"AI" Audiobooks Are Here And About What You'd Expect

Really since 2013 I've used the Text-to-Speech on my Kindles to listen to books in my car.  I'm sure most people wouldn't like it but after a while you get used to the automated voice reading the books.  The mispronunciations like "See Monday" for "C'mon" or "Maximum" for a sentence that ends "Max." or "Lung-ed" instead of "lunjed" or "Jills" for "gills" are still somewhat amusing.  For me it let me "read" books and avoid paying tons of extra money for audiobooks.  The Kindle also makes it easy to transport them instead of needing an MP3 player that can maybe hold one book at a time.

So I didn't really have the hang-ups other people might have when Amazon announced "Virtual Voice" audiobooks.  One night in December I opened my KDP and saw I was eligible to have my books put in Virtual Voice.  And I shrugged and said, "Why the hell not?"

You can scream about "AI" replacing real human narrators all you want.  Someone like me could never afford a real human narrator who's any good and my speaking voice would be much, much worse than "AI."  And a profit-sharing arrangement would just be a waste of time for the narrator.

So yeah I figured, why not?  All I had to do was go to a page for each book.  You can choose your narrator from a few options.  When I started they only had four but then they added a few more.  You can pick the speed you want them to read if you want or just go with the default.  Ones I really cared about I selected some options but most I just went with the default.

Then a few hours later it might be approved and from there people can buy it for $1.99 if they already have the book or $3.99 if they don't.  Those are the minimum prices you can charge.  You can charge more if you want, but why would I?

I could only do it at first for maybe 40-50% of my books.  Older ones especially it would bitch about not having a table of contents.  Others it would say it, "Hasn't completed the post-publishing process."  What is that, Amazon's version of the NFL's, "process of the catch" for receiving?  I emailed Support and didn't really get an explanation.  They just asked for ASINs and I could have them fix it.  Which would be fine if I only had like 5 books, but with over 200 it would be kind of annoying to find all of the ASINs.  Anyway, they did fix a few, though I'm not sure how many.

When I emailed them a second time with the ASINs of a bunch of the entries, the person said it happens because the start and end of the book aren't set and they have to do it manually.  So I expect the 50 or so I sent them will be done any day now.  LOL.  Yeah, it's probably never happening.  There are another 40-50 that say they don't have a table of contents.  Some are newer books and when I look them up on the Kindle previewer thing it shows a table of contents, so I don't know what their deal is.  I think it'd be a lot easier if you have traditional books with chapters since most of mine aren't really long enough to need chapters.

Once the first batch of audiobooks was published, I made an announcement on my Eric Filler website and newsletter and...not a lot happened.  For December I sold 31 audiobooks.  The most popular ones were Chance of a Lifetime and First Contact with 5 apiece.  So it wasn't even my erotica books that were leading the way.  An erotica omnibus was second place with 4.  Actually 1/3 of those first 30 sales were for PT Dilloway books.

January so far has about 45 audiobook sales and it's pretty much just a grab bag.  Mostly Eric Filler titles this time around.  There are a few with 2 sold, but not more than 2 so far.

But really as you'd expect, these "AI" books are nowhere near as good as a decent human.  Amazon actually calls them "computer-generated" and not "AI" which is probably more accurate.  They're just an upgrade of the text-to-speech on my Kindle.  They might get a few more pronunciations right, but they're still pretty flat.  I listened to the first couple of chapters of Chance of a Lifetime and some of Where You Belong and a couple of others.  I definitely wouldn't pay more than $4 for them.  Like how "AI" writing is just vapid, empty garbage, the "AI" reading still lacks the warmth of an actual human reading it.  A computer program just doesn't know where and how to shade the writing to sound natural.  I'd just stick with the Text-to-Speech on my old Kindle since I already have it and it's free.

I'm not really sure what readers think of them.  First someone would have to actually write something instead of just give a wordless rating.

The audiobook sales are included in your KDP Orders reports but you have to run a filter to separate them.  Even then it seems like the reporting on them is a bit slow.  I'll check it one day and there won't be sales for a day and a couple of days later that same day might have a couple of sales.  I'm not sure how they're doing the reporting for them that there's the delay but it might be a glitch that eventually gets fixed.  Or not.  The old reports don't have a bar for the audiobook sales and probably never will since ostensibly those will still be retired.

Anyway, if you have Audible already, maybe give it a try.  Or listen to a sample.  If you don't like gender swap books you can try A Hero's Journey for instance. I would have liked a male British narrator to pretend it's Marlin the ghost but they only have female British voices so far.

A couple of weeks ago, author Lawrence Block had a different take on it that you can read here.

One last thing is you can't do the audiobook until your Kindle book is "Live" on the site.  Which is a little annoying because then I either can't put a link in my newsletter or I have to wait until the audiobook is done too before I can send the newsletter with links to both.  Especially for preorders I don't know why you couldn't just set up the audiobook but probably they haven't figured out how to do preorders or how to have the audiobook if the Kindle book isn't on the site and all that nonsense.  I wouldn't look for them to ever fix that issue either.