How Bad Do You Want to Listen?

June is national audiobooks month! Do you listen to audiobooks? 

I didn’t always listen to audiobooks. In fact, [full disclosure] I didn’t start listening to them until I had some of my books narrated. 

What I realized was that audiobooks fill a gap in my time when I can’t pick up a book to sit down and read—but I want to listen to a story. 

So a few (possibliy embarrasing facts):

I usually listen to audiobooks that I’ve already read. (This is the embarrassing one. The reason I do this is because I can’t stop until I know the ending. And audiobooks take a lot longer to listen to than reading a book.)

I’m not a narrator purist (I.e. I don’t care that much about who is narrating when I just want to hear a story) with one or two exceptions. Well, one. I returned one audiobook because I couldn’t stand the narration BUT I also wasn’t that wild about the book. (Disclaimer: I love my narrator Becky Boyd and would have her do all my books if I could afford it.)

Because I love listening to books, I want to have as many of my books available in audiobook as possible. 

But…it is expensive to get a book narrated. Good narrators deserve to get paid for their work, but they make more an hour than I do. 

Yes, it is kind of ironic. (But there are lots of parts of publishing that make more than authors do. And yes, it is sad.)

So when GooglePlay announced they had opened up artificial intelligence narration for audiobooks I was a little interested. 

And then I got more interested when other authors talked about the experience. So I checked it out.

It feels a little like joining forces with SkyNet. Lol

But once I tried it, well, I might have gone a little nuts. So I AI’d a bunch of my books. It’s been an interesting experience and I’m not sure how readers are going to respond.

If you’d like to listen to one, both of these are free but only on GooglePlay for right now: 

Family Treed

Cyborg’s Revenge

So AI generated audiobooks might be for you IF you just want to hear the story and aren’t picky about narrators. I’d be interested to hear what you think if you try!

Perilously yours,

Pauline