Julie Broad walks through creating a voice-cloned audiobook with ElevenLabs and uploading it to Spotify for Authors. Her team spent 1.5 hours editing for every finished hour of audio, fixing AI errors line by line. She uploaded each chapter with metadata and labeled the narrator as "Julie Broad AI narration" for transparency.
Chapters
Recording an audiobook used to mean booking a studio, sitting in a padded booth for days, and praying your voice wouldn't give out before chapter 8. Ahem. And then you would spend thousands of dollars with an editor to produce and master the book. Audiobooks are time and money intensive to produce a great quality, but you get a human-narrated, top-quality piece of work that you can distribute everywhere audiobooks are sold. But of course, that's not what I did for the second edition of Self-Publish and Succeed, and I'm taking you along with me So if you're wondering about the whole voice-cloned audiobook distribution path, well, good news, this honest and real video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, creator of the best nonfiction book marketing tool, Author Launch Kit, and your host here at BookLaunchers.tv. All right, if you haven't been following along, well, you better subscribe to the channel so you don't ever fall behind again. But I thought I'd outsmart that whole mess of time and money investment for the second edition of my book. I went ahead and cloned my voice in ElevenLabs. That video is right here. I'll put it, the link in the description below. But I thought I'll hit a few buttons and boom, I'll create an audiobook without ever stepping in a studio. Well, building the voice clone was so easy and I think the output is pretty strong. Of course, it's not exactly like me, but thank goodness for that. With AI-generated narration, you can create compelling, professional-sounding audio clips of your book. The cloning of my voice at a push of a button— check, that was done. But then came the real story, the part that doesn't really show up in the shiny AI marketing books— or not books, but you know what I mean. What we discovered is that AI-narrated audiobook doesn't mean hands-off audiobook. Not even close. It took about an hour and a half of human editing for every finished hour of audio. And I mean, I'm not a lone wolf author. I have an entire team at my company Book Launchers. So after I did a little bit, Alyssa, who runs our Books Hub, said, "Well, I'm gonna learn how to do this and then teach the team." So I filmed Alyssa a quick Loom on what had to be done. And she came back and said, "Okay, we've got it." And originally I thought we'd hire our audiobook editors, but Alyssa said, "That's way too expensive and this is easy to do. It just takes time. So between her and two other people on the team, they broke the work up and proceeded to comb through it line by line, which is what it takes. And fortunately, they are more economical than paying a professional audiobook editor, so we still saved money. But the fantasy that AI eliminated all the work and all the cost— no, not a chance. But after they finished, I took it back over to upload so I could film a few videos for you. I am now reminded why I started my company and don't deal with this kind of stuff anymore. I burned 4 hours trying to complete what I thought would be the simplest task in the world, getting my audiobook from ElevenLabs into ElevenReader. These two systems are connected. They're the same company. And every time I thought I had cracked the code, something else broke. So I still don't have it working. But the moment I figure it out, I will film a separate step-by-step video for you on that. I am still a huge fan of 11Labs cloning tech. It's impressive. But the idea that publishing from there to other platforms is easy? Well, my enthusiasm has matured. But today we're going to upload to Spotify for Authors. So hopefully you've got your Spotify for Authors account already. And you'll have to stay tuned, make sure you're subscribed to the channel, so that you can get access when I upload it to other places like ElevenReader and Voices by InAudio. So first things first, let's talk about the part that was actually easy, which was exporting the audiobook files out of ElevenLabs. On the screen, you'll see my edited project inside of ElevenLabs. Once the edits are done, you go to export. Now here's the critical step. You want to export the full project as chapters. So do that. Spotify requires you to upload one chapter at a time, which is exactly as fun as it sounds. But thankfully, this exports in chapters and gives you clean files organized for upload. Now that I've exported everything, I've got those files sitting right here, all individual chapter MP3s ready to go. So now we head over to Spotify for Authors. On the screen, you'll see I'm editing the original audiobook because this is the second edition, but you could start a new audiobook project. I don't know a reason why one would be better than the other. Either process is going to look very similar. You'll want to have all your metadata handy, including ISBN, BISAC codes, description. But right away, Spotify asks you for the chapters. I'm selecting all of my exported files. One thing you're going to see me deal with on screen here is sometimes not every chapter loads on the first try. When that happens, just go back, select the missing files, upload them one by one. It's not that hard to do. In the past, I didn't fuss much about chapter titles. I just let it go chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. So forth, they mattered for organization, but it wasn't a big deal because listeners were listening and only needed the numerical guide. Spotify now allows readers or listeners to choose individual chapters, which means chapter titles could matter more and more. Right now you can't search by the chapter title, but if someone's browsing for a specific topic, say launch teams or marketing foundations, your chapter title might help with that in the deciding factor. Now, it actually— looking at my chapter titles, it might be a mistake that I don't specifically say the 3 kinds of editors your book needs here. My chapter titles are a little more curiosity-creating, but right now people aren't searching for the granular information that a chapter title might contain. But I could see a future where that happens. Regardless, I'm going to put the chapter name in there, not just the number. On screen, you'll see me going through the chapter list and updating each one This is tedious, so I'm not gonna make you watch all of this. Okay, once the chapters are in place, we move to the metadata section. This is your title, your subtitle, author name, narrator. And for the narrator, I'm putting Julie Broad AI narration because transparency matters. And also because I think pretending I stood in a studio for days would be hilarious to the people who actually know my voice. So you'll also see me adjust the publication date, which Spotify also tried to invent for me. And I confirm the copyright details for the new edition. The BISAC codes, formatting, and review. Well, the description formatting, I'm actually not in love with this formatting. Spotify gives you a very narrow window and it does not translate well. I actually copy and pasted it from Word and it was a real hot mess. So I copy and pasted from Word into a text file and then into here. And I still think it needs a little tweaking, but I won't bore you with that. BISAC codes, well, I actually think they've evolved since this first edition, so I'm going to come back to this later because I didn't have my new BISAC codes handy. I'm leaving placeholders here because I want you to get to the next steps without having to watch me scroll. Once everything looks good enough to proceed, we hit review. This is where you double-check the layout, the chapter order, the metadata, and make sure Spotify hasn't snuck in any surprise creative decisions. And this brings us to the next step, which is Submit. I hit submit and voilà, I get this screen. So by the time you're watching this, the audiobook should be available in Spotify for Authors and I'll be able to do a follow-up video. But in the meantime, what did you think? Tell me in the comments below.
