This Crazy Writing Life: AI And Indie Pubbing—Is This The End Of The World As We Know It?

By Steven Womack

---

Want to read a book that’ll scare the bejeezus out of you? Grab a copy of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies—Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. The authors—Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares—have studied artificial intelligence for decades and have reached the conclusion that if we keep going the way we’re going, AI will soon be smarter than we are. The next step is for it to become sentient and when AI is able to perceive, feel, and outsmart us, it will ultimately get into conflict with all us mere humans.

Then guess what? We’re toast…

Is that the way this is all going to play out? Who knows? As Yogi Berra once said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

One thing I do know is that the whole AI thing is taking up more and more of our bandwidth each day. Major corporations are laying off tens of thousands of workers and replacing them with AI. From driver-less taxis to robotic Door Dash deliveries and fast food cooks, AI seems to be on everybody’s mind. Try calling a large corporation, hospital, or customer service center, hoping to reach a human. It’s harder than ever.

It’s no different in the publishing world, especially in the indie-pub space.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve been able to attend the last four Novelists Inc. annual conferences. At each one of those conferences, the issue of AI in indie-pubbing—especially AI-narrated audiobooks—has been front-and-center. Is AI going to put human audiobook narrators out of business? Do we need a new army of Luddites smashing the machines to protect the paychecks and lifelines of the modern-day equivalent of textile workers.

Again, I’ve given up prognosticating. I’m usually wrong anyway.

But I can make some observations, and you can draw your own conclusions from them. Let’s start with AI-narrated audiobooks.

First, a brief history. In 1976, Ray Kurzweil unveiled the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first modern text-to-speech synthesizer. He originally envisioned the machine as a way for blind people to have access to text (Stevie Wonder bought the first one). By 1988, the Apple Macintosh had an effective TTS (text-to-speech) capability, and development has continued to this day.

By far, the that biggest hurdle to creating audiobooks—especially for indie authors—is the production cost. Costs vary widely, depending on a number of factors, but professional audiobook narrators with credits typically charge from $100-300 or more per finished hour. Studio rental, editing, and mastering the files can add significantly to the cost.

For audiobook producers who choose to have multiple narrators, sound effects, etc., costs can double or even triple.

Not only are the costs out-of-reach for many indie authors, the ROI is often simply not there. A ten-book series by an indie author can easily cost $35-50K to produce and publish. Obviously, in a competitive marketplace where discoverability is also an issue, one must sell an enormous number of audiobooks just to make back the production costs.

The evolution of digitally narrated audiobooks has rocketed into high gear in the past few years. In March 2021, Hume AI began developing AI platforms that analyzed vocal inflections and facial expressions that better gauged human emotional states and could create more human-sounding voices (and AI characters).

In 2022, a machine learning engineer and an ex-Palantir deployment strategist—both from Poland—created ElevenLabs, motivated by what they felt were American films badly dubbed into Polish. In January 2023, ElevenLabs’s beta platform went public. Since then, a number of versions have been developed and deployed.

Today, ElevenLabs is leading the charge on realistic digital voice narration for audiobooks. They have a library of hundreds of voice samples. You can even create an ElevenLabs account and upload of sample of your own voice. It goes in the library and if someone likes your voice, they can choose you. Only you won’t actually narrate the book. ElevenLabs will synthesize your voice based on the sample and narrate the whole book and you’ll get a small licensing fee.

In November, 2023, Amazon rolled out an invitation-only KDP Beta test for digitally narrated audiobooks. Early results were considered by many to be problematic. The only appealing thing about it was that it was actually free (but you could only sell your audiobook on Amazon).

At this year’s NINC conference, I had the chance to sit in on a panel presented by Dr. Phil Marshall, the founder and CEO of a company called Spoken, which is the latest contender in the digital narration sphere. Marshall—who’s an M.D. and a surgeon who left the field of medicine to pursue a career in AI development— founded Spoken two years ago, a company whose mission is to make the most realistic and effective AI-narration available to authors at a reasonable cost.

“Listening is the new reading,” he explained. “Half of all Americans listen to spoken word media every day.”

Marshall then demonstrated the Spoken platform, which works on multiple levels. Authors can choose totally digital narrator voices, or they can use voices of real actors, whose voice samples are then synthesized and replicated by the AI platform to speak the text in the audiobook.

He emphasized the editing capabilities of the platform, which enables authors to manipulate voices at a single-line level. If an author doesn’t like the inflection or pacing of a delivered line of dialogue, for example, he or she can go so far as to record the line the way it should be delivered. The Spoken app then analyzes the author’s reading of the line and regurgitates it in the digital voice.

