Travis Baldree himself weighed in with some quick thoughts on this Twitter thread here: twitter.com/TravisBaldree/status/1520067318604197888?t=bFXJtjA19FrTh3ULTEftXg&s=19 Where do you guys sit? Let me know!
@DaleLRoberts
2 жыл бұрын
Why haven't I seen your channel much sooner?! haha Subscribed! Great content.
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
The KZitem algorithm works in strange ways! Thanks Dale, I'll do my best to keep it up. 😊
@kartik3719
2 жыл бұрын
I really hope this announcement gets more and more audiobooks made, I can respect the fears of the voice actors to not have their jobs taken away, as a person who can't read anything without having an audiobook I'm floored by the sheer possibilities this new development represents and as a consumer I will instantly be pulling out my wallet for anything that makes it easier to read. Brilliant video as always!
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
💯 The huge investment in production is really what makes audiobooks untenable at the start up stage. Audiobooks aren't really my thing; I'm a binge reader and I read really fast, far faster than someone can narrate. So no matter how good the narration is, I always find myself tuning out. But I know many people love audiobooks and swear by them, and it's a huge opportunity. I just wonder how much of the audiobook value can be apportioned to the performance aspect and how much to the format itself.
@stephenwolberius
2 жыл бұрын
Let's first hear the quality of this auto-narration. If it sounds like a dyslexic wall-e, it will never take off. If it sounds plain and natural, I can see it work and have its place. Like you said, like a lower end, serviceable audiobook.
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
It's definitely nowhere near the quality of a good human narrator, though Travis Baldree did say on Twitter that the arguments against auto-narration would be very similar to the arguments against getting a really poor human narrator. I believe the auto-narration is being done via the Google Cloud API tech. You can actually try out the demo here with your own text if you don't have a live epub ready to experiment with: cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/
@zippywings
2 жыл бұрын
Thanks for the mention and the link. Also, I agree with your thesis. This could lead to getting narrators more work if our audiobooks prove marketable and thus less risky.
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
I should caveat that I've said this as someone who doesn't read/listen to audiobooks. The existing free Google Play auto-narrated books are getting listens and reasonably good average ratings so the audiobooks must be meeting the minimum viable product threshold, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to people listening to it for the sake of the titles themselves, since Google picked all classics. I wonder how much of that would translate for a lesser known title in terms of listen-through or retention. I mean, the classic complaints against poor quality self-pub are things like bad prose/plot/structure/characters/etc but those books still sell! Clearly there is an audience that doesn't care about those aspects so long as they are drawn in by the story.
@zippywings
2 жыл бұрын
@@PaperTigerProductions Conflict and emotion are the driving forces of engaging stories, so any story that's consistent in delivering those traits will likely do well. But I also think if anything can hurt the AI voice movement into audiobooks, especially for fiction, it would be the lack of emotion that comes with every Google voice. Personally, I think this will be fine for the nonfiction writers, but the fiction writers might have to swim upstream a bit. Gonna test it either way!
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
@@zippywings Gonna be super keen to see how your experiment goes! The Google Play beta program is specifically warning away fiction authors away from jumping onto this right now, as well as things like cookbooks. In absence of anything else, I'd have to conclude they're making this recommendation on the basis of the data they've gathered so far on those free titles they've released...it wouldn't otherwise make sense.
@jeremyfee
2 жыл бұрын
This is fascinating, an interesting option. Thank you.
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
I'm so glad you enjoyed it!
@3dchick
2 жыл бұрын
Former cover artist here: You spent too much to have your covers adapted to the different formats, unless there was significantly different art on the backs of the paper and hardback formats. $50-75 max. Very interesting overview of the development, tho!
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
I've got a review video planned on the cover, so it'll be super interesting to get your thoughts on the process!
@3dchick
2 жыл бұрын
@@PaperTigerProductions Cool! 👍 I'll look forward to it. 😊
@snowpoint720
2 жыл бұрын
A compelling reason to publish via Google may have a positive impact over at Amazon. If the Audiobook market grows because of Auto-Narrators, Audible will want a piece of the pie. Might encourage them to offer better deals to authors.
