Should You Use AI Voiceover to Narrate Your Audiobook?

Hi, friends and future authors. This is Lynn “Elikqitie” Smargis back for another episode of Publishing for Professionals and future authors. I'm super excited about today's episode because not only is it going to be a great value information packed episode, I have a fabulous guest on today. My guest is Trenton Bennett and he is a voiceover artist who I've also worked with personally on one of my books. Trenton, welcome to Publishing for Professionals. Hi, lynn, glad to be here. I'm so excited you're here today to talk about audiobook narration, because this is another hot topic where I know a lot of people think, oh, I'll just use AI. But AI is actually not a great choice for audiobook narration, which we'll get into later. But first let's start off with if you can tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and how you got into audiobook narration.

Trenton

01:08

Sure thing. So I had done a little bit of voiceover work off and on over the years and when I decided to make it official I started with a class called the ACX Audiobook Masterclass, run by David H Lawrence the 17th and Dan O'Day. That five week class was end to end, really thorough. For everything I would need Before the class was over I had built a profile, was submitting auditions.

Lynn

01:31

I landed two audiobooks and was working on a third as the class wrapped up. Nice. That's amazing, yeah, that shows how well put together and how good the information is in that class If you can jump in and just take the keys and start running right off the bat. So let's talk about audiobooks. So you get into audiobooks, you're an audiobook narrator, you're also a SAG-AFTRA member, and so, for people who are not familiar with SAG-AFTRA, can you briefly explain what that is being a SAG-AFTRA member, and do you want your audiobook narrator? Well, we'll talk about that later, but what is SAG-AFTRA?

Trenton

02:03

The simplest explanation is that SAG-AFTRA is the union that represents acting talent throughout America, so that's everybody who's a Hollywood actor or a TV personality or a voice artist like me, and that includes audiobook narration you can be in SAG-AFTRA. Now what that means for you as a publisher looking for talent is you're going to get a kind of a top drawer level of talent because you have to qualify to be in SAG-AFTRA, and so, while the rates may be a little bit more typically, what that also does is it means that if you were a SAG-AFTRA compatible producer, you'd be protecting the talent, you'd be working closely with the writers and such. There are rules that you would have to follow, and then there are certain payments that you would make. But with audiobooks it's just a little bit different.

02:51

A SAG-AFTRA audiobook narrator can take non-union work, so I can work on a SAG-AFTRA project or not, and for me because I'm not going to be, say, suspended in front of a green screen on a wire for 20 hours straight while I'm trying to scream because I'm a character in a movie I don't have to have those SAG-AFTRA protections when I'm narrating an audiobook, because I'm controlling my time in the studio and I'm determining how much I'm going to put into it. So I hope that's the simplest answer for you. But either way, it's kind of a different level as far as narration.

Lynn

03:28

So I never thought about that distinguishment between, like, if you're an actor or an actress, you have to do union work. If you're SAG actor, but if you're a voiceover actor, you don't necessarily have to do that because clearly I'm not part of the union. But we worked on an audio book together.

Trenton

03:42

Exactly yes. So we were able to do that non-union, because that's my own project that I chose to do.

Lynn

03:49

Nice, awesome. So let's talk about getting audio books on. So if someone has a self-published book or they're about to publish their book and they want to do an audio book, I know one of the best platforms to use because we work together on this is ACX. So can you explain what ACX is and just the basics of how to get on that platform or where people would find it?

Trenton

04:09

Absolutely. Acx is short for the Audiobook Creators Exchange, acxcom, and it is actually the clearinghouse that Amazon uses to put together all of its audiobooks that go out to Audible and iTunes and, of course, amazon. So you can actually log in with your Amazon credentials to ACXcom, because they're that joined at the hip, and what that means for you is, if you've published a Kindle book to Amazon, use the same Amazon ID to log into ACXcom and what you can do there is you can see your Kindle book is there and it will let you assert your rights, which is you saying yes, this is my book. I am now claiming the rights to be able to put this book on ACX as an audio book. Now let me get into that a little bit more. Acx is both a portal that will help you. If you go into the help menu, there are a lot of help tips that are based on who you are, so you can click on the I am a writer or publisher and read how it works and get details. But the long and short of it is you claim the rights to your book, you then write up a description for it as you're putting it out for auditions, and you collect auditions that come in from narrators who are looking to do your book, and when you do that, you then have to listen to all of those auditions to make the decision of who you want to offer the book to when you do this. I'm going to digress briefly, lynn, because this is important too.