Marshall then outlined his company’s strategic partnership with ElevenLabs and Hume AI, in which authors using the Spoken platform can have access to literally hundreds (if not thousands by now) of voices available on those platforms.

This flexibility, combined with the pricing structure, even makes multi-voiced cast recordings accessible and affordable. In Marshall’s view, he noted, this represents one of the greatest opportunities for indie audiobook producers. He demonstrated a project he’s working on now—his own novel Taming the Perilous Skies—which will contain over 100 voices.

Spoken’s pricing structure offers two different options. Authors can work on a per project basis, which offers an unlimited number of voices, custom voices, full access to the Spoken studio, project download, and audio mastering at a price of $10 per 5,000 words. For multiple projects, authors can subscribe for $50/month, with 50% off all narration costs.

So there you have it, folks. A human-narrated audiobook can easily cost $3500-$5000 to produce. A 100,000 word digitally narrated audiobook will cost a couple hundred to get out there. When you take into account the digitally narrated audiobook will sound about 90 percent human, that’s not a bad compromise. And I don’t think we’re too far away from a place where you’ll almost have to be an audio expert to tell the difference.

The question remains for many people is whether or not this is morally and ethically right. If you look at technical revolutions throughout history, they have always disrupted the status quo. In the 19th century, the Luddites were textile workers rebelling against the automation in mills. Did that stop the process?

No, but it created a whole new segment of industrial jobs. Somebody had to operate those mills. Textile workers became machine operators in a factory rather than sitting at home with a traditional loom. And while Henry Ford did put a lot of blacksmiths and buggy whip makers out of business, in the end I think it’s safe to say he created more jobs than the ones he eliminated.

Besides, blacksmiths are still around, and I’d speculate that they’re making more than ever.

Another way to look at it is if I produce an AI-narrated audiobook, have I caused an audiobook narrator’s children to go hungry? No, because I can’t afford the human narrator in the first place. I drive a KIA; that doesn’t mean I took a Cadillac worker’s job. I can’t afford a Cadillac to begin with, not to mention I wouldn’t be caught dead in one.

Nearly twenty years ago, many gurus railed that the advent of the eBook industry spelled doom for print books. But are print books dead? No, they’re more popular than ever before.

So if you’re a human audiobook narrator and voice-over artist, do you need to be looking for a new career? I don’t think so. Human voices are always going to be needed, even in audiobook narration.

Two years ago at the NINC conference, I had a conversation with USA Today best-selling author Sylvia McDaniel, a hybrid author who’s penned over 100 romance novels. She’s very successful and a delightful person to be around. I’m genuinely fond of her.

She told me that her approach is to produce two audiobook versions of her novels. The human-narrated version is priced as a traditional audiobook—roughly the $10.99-on-up range—and a digitally narrated book for as little as $.99 with an Audible membership.

So if you’re an audiobook consumer and want the joy of hearing Tom Hanks narrate the latest best-seller, then you can shell out a little more for that privilege.

But if you’re just looking for somebody to read you the dang book while you’re driving to and from work, then that option comes a lot cheaper.

Does any of this sound familiar?

During the Great Depression, a lot of people couldn’t afford food and clothes, let alone expensive hardbound books. In 1935, a London publisher named Allen Lane came up with an idea to make books more accessible and affordable. He created a universal format that was cheap to produce and would easily fit into standardized wire racks that could be placed in any retail space, not just bookstores.

He founded a company—Penguin Books—to move this idea forward and the mass-market paper was born. For the next seventy years—until the advent of the eBook that replaced it—the mass market paperback was the chief medium for both fiction and nonfiction sales.

I think we may see something very similar to that in audiobooks.

***

But it’s not just audiobooks. What else is expensive to produce for an indie author?

Foreign translations…

With Amazon.com in practically every corner of the globe, marketing eBook translations can be a lucrative revenue stream. Only it costs a boatload of money to hire a translator and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever see a decent ROI.

While at the NINC conference, I met indie authors who are using a company called ScribeShadow to produce AI-translated foreign editions. I spoke with a few authors who have used this service and have been very happy, especially given the 90 percent-plus savings in creating the foreign work.

What about the quality? Idioms and inflection? The nuances of slang and regional dialect? I once had to explain to a Japanese translator that my use of the Southern idiom slicker than snot on a doorknob didn’t mean there was literally mucous on the door handle. Yes, I agreed, that would be very unhygienic. 

One author explained to me that when you produce a foreign language eBook, if the translation sucks, readers will beat you to death in the reviews. She’s done a number of German translations—without speaking a word of German—and so far, her reviews have been positive.

