Your book, narrated by the voice it deserves.

Prepare the manuscript

Work a chapter at a time. Remove anything that doesn't belong in audio, like page numbers, image captions and “see figure 3”, and spell out what should be read differently from how it's written: abbreviations, symbols and years.

Before you generate a word, add your characters' names, invented places and any unusual terms to your pronunciation list. Every chapter, and every future book, will then say them the same way.

Choose the narrator

Fiction usually suits a narrator with warmth and range; non-fiction a clear, steady voice that's easy to listen to for hours. Generate the same two pages in three or four voices and listen on headphones before deciding: you'll be living with this voice for the whole book.

You can also narrate it in your own voice. Authors' own voices work especially well for memoir and non-fiction.

Characters and dialogue

You can keep a single narrator for everything, which is the traditional approach, or give main characters their own voices for a fuller production. If you do, keep the narrator for all the prose and use character voices only inside quotation marks.

• Slow the narrator slightly (0.9–0.95×) for literary fiction.
• Add a short pause at scene breaks and a longer one before a new chapter.
• Use emotion sparingly in narration; save it for dialogue.

Export the book

Audiobook projects export M4B with chapter marks, a single file that audiobook players understand, or an MP3 per chapter. Both are mastered to −20 LUFS, the loudness audiobooks are usually delivered at.

Stores have different rules about AI narration and change them from time to time. Check the requirements of the store you want to sell on before you publish.

What it costs

Narration costs about a credit a word in a standard voice. An 80,000-word novel is about 80,000 credits, which is one month of the Starter plan. Premium voices cost 1.5 credits a word, so the same book fits comfortably in a month of Creator.