the cloning isn't quite good enough for a complete upload, but man, it's coming and I can't wait for that day because I am excited about having an audiobook in my voice without me having to spend three days in a studio. That is a dream come true. All right, what's new in digital narration since I shot the video or what do you know about it that I should add to an update? Oh, by the way, you can copyright protect this because it's still your material. Unlike if you generate a book using AI that you cannot copyright protect. But this is still your material. It's just a synthetic voice. It's not the same as AI generation. Just a little note there. All right, let's chat about all of this in the comments below. And of course, when you comment the day a video is released, you get entered to win some of our fabulous hashtag no boring book swag. Or, or you could win physical copies of my books. All kinds of fun stuff. All right, so after you comment on this video, this one is a great one to watch on selling audiobooks direct to your listener, which by the way has no restrictions on digital versus human except what your listener will like. And this video is a good one for you to watch according to our friends at YouTube's Algorithm. Click on over to one of them and say hi when you get there.