This author doesn’t even use German proofreaders to check the translation. She told me she feeds an English manuscript into the ScribeShadow AI platform, and a German translation pops out the other end. Then she feeds the German translation into ChatGPT for a final check.

There you have it, folks; a foreign edition of your English masterpiece that’s entirely untouched by human hands.

As I’ve said so many times over the last year-and-a-half of writing these columns, it’s a whole new world out there.

As always, thanks for playing along.

***

Wait! Stop the presses! The day after I turned this column in, Amazon announced via PublishersLunch that they’ve launched an AI translation service for indie authors publishing through KDP. It’s currently in Beta and will convert books from English and Spanish and from German to English (not sure exactly what that means), with more languages to be added soon.

To quote from Amazon’s announcement: With less than 5% of titles on Amazon.com available in more than one language, Kindle Translate creates opportunities for authors to reach new audiences and earn more…Within a few days, authors can publish fully formatted translations of their books. All translations are automatically evaluated for accuracy before publication, and authors can choose whether to preview or automatically publish completed translations.

And, like KDP’s digital audiobooks option, the service is free.

See what I mean, folks? Things are changing so you have to update columns before they’re even published. I’ll do some more digging and report back in next month’s edition. Best guidance going forward—jump in and hang on!

This Crazy Writing Life: On Defining a Book By Its Cover

By Steven Womack

---

We left off last month’s column with an exploration of the technical aspects (and challenges) of formatting the interior of print books. This month, let’s talk about the exterior of the book—the cover.

Before we get started, though, one quick sidebar. In late September, I drove back from St. Petersburg Beach, Florida (just about 48 hours ahead of Hurricane Helene) after attending the annual conference of Novelists, Inc. Novelists, Inc. may not be as well known as some of the other major writers professional associations like the Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, or SFWA—Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America—but since it was started in late 1980s by a group of disgruntled romance writers, it’s emerged as one of the most powerful trade associations out there. It’s the only writers’ organization I know of outside of the Writers Guild of America that requires you to actually be a professional writer to join. To gain admittance to NINC, you have to have published at least two novels in popular genres like romance or mystery, and you have to have earned a minimum amount of money from those two books (the exact requirements are outlined on the website at www.ninc.com).

Readers and fans, editors and agents are not eligible to join NINC. The founders of the organization decided that NINC would never offer prizes or awards (like the MWA and RWA) because this fostered a sense of competition that was contrary to the organization’s purpose of encouraging and lifting up all writers in the struggle to survive in this crazy business. And business is the focus of the conference as well as the organization; you’ll rarely see a NINC panel on how to write sparkling dialogue. But you will see panels on understanding the intricacies of subrights licenses and contracts or the technical aspects of independent audiobook production.

Sponsors pay big bucks to have a presence at the NINC conference (in the spirit of complete transparency, I’m a former president of the organization and a current Board member). The reason I bring this up is that as a result, some of the most cutting-edge aspects of indie publishing show up at this conference. Every time I go, I learn something new. Last year, the big topic of discussion was the use of A.I. generated voices in audiobook narration. This year, there seems to be a big movement toward indie authors selling books directly from their websites. The One Big Thing I learned is that taking a simple, static author website and turning it into a true e-commerce platform is something I’m just not quite ready for.

In future columns, I’ll share some of the things I’ve learned from these conferences. As independent publishing continues to grow from an isolated few stubborn writers trying to survive into a cultural and business movement that has totally remade publishing, dozens of other companies have sprouted up as well to serve this market.

As I’ve said more than once lately, it’s a whole new world out there.

***

I was curious as to where the phrase/cliché Don’t judge a book by its cover came from, so I Googled it. Turns out George Eliot first coined that turn-of-phrase in her 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss.

Gotta confess, I missed that one.

But I’ve heard the adage all my life, which is a metaphorical phrase telling us that outward appearances can be deceiving, that we should never judge anyone or anything by its external looks.

Sounds good on the surface; only problem is it’s hogwash. 

We judge everything by its external appearance. A car may be the most dependable, rugged, efficient vehicle ever made, but if it makes you look like a complete yutz driving it, you’re not going to buy one (are you listening, Walter White, cruising along in your Pontiac Aztec?)

You may meet someone at a party who would be the kindest, most loving, passionate and dependable life partner you could ever wish for, but if their hair is greasy and dirty, they smell bad, snot’s running out of their nose, and they have huge pit stains, you’re probably gonna take a pass.

It’s the same with book covers. The indie pubbing world is full of stories of books that didn’t sell for squat, so the authors yanked the books down, changed the cover, put the book back up without changing a word and now it sells like crazy. You may have written a classic, a prize-winner, a book that will last through the ages, but if your cover turns everyone off, then the book’s going to be a loser.

