One of my short story collections—Arm of Darkness—went live yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon in the Apple Audiobooks store. I’ve had audiobook versions of my nonfiction history titles before, but this is the first piece of fiction to go live for readers who prefer to consume books that way.
So that’s one cool thing. You can check out the book right here, and buy it outright for $4.99. It’s a book of six scary short stories.
The second cool thing is somewhat, well, complicated. Audiobooks are acknowledged in the industry to be pricey items. The cost of production can be prohibitively expensive, especially for indie authors like myself. Voice performers cost $200 to $400 per finished hour of audio. That means a complete novel might cost a publisher $4,000 to $5,000 to record up front, before the book ever goes on sale. Simon & Schuster, Amazon Audible, and Penguin Random House might be able to lavish that kind of budget on their books, but most indie publishers cannot. Writers I know who have paid out of pocket for audio versions of one or two of their novels are psyched to have those books available. But they are still waiting to recoup their investments. Until that happens, as one of my buddies tells me, he’s hit pause on future audiobooks.
That cost gets passed along to listeners, of course. Since my commuting days are long behind me, I never really understood the costs of going audio. However, when Denise and I starting taking long road trips for research, we thought about buying a few audiobooks in CD format for the car. That’s when we first got slapped with sticker shock. The titles we were contemplating cost $35 and up. Far more expensive than the price of a modern-day hardcover, paperback, or ebook. For the first time, we understood why so many folks subscribed to streaming programs like Audible to get their daily fix of audiobooks.
Since we weren’t commuters, it didn’t pay to subscribe. Instead, we borrowed audiobooks from our public library. Long trips north to visit my parents in New Jersey, and then a hop over the bridge to New York City, gave us an 11- or 12-hour drive in which we could consume entire books by Lee Child, P.D. James, and Dennis Lehane.
On one trip, we reached our destination yet sat in our cold, parked car to hear the final hour of The Given Day, read so expertly and excellently by actor Michael Boatman. We loved the plummy voice of veteran reader Penelope Dellaporta, who for years sublimely voiced the mysteries by P.D. James. Audiobooks are how we first experienced the works of James Patterson and Nora Roberts. Hurtling up I-95 while listening to a hot, steamy sex scene is probably not how most people consume a romance novel, but it’s an unforgettable experience.
So how can my audiobook cost a mere $4.99? The clue is found in the first line of the description on Apple Books:
This is an Apple Books audiobook narrated by a digital voice based on a human narrator.
I had heard what other authors deride as “robot voices” before, and I didn’t think much of the results. They sounded too fake. Too tinny and uninflected. But in the last year or so, authors like Joanna Penn have been saying that the technology has gotten increasingly better. Apple recently rolled out a program whereby authors could submit their books to be digitally voiced and exclusively sold in the Apple Books store. I entered a handful of my books in the program, more out of curiosity than anything else.
Last night, I was sitting in a bar when I got the email that Arm of Darkness had gone live. I listened to the preview—and it was wonderful. The story came to life. Somehow, the AI narrator knew exactly which words to emphasize, and when to drop into a whisper. I also know that writers can create their own digitally narrated books these days, using programs that offer a great deal of flexibility. You can literally go in and tell the narrator, okay, say this line curiously, or this one angrily, and this one triumphantly. That adds more time to your production, no doubt, but it is possible.
In a sense, this book was a great test subject for Apple’s new system. It’s short, only six stories long. That translates to more than three hours of audio. A brisk read compared to most audiobook novels. But as far as my catalog goes, the book would always be a low priority for me because I know most people don’t love reading short stories in print. But in the world of audio, short stories are experiencing something of a renaissance. They are one quick listen as you run short errands around town.
Naturally, this is all controversial. In the same way people are worried about AI stealing the jobs of artists, writers, and screenwriters, they argue that such books have the potential to destroy the livelihoods of voice performers. Penn and Kristine Kathryn Rusch—two writers I admire greatly for their business sense—contend that there is room in the audiobook space for different tiers of quality and pricing. There is even the possibility that voice actors will derive a new income stream from books which they haven’t personally voiced but simply licensed a digital version of their voice to the audiobook’s producers.
I can also imagine an author authorizing a publisher to re-record a lackluster audiobook with an AI narrator because the human-voiced audiobook is logging terrible reviews. It happens! People are picky about voices. They love one reader, but detest another. Moreover, sometimes voice performers make poor choices, affecting accents that they aren’t capable of sustaining for the length of a book.
This has the potential to directly impact us here at D’Agnese-Kiernan HQ. My wife has now voiced at least three of her titles, and always gotten raves from her producers, engineers, and editors. (She recorded one this past month in a sound booth erected in the dining room.) She could potentially develop a side stream of income doing voice work—if she had the time. But if she could license her voice, that might suddenly make the audiobook world much more enticing for both of us.
That said, no one is arguing that the results of digital voices are better or even equal to the sound of a live human reading a book. It comes down to Listener Choice. If I’m a lifelong commuter and can afford to spring for a perpetual Audible subscription, then I’ll continue to get the highest-quality audiobooks read by likes of the real Stefan Rudnicki. If I’m only an occasional listener, or I’m the sort of person who wants to own an audiobook outright so I can listen to it whenever I want, unencumbered by a points system or borrowing limits, an AI narrator might be perfect for me. We don’t all drive Bentleys, but nor are we compelled to drive Yugos.
Anyway—this drama will not be solved today, on my watch. I’m curious to see what happens, and I hope you’ll check out Arm of Darkness if it’s your kind of thing. Remember: you will only find it on Apple.