Thoughts on Audiobooks with KDP Virtual Voice

By Elaine L. Orr

Audiobooks are my reading passion; probably 90 percent of the books I 'read' are performed by talented narrators. That has made it all the more joyful to have many of my books made into audiobooks.

I ran into a hitch with the family history mysteries, however. Approximately fifteen narrators (producers) auditioned tor the first book in the series, with my promise of doing all five books. I found the perfect person through Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX). 

And then the delays started. They sounded reasonable. A bad respiratory infection, seasonal holiday interruptions. Pretty soon a year passed and almost nothing had been done. ACX permitted me to cancel the contract. 

It takes a huge amount of time to listen to a lot of auditions. I was about to start the process again when KDP developed the Virtual Voice program. I discounted it at first, but decided to explore. 

KDP has tons of guidance, but here are a few salient points. 

• Understand that ebooks are the source, and they must have a table of contents and be reflowable (largely text, not something like cookbooks).
• Listen to the samples of male and female computer voice options in American and British English, with several age ranges. Pick one that seems best for your book's characters.
• Recognize that while the virtual voice distinguishes punctuation, it cannot convey excitement or sadness with exaggerated changes in tone or inflection. It definitely would not work for foreign accents, as would be needed for M.C. Beaton's books, which are set in Scotland.
• Review the created audiobook to be sure you like the pronunciation of names or any nontraditional words.
• Rejoice that you have the option to correct the virtual voice's diction by giving it phonetic spellings of words that are mispronounced. For example, I describe my character Jolie Gentil's name as having French pronunciation (soft J and G, final L not spoken). I told the virtual voice that it should be pronounced Zho-lee Zhan-tee. It complied.

I'm fortunate that my mysteries can be presented in fairly straightforward narrations. Since I can't use a narrator with the talent of Jim Dale, who does the Harry Potter audiobooks, I have generally asked narrators not to attempt distinct voices for my characters. I ask for straightforward narration with good inflections and a steady volume. 

My book In the Shadow of Light used a lot of Spanish accents and I had a fabulous narrator who did traditional American and Spanish-accented English. Such a book would not be a candidate for Virtual Voice.

A talented narrator is clearly the best option. However, the nearly-instant creation of a Virtual Voice audiobook could work in some circumstances. You can explore without committing to publish. What's more flexible than that?

April 2024 update: Amazon recently let authors know they continue to improve the quality of the narrators and how they react to punctuation. Authors can republish a book to take advantage of the changes.

To find all my audiobooks, visit my website.

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Back to the Drawing Board...Keyboard

I'm not generally missing in action for a month. I'd like to say I was deep into a mystery and finished it. Not. 

I had colon cancer surgery and received my stage afterwards -- 2A. Way better than stages with bigger numbers. I'm meeting with an oncologist today to discuss chemo options. The surgeon said, and I quote, "It won't be the horrible kind."

There, I'm done. I'm not big on talking about illness details. I'm willing to listen if someone else needs to talk about their situation, but I'm generally more private. That said, I will tell the world when the chemo is done and I'm entirely out of the woods. 

At this point, you can say, "Tell the world? Who does she think she is, King Charles?" 

My Newest Book Project

I'm written several chapters of another Jolie Gentil mystery and am ready to move ahead more quickly. The break was good in that when I came back to it, I realized my choice of an opening scene would not draw in readers. 

Initially, the first chapter featured a scene with Jolie, Scoobie, their kids, and best friends at a high school football game. It relayed some important components of the book, but intuition tells me a lot of people won't keep reading if they think the book is too family-focused. Plus, nobody got killed.

I constantly consider the balance of personal life and mystery solving. So many TV shows became too much like soap operators, in my opinion, after lead characters got married. House comes to mind. It went from being a tightly presented, funny medical mystery series to one that focused on personal problems. Boring. I'm trying to avoid that.

Okay, back to work. More gripping blog posts to come, I hope for a long time.

Update: Turns out my tumors are among the 15% of colon cancer tumors that don't respond to chemo. The doctors think they got it all, but they can only be sure through future scans and other tests. I wish there were a magic pill, but I remind myself the cancer was caught through a routine colonoscopy -- much earlier than is sometimes the case. Lots of check-ups to come.

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 Check out Elaine's web page or sign up for her newsletter