I’m speaking for myself now, but I’ll bet a lot of you are in the same boat. I’m not a graphic artist, and when it comes to good cover design, I wouldn’t know it if it ran up behind me and bit me on the butt. Truth is, I’m not even qualified to write about book covers from an artist’s point-of-view. I have absolutely no talent as a graphic designer. So, I’m writing this from the perspective of an indie-pubber who has to deal with the fact that he’s not even capable of telling good design from bad.

Maybe I’m being a little hard on myself here. Truth is, I’ve been around book covers my whole life, and while I have no talent as a designer, I am a sophisticated and experienced consumer of books. I know when a book cover design doesn’t work for me. And when I run across a brilliant book cover, it moves me on a visceral level.

I’m not overstating here: your book cover is the first and one of the most important marketing tools you have.

So how do you deploy this tool to make your book as marketable as possible?

First, it’s got to convey a certain amount of information. The title of the book—and subtitle, if it’s got one—and the author’s name should be prominent, along with any other information that will help sell the book (as in “New York Times Bestselling Author”). I have actually seen book covers where the author’s name was hard to read. When that happens, someone needs an intervention.

Second, the design/artwork should stand out visually. Whether on a jam-packed bookstore shelf or a crowded Amazon web page, there should be something that grabs your eye as you scan from Point A to Point B. I realize that’s a nebulous, unfocused notion. If I could actually define in solid terms what “stand out visually” means, then I’d be a famous well-paid cover artist and not the word-shoveling literary coal miner that I am. The best I can do is echo Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who—in attempting to define obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio—famously wrote I know it when I see it.

Third, your cover design must reflect and communicate the book’s genre and tone. If you’ve written a light-hearted cozy mystery where the protagonist’s cute but feisty cat solves the murder based on a plot point that’s a recipe for cream cheese blintzes, then a dark, brooding, heavily shadowed cover with a pair of threatening, glowing eyes coming out of the mist is not going to help you. Conversely, you’re not going to sell a graphic, disturbing serial killer suspense novel with a bright, cheery cover of pinks and blues, cartoon characters and fonts with extra curlicues and other cutesy elements.

This requires you to learn and study the conventions of your genre, to research what works and what doesn’t work, and to learn the expectations of your audience.

Stuff you should already be doing anyway…

One of the best examples of dynamite book covers out there today are the books published by Hard Case Crime. Hard Case Crime publishes crime fiction that echoes back to the paperback pulp fiction era of the 1940s through the late 1060s, when writers like Mickey Spillane, Cornell Woolrich, and Robert Bloch were flourishing. They’re bringing back and revitalizing the old hard-boiled school with contemporary writers like Stephen King, Lawrence Block, and Max Allan Collins, as well as republishing long-dead writers like Donald Westlake and Woolrich. And their books all feature covers that are homages to those great mass-market paperback pulp fiction covers.

While I admittedly am not a designer myself, I do find that there are certain things I react positively to and others that turn me off. I subscribe to a lot of book promotions websites: BookBub, Free Booksy, Robinreads, etc. So I get way too many push emails every day, and most of them are for indie-pubbed books. I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that more and more book covers depend on stock photos for their visuals, especially in genres like romance. I get that original art costs a fortune, but there’s something about a generic stock photo on a book cover that screams self-published, and I find that a turn-off. You can start with stock photography if you want, but with programs like Canva and Book Brush out there, in my view one should at least put a little effort into manipulating and adapting the image to make it more unique.

The bottom line for most writers—myself included—is that the best way to land that beautiful book cover is to find a cover artist you trust and whose work you admire. Only problem is, they can be hard to find and kind of expensive. It’s a challenge to find that sweet spot between “I love your stuff” and “oh, I can afford that.” I worked with a designer for several years when I repubbed the out-of-print novels in my Music City Murders series. Dawn Charles did a fabulous job for me, was great to work with, with very reasonable fees. Unfortunately, she passed away a few years ago. But go to my Amazon page and you’ll see what I’m talking about; it’s an object lesson in how to create a brand.

And I mentioned earlier, companies are popping up everywhere to help indie pubbers get the help they need. One that’s been around over a decade is Reedsy, which is a company that’s an online employment agency for publishing freelancers of all types; editors, designers, formatters, etc. They’re great to work with and a good place to start.

We’ll continue this discussion next month. Thanks again for hanging with This Crazy Writing Life.

