Unlocking ElevenLabs: 6 Tips Every Indie Author Should Know

So you have thought about creating an audiobook with ElevenLabs Studio. I’m going to give you my tips on how to produce the best product you can. There may be a help menu or tutorials somewhere, but I could not locate them myself. A few people have instructional videos on YouTube, and a lot of what I learned was through trial and error and querying ChatGPT.

Tip 1.

You can upload various formats into your project in Studio. When I did Cold Iron, I used the PDF that was created for my paperbacks. I found everything loaded into one section. Then, I had to create chapters and then cut and paste the items from the first section into the respective chapter sections.

When I uploaded my second book to Studios, I used the ePub for my ebooks and found the upload much better as it created the different chapters to correspond with my ePub.

Tip 2.

One thing you will want to do before uploading a file is decide on your default voice. It took us an afternoon to listen to around 100 selections and pair down to our top 20 before selecting the voice actor who would serve as our narrator.

You have to set your default actor when you upload your file, and the Studio will then generate the audio files for every paragraph in your book.

Tip 3.

Another tip I personally would recommend is to wear earphones and not rely on your computer speakers. I have a pair of Beats on ear headphones that work great because part of the process going forward is going to be to review each paragraphs audio file, to ensure that it is clear and that every word is pronounced they way that you want it to.

If some words are not spoken how you envision, you can use the custom dictionary to highlight the word and spell it out phonetically and press play. Continue pressing play until you are satisfied with the pronunciation of the word. I found I had to fiddle with the spelling to get the pronunciation just right. Once you have it, save it, and then the system will use it in future paragraphs. As an example in Hot Iron, I had a hashtag for social media, so if I had #fun, Studio would pronounce it number sign fun. I used the custom dictionary to tell Studio anytime it saw # to substitute with the word hashtag.

Tip 4. (Most important tip)

One of the most important features, something that I didn’t discover until I was nearing the end of my first audiobook — was the lock button. This, I would say, is critical to use. I found as I regenerated some text, items I had already gone over and sounded great sometimes ended up with a pause at the end of the paragraph before starting the next paragraph. I’m not sure if this was something I did but the big tip here, is as you go through a paragraph and you get it just the way you want it is to lock down the paragraph, this prevents anything from accidentally changed and if you need to adjust something, you need to unlock the paragraph before making any changes and just ensure you lock it again when you are happy.

Tip 5.

Go through each paragraph and make sure everything is just so and lock it down. When you are done, you can export an entire novel as an MP3 file or by chapters in a zip folder. I found in uploading to websites like BookFunnel that chapters worked best as one file can be quite large.

Tip 6.

One of the other things I found interesting in Studio and I didn’t fully understand this when doing an export to Spotify is that you are not really exporting to Spotify. For both Spotify for Authors and InAudio, you are downloading an LCF file to your computer, which you will use to upload to the sites once you sign onto the individual sites to complete your uploads.

So there you go; those are my tips having completed my first audiobook, Cold Iron, with ElevenLabs Studio. As I learn new things to improve the creation of my audiobooks, I will update this post.