Made My Entire Audiobook with a Voice Clone… Here’s What Really Happened

Hey author, do you want to produce an audiobook in your voice but not have to sit in a studio working your butt off for 18 hours and paying an audiobook editor and producer $3,500 or more to produce it? 11 Labs has a pretty awesome solution for you. So if you're curious how easy it all is, well, you're in luck because I walked through the whole process and filmed it for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and host here @book launchers TV. All right, I get the that this is not for everyone. So if you hate AI and digital narration, this video is not going to be for you. And that is okay. I have plenty of other videos you'll like. No need to leave me hate in the comments. Unless it really makes you feel good. Then, you know, go ahead. I can take it. I got Broad shoulders. Yeah, for real, I do. At Book Launchers, most of our authors narrate their books themselves and we pair them with an editor and producer to make their book audible and other platform ready. It is a great process and absolutely my recommendation for nonfiction authors. If you can do this. A human narrated book also has the widest distribution options. That said, it is expensive and time consuming and not everyone is going to be able to do that or want to do that for me. As I've launched the second edition of Self Publish and Succeed, I have been so busy that carving out three days to record the book just is not an option. Right now we're deep into big goals with our Author Launch Kit software. We're doing our first big live event in Las Vegas in March. You're invited. If you want help writing a book to build a business, it's authorsempireworkshop.com and of course there is all the regular business stuff. And I have a family too. All that is to say, I needed a different solution for the second edition. I didn't want to hire a narrator because I want it to be my voice. So that left me with a voice clone option when I released Self Promote and Succeed. That one my audiobook editor used my voice clone to edit my audiobook. You can watch and listen to the audiobook here on YouTube if you'd like. I'll link to the playlist in the description below. And for that, the voice clone worked really well and now Elevenlabs is much more sophisticated than it was then. So I'm going to create a new clone and make my audiobook and you can come along with me. So first let's get the clone started. After you've paid for your account, you'll get to this screen. If you don't have voice samples of a high quality like I do, you'll want to be ready to record something. They have this video and these instructions so you can create the absolute best possible recording. This is an important step. They recommend a quiet room and good equipment, including a pop filter. For me, what I used is my last audiobook recording because it was recorded with those criteria. The instructions here are good and as you can upload, you can see the voice clone quality getting rated and improving. Now, I had a lot of audio content to use, so I uploaded two full hours and I just waited until it said it's the best. So I just kept uploading and uploading until it got the best rating and then I clicked the button to create the clone. Now, the clone does not happen instantly. In fact, the next step was to verify this is me and that I'm not creating a voice clone of someone else's voice. When you hit create the clone, you need to be ready to record a quick voice sample so that it knows that it's you. It's just a quick verification step where you read the sentence they show you and now you wait for them to produce the clone. I actually didn't get an email saying it was ready, but when I logged back in the next day, it was ready to go. Now the next step is to get our manuscript ready for upload. This isn't as simple as just taking whatever you have and uploading it, because you want your voice clone to be able to read it quite effectively. So the first step is to remove running headers and page numbers, remove images and charts and graphs. Now, my book is simple and the removal of these things doesn't impact your understanding. If you have some charts and graphs that impact your understanding, you'll want to remove them and replace them with the words that should be there. For example, in the diagram you will see in the PDF download you can access with your audiobook on page 4, you will see the trend line is heading up until 2022. Then it dramatically drops and that is a result of blah, blah, blah. So you need to type all of this in. Now, most people would do this to prepare for an actual audiobook recording as well. Unless you're mean you wing it when you record, which I do. But after recording, you know, 1200 videos and doing hundreds and hundreds of interviews, I can think and speak on the fly. Probably still better if it was prepared. But I don't have complex charts or images. So this was easy for my book. Number three is change URLs to remove the HTTPs www. Now cleaning up the URLs a must do, but it does sound better. Even when I read my own books, I don't say HTTPs www.website.com so I would say website.com so I remove that. The other thing is to remove special formatting like drop caps and text boxes. Now we actually think this may have been unnecessary now that we uploaded it, but that is something we did. What you do want to do is remove blank pages, the title page, copyright page, the table of contents, footnotes, and you also want to remove the title at the top of each page because it will read that. And we added opening and closing credits. So you need to add the title page that says Self Publish and Succeed. Second Edition. Written by Julie Broad, Narrated by. I mean, what do you put here? I put Julie Broad's voice clone. I almost said Julie the Book Bot, because that's what I call my clone. And you'll find her inside of the Author Launch Kit or our premier community on school. But I just said narrated by Julie Broad's voice clone. Anyway, now it's ready. Or so we thought. So I went ahead and clicked on Audiobook and excitedly uploaded my manuscript. Ready for the magic. I selected the Julie Broad clone from the list and it looks funny, but I had a listen and it actually sounds pretty good. So there's something wrong with how we had created this file to upload it. So we had to take a step back and go back to the drawing board so you can. You can edit it really easily to make the silences shorter and even click the pronunciation guide to change things. So what we realized was that something was off with the header and subheaders that was making it into a whole bunch of different files instead of it being a file for chapter one and a file for chapter two. So I got Alyssa on my team and she fixed it. And I'll tell you how she fixed it in a second. But first impression. Well, listen to the voice.

