I am certain that all the writers who follow this blog are, like myself, against using generative AI to write our stories for us. Some of you, perhaps most, may also draw the line at using AI in any of its various forms, for any reason connected with your writing. However, if you are interested in offering your readership audiobooks, and lack the business to justify the expense of hiring human narrators, then a new opportunity has opened up for you. Namely, Spotify. Yes, that music streaming service.
Recently Spotify has begun to give indie-authors the opportunity to offer their books on their platform as narrated by a digital voice audiobooks. You upload an ePub version of your book and they will convert it into an audiobook at no cost to you. You set your own price. I’m not an audiobook listener, so I am not a good judge of audiobook narration, but I must admit, I rather liked my narrator, Nathaniel, who was, of course, the voice of a real human who was paid for his work.
The process of setting up an audiobook is pretty much the same as with the other audiobook services I use. You do have to be signed up with Spotify. Currently you have to reside in the United States. You have to give them your banking data so they can send you your royalties and the government your tax info. When you upload your ePub book, your blurb from the web is automatically loaded, which, I guess, is the state of the internet and world these days. There are the usual details to be filled in, like title, series, publisher, author, and genres. NOTE: I discovered that there is a limit of 5 books to this service. There is a character limit of 500,000 characters, so you’re looking at an upper limit of around 100K words. You have 6 male and 4 female voices to choose from. They offer a list of words to check the narrator’s pronunciation, which you can then correct if needed. Interestingly, they offer the chance to post a teaser from your book using up to 700 words that people can listen to before buying. You can only regenerate the audio 4 times, including while you are setting up the book, so determine your voice and corrected words before actually creating the audiobook. Still, all in all the experience, after your first time, is straightforward.
Not being a book platform, I have no idea how readily your books will be found, though I believe audiobooks on Spotify is a growing business. I am going to upload a limited number of my shorter books, and may report back in a month or two.
If you are interested, you should search for “Spotify for Authors”, since I did not see any option for accessing this service from my usual account page.
So the voices are those of real humans who are paid for their work, not AI-generated voices? But you also say they are “digital voices.” I’m not sure I understand how that works. From your description, it doesn’t seem that the author of the book works directly with the human narrator.
Since this is available only in the US now, I won’t be jumping in, but thanks for the info, Chuck.
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The voices are produced by 11ElevenLabs which, like all these AI generated voices, sample or “clone” the voices of real humans to create the digital version. The software then translates the letters into the spoken word as the recorded speaker would say the word. The big advance is that these days the software is aware of the immediate and overall emotional context of the words, so it transcribes the words with the proper cadence and emotion.
If the voice actor choses to license their voice for use as a digital narrator, that seems to me to be perfectly ethical, and its use ethical as well. But everyone has to draw their own lines on what their comfortable with.
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If the voice contributors are paid, that does make this more ethical. And adding emotional context is a bonus. Google Play advises their AI voices are best suited for nonfiction narration rather than fiction, because of a limited emotional range.
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It was a surprise to me to know that Spotify, a music channel, was getting into audiobooks. However, my discovery of this was a few months ago, when an author fried discovered by accident that scammers were using the titles of some of her books, some of mine and who knows who else’s on Spotify. What they hoped to achieve I can’t say, but Spotify acted rapidly to remove them once informed of the scam. I’d never have thought of putting audiobooks on there even if audio versions of my books existed, but my efforts to create these elsewhere have gone unfortunately wrong. As the KDP versions as well as Spotify are only available for US consumption that’s another reason why my UK and Europe-based books won’t be on there soon. I’m sure the information you give will be useful to others though so thanks for sharing it.
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It seems that its the wild west these days in publishing. Anything goes. Of course it always has been the case that once you put your work out in digital format you’ve lost control of it. I discovered a musician was using two of my painting for their song’s cover art by chance in my music stream. Kind’a cool. But then, I don’t even try to make money from my artistic efforts, so no sleep was lost.
Audiobooks make up something like 40% of my sales, so they play an important in my publishing “business,” such as it is. Spotify allows me to price them at $0.00, so we’ll see how they fare there.
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Somewhere, somehow I’m gonna have to et on the audiobook train. Thanks for posting this here!
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Since I sell my audiobooks at cost ($0) I do a good volume business. In the 3 years or so I’ve had audiobooks on Amazon for $3.99. I’ve sold 29.
The easiest way to get an audiobooks is on Apple via D2D. It’s just a couple of clicks on the book’s D2D page…. but you need a square 2000×2000 pixel cover. And well, all you get to do is chose either a male or female voice and trust Apple’s tech.
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