“an outright fee”? The very gall of a narrator, to expect to be paid for their work. As if having to wait for something weren’t bad enough. Audible set up sharing royalties to let an author work with a narrator without having to pay any of those rapacious up-front costs, but thank goodness you’re here to steer authors clear of that too.

We can’t stick our heads in the sand about generated content changing everything. It’s inevitable. Are you excited at the prospect of more generated books on the market, too? Technically Audible and Amazon don’t need anybody to do anything if they have a handful of prompt-creators. Feed your books into the engine, make new ones, recommend those to your readers, solve the problem of sharing royalties altogether.

No.

Having one voice tell a story with more than one POV character has never bothered me.

Still, I have enjoyed the few that had a cast of voices more, but that never stopped me from listening to audiobooks with only one narrating voice, since most of them are produced that way.

I’m listening to one now, when I’m in the car going somewhere, the second time. It’s called Devotion. A film is coming out or its already out, based on this nonfiction novel that has more than one POV character, female and male.

Yet the audio version only has one male narrator, and that doesn’t distract me.

And, a few days ago, I also published one of my thrillers through Amazon’s virtual voice BETA program. My thriller has more than one POV character both male and female. Listening to the narrator as I was editing it, was like hearing someone with an impressive voice reading my novel to me. Having one voice still didn’t bother or distract me.

I think you have a point wrt the listener’s experience, and that non-fiction is a more likely market.

If you just want a text to speech reader to read to you while you do stuff, and I get it, I’ve heard some “AI” text to speech readers and have used Natural Reader for TTS editing – maybe this works. And maybe new generations will find this to be the norm: synthetic voices who read something so you can be hands free.

In this shift, I think human-read ones will stand out as something special, will win the awards, will possibly become a differentiator for traditional publishers and a “leg up” on Indie authors who choose the AI voices.

In the end it’ll be for the reader / the consumer to decide what they prefer.

Yes, KDP revolutionized the publishing industry. But Vella hasn’t caught on the way that some other subscription publishers have. So it’s not like everything Amazon does in this space proves out.

Yes, the possibility will be there that those who couldn’t (for various reasons) offer audiobooks will now be able to. Again, it remains to be seen whether the majority of readers will want / accept this and come away with the potential attachment that can be realized with human narrators – author or VA.

If it ends up making a book’s experience “less” to a reader (or aggravate anyone who has a real aversion to AI – as it is still a polarizing topic to many), then authors may still choose no audiobook over an off-putting one. And traditional publishers, assuming they stick to their guns, could end up rising above in this growing space.

(As an aside, I’d be curious what the marketing psychologists say… And for more insight on the beta testing. Amazon worked with ?? authors on the beta. Who did they work with as readers on the beta? What were their psychographics and are they indicative of the audiobook market as a whole? And most importantly, will Amazon provide any of that info, or just some anecdotal reader reviews to support their service?)

In the end this is one of the few places I won’t be moved. Won’t do it. Just won’t. No one will convince me that even if the market shifts to ACCEPT synthetic voices, that the experience would be PREFERRED over human readers. And so therein lies the answer.

If KDP uses an e-Book as it is written for text reading there will be a lot of “he said,” and “she said,” attributions in the audio version, thereby cluttering up the flow of information. I thought that an e-Book currently being converted to an audiobook needed to be cleaned up to remove most of these character attributions before being forwarded to the voice talent. However, it sounds like Virtual Voice will simply leave these attributions in the audio version.

Non-fiction may fare better in this regard.