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
The competition is definitely a good thing! ACX has such an absolute stranglehold right now through Audible. I haven't seen any figures lately but I feel like Audible subscriptions are even more of a powerful draw than the KU program, so I wouldn't be surprise if the market dominance of Audible is STILL even more skewed than the Kindle store even with more players entering the market. The last figure I saw circa 2020 in Publishers Weekly was 90%!
@armanisar-feinial1789
2 жыл бұрын
I was actually in disagreement in the beginning, but then you broke down the ways audio books could be reintegrated back into the market text to speech, AI, human, luxy ect. Though, I wonder how that would work with the ISBNs. What are your your thoughts on that?
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
If we treat different types of audiobooks as different audio formats, then the same rule would apply as with text formats: one ISBN per type of format. This won't apply to text-to-speech apps since that's converted on the fly, but auto-narrated audiobooks, human narrated books and graphic audio formats would all have their own ISBNs. You can already see this in action with the Stormlight Archive books. The Way of Kings audiobook ISBN is 9781409141174, but the graphic audio comes in 5 parts, with each part having a distinct ISBN (two, actually, because there's also an ISBN allocated to the MP3-CD). That's 11 ISBNs in total for Book 1 of the Stormlight Archive. Though who knows? Technically epub files are a specially packaged set of XHTML and CSS files. Other than inconsistent support across ereaders, there's no reason why we couldn't have an *integrated* ebook+audiobook (I don't even know what we would call these) where you could switch seamlessly between the text and the audio version. I would bet Amazon, Google and Apple already have teams working on this problem.
@AndrewDMth
2 жыл бұрын
I do see a few issues with this offering. Amazon currently will block an author for trying to upload an audiobook that already exists. (This comes from overseas auto-narrated markets scrubbing for new books and then uploading the audiobook. The author then trying to upload an audiobook to Amazon is denied for plagarism. They state the author is plagarizing their own work...) So, this change will basically "require" that all Indie authors use this, if they cannot afford narrator. Because I see domestic "pirates" doing this themselves. So, this is good and its bad. Good because it's affordable from an MVProduct situation. Bad because it is a substandard product to the professionally narrated product. I would also say that with practice, a self-narrated book is not nearly as expensive as you initially estimated. I am self-narrating, and for each finished hour of work, I've been seeing 4-6 hours of work. This equates to $600 for 4 hours of audiobook narration. I'm not countering, more so I'm saying that for a $300 investment in a mic, an author with a good reader voice can split the different between thousands of dollars and free through google. The same can be said with Indie covers: You can have a stock image cover put together for fairly affordable, or you can spend $3000 on a cover-art piece. And there are lots of options in between. I think Auto-Generated Narration is the future. But I also will be keeping a wary eye on it.
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
Great points Andrew. The issue with pirated audiobooks give me a headache, to be honest. I have heard of needing to claim your audiobook on ACX before unscrupulous scammers do, because apparently there is no authentication process in place to prevent somebody who doesn't have the rights to your title from uploading a poorly narrated audiobook anyway?!
@mowgster7
2 жыл бұрын
One callout though. ACX offers royalty share so you can publish a book without the $4K-5K upfront you cite as the barrier that would make you choose Google's robot narrations?
@PaperTigerProductions
2 жыл бұрын
Good point. I didn't mention the royalty share arrangement because Travis Baldree warned against it. From his Medium article: "I’m going to advise you against doing that. You will be inundated with auditions, but if you want to guarantee a certain quality level, you probably need to be aiming for working narrators who are of that caliber. They are very seldom auditioning for a debut book with no discernible Amazon rank." But it IS an option. I don't know if I would go for it. You limit your cash investment, it's true, but you also take a risk on the narrator, who will probably be unknown. Audiobooks are a performance; star narrators definitely have fans who love them and like to buy titles that they narrate. But to quote Travis again: "There are very few levers you have to influence audiobook sales - they are primarily driven by sales of the book itself." It becomes one of those chicken/egg scenarios, like the one about how to find readers and build an author platform, because nobody will buy an audiobook if your book isn't selling. I'm SUPER CURIOUS to hear if there have been any ACX royalty share success stories that everybody is happy with on all sides. There must be some out there, because how else would you get started as a narrator?
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