The Indie Pubbing Journey Continues—Part Three: The Learning Curve

By Steven Womack

---

When I was young, I wasn’t afraid to tackle anything technical. Someone sold me an ancient Alfa Romeo sedan back in the 1970s for a few hundred dollars. The engine ran rough and coughed out blue smoke, so I decided to rebuild it. Had I ever rebuilt an engine before?

Absolutely not.

Did I have any idea what I was doing?

Nope.

I had a manual and that was it. No YouTube videos, no old Italian mechanic to mentor me… Just a box of parts, a paperback book with pictures, and a toolbox. So I went out into the driveway and went to work. Several weekends later, I added new oil to the engine and cranked it up. It actually ran a little bit better, once I got it running. Then I did the first really smart thing I’d done since I bought the old Alfa.

I sold it to someone else.

In the early days of computers—I’m talking Windows 3.1 here—if my computer had some kind of weird hiccup or wasn’t doing something I needed it to do, I opened up the Windows registry and tinkered with individual lines of code.

Would I open the hood on my computer or my car in this day and age and start digging around inside it?

Hell, no.

I don’t even change my own oil anymore. I don’t know whether cars and computers have gotten exponentially more complicated or I’ve become a technological wuss. Probably a little bit of both…

So when I decided to indie pub my Harry James Denton Music City Murders out-of-print series backlist from Ballantine Books, I confess to a little fear and trepidation about the technical challenges of making that happen. But I also knew I didn’t have the resources to pay somebody else to do everything for me, so I had to swap out my lack of cash for hours of sweat equity. Facing fears trumped lack of resources, so I started with the eBook editions and did a pretty deep dive into options for creating them.

I quickly discovered that one of the most popular apps for eBook formatters is Vellum. Every writer I surveyed who used Vellum loved it, although many folks offered it had a bit of a steep learning curve. It’s powerful, flexible, and very widely used in the indie pubbing space. At a couple hundred bucks, I thought it was a little pricey but not so much as to be a deal breaker. What was a deal breaker for me, though, was it’s only available for Macs. I’m a longtime Windows kinda guy, so that eliminated Vellum for me.

I found another software package from a British company called Jutoh. When I bought it seven or eight years ago, I think I paid like thirty-five bucks for it, so the price was right. It’s a quick and easy download and there’s lots of support for it. I ran into a few technical problems and challenges, and I found Jutoh’s support team was quick to respond, despite the seven-hour time difference. When I first started my indie pubbing adventure, there were a number of different formats out there. Most of the eBook distributors—Apple, Google, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc.—used the .epub format, while Amazon, of course, had to make thing complicated by developing its own proprietary eBook format, the infamous .mobi file (thankfully, Amazon has let the .mobi format sunset and now uses .epub like everyone else). Jutoh was able to handle them all as well as other formats like ODT (OpenDocument) files and .pdf.

For a few years, Jutoh was it for me. Then I began to get hints of another option out there, an app called Atticus. Curious, I started digging around and the more I dug, the more intrigued I became.

Before I go any further, let me state for the record this is not an ad for any one app or the other. I’m not getting paid for any of this (God forbid, writers should get paid…) and the folks at Atticus don’t even know I’m writing this. This is all based solely on my own experience.

So after a pretty deep dive into Atticus, I decided to go for it. I haven’t looked back since.

Atticus is the eBook (and in its latest revs, print book) formatting app that’s become the gold standard for indie pubbers. It was created by a company called Kindlepreneur, which curiously is located just down the road from me in Franklin, Tennessee (also the home of Killer Nashville). The founder of Kindlepreneur is Dave Chesson, who brings many years of experience in publishing and as a book marketer to the company.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dave Chesson at the annual Novelists, Inc. conference in St. Petersburg Beach a couple years ago. Not only is he a genuinely nice guy, he’s also obsessed with creating tools designed to help indie publishers succeed. He has a podcast, a blog, a YouTube channel, has created a ton of courses—some free and some at minimal cost—and with Atticus has given writers a way to easily and quickly format both eBooks and print. I won’t go into the technical aspects of Atticus because I’m already over my word count, but there are a ton of tutorials out there that will make the Atticus learning curve manageable and even enjoyable.

And once you get your books formatted, you can get—as I did—at very modest cost Kindlepreneur’s Publisher Rocket app, which will help you optimize your keyword and category listings on Amazon (and trust me, that is much harder than formatting).

Next month, we’ll take up the subject of where to sell your indie-pubbed books. The choices there are as varied and as complicated as any other decisions you’ll make. Are you starting to get a sense of what it means to independently publish your own books? You aren’t just self-publishing (again, a term I hate). You’re creating a business.

Which is one grand adventure…

That’s it for episode #5 of This Crazy Writing Life. Thanks for playing along.