Self Publish and Succeed the no Boring Books Way to Write A Nonfiction Book that Sells. Second Edition. Written by Julie Broad and narrated by Julie Broad's voice clone. Copyright 2025 Stick Horse Publishing. All rights reserved.

Sounds pretty darn good, I think. What do you think? Tell me in the comments below. Okay, so just in case you end up with a mess of files on the left hand side like I did, the system was reading every subheader as a different file. So Alyssa went back in and we just found that editing the Adobe file was not going well. And what she did, she ended up actually putting it into a Word a Dot docx. And even though it said to be careful with that, that's what we had when we kept uploading the PDF. So eleven Labs was not recognizing the start of the chapter for some reason. We exported it to Word, removed the running headers and page numbers. We removed the blank pages. We removed those images and charts just like before and the URLs. We also removed any special formatting like drop caps and text boxes. We removed the title page, copyright page, half title page, and table of contents. We removed all footnotes. We added the opening and closing credits. And here was the thing that fixed it. We assigned chapter titles the heading one style that told 11 labs to create all the individual files. If you had a final Word version of your book before creating your layout and haven't made a lot of your changes, use that. It's going to make the changes so much easier. However, if you made a lot of changes during layout like we did, all hope is not lost. You just export your PDF layout to a Word Doc and follow the above steps. Okay, it takes a little bit of work to prep the file, but when you do this, it will make the rest of the process so much easier. Now, you do have to go through and check for for things like stray hyphens, lists and odd spacing, because that will confuse the AI voice clone. Now, if you're lucky enough like me, to have an amazing person on your team like Alyssa, they'll help you with this. And she definitely spent a few hours on it, but in doing that, it set this up for quick success. Now, I want to show you a couple of things with the platform. First, once the file is formatted correctly, look how this comes out. Like a dream, all separated exactly as you're going to need it. Okay, so you see all the files are separated nicely on the side by chapter. Now, what you want to do is listen and then edit. And you can type right in here to make edits and elongate the spacing or delete spacing in the bar. And I also want to note a couple things. One is, in my about the second edition, there were some weird things like it doesn't say AI, it says I. So I had to put a space between the A and the I so that it actually said AI. It also had a few sentences that were just coming in hot, so I had to insert spaces. And you can just do a hard spacing, or you can use the little button at the top to insert space.

This edition isn't a how to manual for using AI to write your book. And please, even if you do use AI to write your book, aspire to create a book that is better than something AI could write in the next decade. Being human is going to be your edge. Still, I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't at least address how to think about AI's role in your author journey, because it is going to be part of that journey whether you use it or not. Beyond that, since the first edition launched, we've worked with 500 more authors. One of them went massively viral like Today Show, USA Today, People Magazine. Kind of viral. We've had some authors hit major bestseller lists. Many others sold more copies than those who hit the lists, but they never hit the lists themselves. What I know, I'll explain in the book.

Okay, so one thing to note is you don't want to export the chapter every time because it uses credits. I have a ton of credits, so I'm not really worried about that. But I don't have time to go through the whole thing. This is where having an assistant, a VA or someone you know on your family to help you because it's not complicated to edit. But you do want somebody to go through and listen to the entire thing and make small adjustments. For example, another one I found was our hashtag noboringbooks came out number sign no boring books. So you have to go in and manually type it. So I highly recommend that somebody go through it and catch all those things because it will take a reader out of the experience of listening to your book if there's little things that remind it that it's like listening to a robot. Because other than those little glitches, it is quite good. And while you can probably tell it's not me, it's not jarringly so not me. So you want to make sure it's not doing things like number no boring books process. You want to make sure it's saying hashtag no boringbooks process. So all I did was remove the number sign and write the word hashtag so it would say it. Here are a few other editing tips that I found. Chapters and sections clearly mark chapters with the headings. So we said that to prep the file, chapter one should be a heading one and use line breaks for natural pauses. And this just helps the studio segment your project for easier management and progress tracking. I do also find it makes a difference if you label a chapter heading as heading one and the subheadings as heading two. It's subtle, but there is a difference between it. The one thing both Alyssa and I were impressed at was how it puts emphasis on certain words and actually can emote in places where I would have emoted. So we were quite pleased overall with the clone's quality and ability to to adjust based on the words and the text and probably because of the quality of the voice samples that it had. Some other things I recommend is to keep your paragraph short like three sentences max. I mean five sometimes works if they're short sentences. You can also use this little Add break feature at the top to add one second or just hit Enter and put a hard space in. Both will work format naturally with quotes. You know, like hello Said John. Use italics or brackets for internal thoughts if you want a subtler tone shift. It does do a good job of adjusting tone when you do that, of course. Periods for short pauses or commas for breaths. The ellipses for hesitation and exclamation question marks for inflection. Capitals can also add emphasis like stop, but obviously use those sparingly to avoid shouting. Now get this from a bit little 11 labs to 11 reader well, that process, you're going to have to wait and tune into the next video to catch that. This video is already jam packed and it's probably going to take you a minute to get your book done. But let me know in the comments what you think of the voice clone and the process and I'll get to work on the video on distributing my voice clone to all the places I'm going to be able to do this with. That is going to be fun. Now this is the next video to watch to help you.