Why I Chose AI Audio Narration for my Books

You did what… might be the response that I will get from many people in the creative space. After all, as an author, how do I feel about people using AI to create a book in a few brief minutes when I take months and, with my first novel, years to craft a story? The answer is not too great, but I also don’t believe AI is a fad and will go away.

Given that the AI engines are now programming themselves, the platforms are going to get better and better, and yes, some readers will be happy to turn to an AI-generated novel than to one of my human-created masterpieces.

So I feel for the human narrators that may see less work because of the increase in voice AI technology like we might feel about the artist who might see a loss of work to people using MidJourney or Dall-e.

But was this any differenent when the development of the automobile put the horse and buggy companies out of work, when digital cameras took the position of the film-based cameras, when streaming eliminated the need to go to the local video store? Progress always leaves someone behind; it can’t be helped. Without it, we can’t progress forward as a society.

For the past few years as I published the Cache Iron Mystery series, I heard from many people asking me if I had audiobooks, or was I going to produce audiobooks and my answer was "I would like to but I really can’t afford to". This is what many authors face.

Let’s look at the economics first. The average human audio-narrated book, from what I have heard over the years, is about $3500-$5000 USD. Though I have heard of some authors paying over $10,000 for the narration of a single book. I asked ChatGPT what the average price of an audiobook was, and it suggested $18.99.

Once the audiobook is created, it has to be distributed, and many of the distribution outlets take as much as 60% of the sale price. So, on an $18.99 audiobook, the author would receive $7.60.

This means that if the upfront cost of narration was $3500, and the author who has to pay for the narration earns $7.60 per audiobook, they have to sell 461 copies of their audiobook before they break even and that doesn't even take into account the cost to advertise for the audiobooks. Given that many authors might not sell over 1,000 copies of their printed novel, and the printed novel still dominates sales over the audiobook, the author may not see a profit on this endeavor for years into the future. This is if you have one book and I have four with a fifth on the way.

So what do I do? My development team, which comprises my human editor, who lives in Texas, and my cover designer - the first three were in New York; my last cover was done by a designer in Ontario cost me in total about $4,000 a book.

While I want to make my books open to everyone, my joy is bringing new books to market and dollar for dollar I rather spend that money on developing new books than paying for human narration, so I can’t make my stories available to a smaller set of the reader/listener population as much as I would like to - or can I?

The advances in AI narration allow me to create audiobooks at an affordable price. Human audio narrators are licensing their voices to the big AI audio companies, and I use the biggest of them all. Their software combines a real human narrator and my written work to create an audiobook at an affordable price to me as an author. I can bring all my books to the audio market. I can afford to develop new written novels, and if the audiobooks don’t sell well, well then I lose a small investment rather than a fortune.

If they do well, I can either turn those profits into hiring a human narrator to update the audiobooks or continue to create AI audiobooks, which I suspect in time will grow to greater acceptance like streaming did for video rentals.

That is why I decided to use AI narration for my audiobooks. I hope you will give it a chance. Try the first novel in the series on for size. If it doesn’t work for you, don’t purchase the rest, and if it does, enjoy.