CREATE AN AUDIO BOOK IN UNDER 30 SECONDS WITH KINDLE
Kindle Direct Publishing (Amazon) has a Beta program to create audiobooks with AI-generated digital voices. These are not your old-style text-to-speech generated voices without inflection. They are more "natural" sounding. If you listen closely you know they are computer generated, but not jarringly so.
I wouldn't use them for a novel or short story. However, for basic nonfiction, they will work well.
Anyway, today I decided to try it out.
First, you have to have your book published through Kindle Direct Publishing. It needs to be available as an eBook. The book must meet some eligibility standards. It has to be something suitable for an audiobook. A book that requires a lot of images to convey content would not be appropriate. It also needs a clickable table of contents.
You can read all the standards when you sign up for the beta program. There is a link in your Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard to sign up for the program. It’s a short sign up process. Once that is finished, you are ready to publish your first audiobook
So, today, I went in and I looked at the books in my Kindle Dashboard. First, I checked for eligibility. Each book had a notice stating whether it was eligible or not. Those that are not eligible will have a link that tells you why. Some of my older books are not eligible because I didn’t have a clickable table of contents. So, I’ll add one to those files when I get ready to save them as audiobooks.
I clicked on the first eligible book. It pulled up the book and presented me with a list of voices. I listened to all of them. I wanted a feminine voice so it would be more closely associated with my author's voice. I chose the one I liked the most.
Then put in the price. It has to be between $3.99 and $14.99. This one is a Bible study with the total reading time being about two hours. So, I set it at $3.99. They also will offer a package with the eBook included at $1.80 or thereabouts. Since a lot of my readers are members of small home or church Bible Study groups, I suspect a lot of my buyers will be leaders of such groups.
Then I simply clicked to publish and it was done. It literally took less than 30 seconds.
After the book is published, it will appear on both Amazon and Audible.
BTW, if you want to check out my new audiobook, you can find it on Audible. You can play a sample of chapter one to see how it sounds. The title is A Joyful Noise: Lessons in Praise from Psalm 100.
To learn more about self-publishing, check out our courses at WordmasterAcademy.net.