05:36

The pricing has three different layers to it. The first is called royalty share, and what that means is, whatever profit you make off of the sale of the audio book, you and the narrator split it 50-50. So you're not paying the narrator anything and they're agreeing to do your book, to be able to take half of the take of that book. Do this or not do this? That probably can't get into in 30 minutes, but I'm happy to help anybody. We'll talk about contacts later.

06:12

And then there's per finished hour. This is the standard for the business, and what that means is, if your book is four hours long and it takes me 20 hours to do, that's none of your business. You pay for four hours of finished product, and so the per finished hour rates. Typically, when you're looking for a talented narrator, you want to start at about $250 per finished hour. That helps kind of set the bar a little bit higher and get you a different tier of narrator submitting, because that bar has to do with people who have put more time in this. They're more professional, they're more likely to be submitting you a demo. That implies that this narrator is probably going to take care of you. They're not only going to do a good performance, but because it is on this narrator to provide you audio that passes ACX's quality checks to make sure it can get to market without sounding crummy. That also differentiates a narrator with a higher per finished hour rate.

07:03

Some authors will come up with that funding by doing a GoFundMe or a Patreon, however you wish to do it. But I'm going to give you the third one. The third one is a combination of the two and it's called Royalty Share Plus Outside of ACX. You may hear this referred to as a hybrid stipend. What it means is yeah, I know we're going to split the royalties 50-50, but I also know that I'm not a New York Times bestseller yet. So I'm going to sweeten the deal here by giving you just a lump payment of X number of dollars, and so I'm giving you cash in hand plus we share the profits.

07:41

Now one other thing I'm going to mention, and I promise I'll stop talking about ACX and we'll move on to any other related topics. You want is that when you list a title in ACX, you have two options. You can list it as ACX exclusive, which means you will not distribute it anywhere else for seven years, and as a result you will get a slightly higher take than if you go non-exclusive. Non-exclusive means yes, it's on ACX, but I'm also going to other platforms. So, with that said, I mentioned ACX because it is the biggest. It is the easiest to get started. They handle a lot of the other rigmarole for you, like the agreement between you and the narrator and who gets paid for what they handle, payments and all of that. So all of that stuff is easier to deal with. But you can, of course, also go the route with many fine publishers anywhere from small indie all the way up to Penguin Random House and some of the other large producers to handle it all for you.

Lynn

08:39

So one of the things I tell my clients because they always say they see the magic of oh, I want to put my book in a bookstore and I have to explain to them A, the process is harder. B, if you put your book in a bookstore and it doesn't sell, then you have to buy your books back from that person. You're actually losing money on your book sales. So really I tell people, just publish it on Amazon and then if you go to like an event or you have a table at a conference or you're speaking at a conference, then buy your book and sell it there. But I tell people, don't worry about putting it in bookstores because you're not, it's really not worth your time, money or effort, because you're not going to make a profit and you're most likely will have to, will lose money. Well, what do you say to people who are saying like, well, what if I want to publish on other channels other than acx? Like is it really worth their?

Trenton

09:29

time and money to publish on, to go through the effort, time and effort to publish on a lot of other audiobook channels. It is worth it. It's easier if you're working with someone who already knows how to do this, but there are a number of aggregators out there. There are channels that you can use that will help distribute your audiobook for you. That in itself is like a long class in and of itself, but the gist of it is every one of these companies, like Podium or Tantor, they're going to have their own agreements, and you would want to read those agreements to be sure that A you know exactly who is doing what and how much it's going to cost you or how much of the profits they're going to take. B this is an important one you want to be sure that nothing in that agreement implies that you are giving the rights to your property away. They are simply providing a service of producing or promoting your audiobook in other channels and they're not actually taking ownership of your title. So as long as you make sure those things kind of cover your bases, you then have the leisure to choose how you want to handle publishing and distribution.

10:27

One last note I'll mention, though. Lynn, you're right. If you physically print a book and you have to manage the distribution of that book, you end up with 5,000 copies in your garage and you don't know what to do with it and you get so many orders where you spend less time writing and more time packing boxes or stocking shelves or, worse, as you said, having to buy back unsold copies and handle getting those back to you. So yeah, that's the large scale production. If you don't know if you're going to sell, that many is more difficult than having a small number that you can hand out to people, you can sign at events and stuff like that.

Lynn

11:02

Right, and I'm sure also clearly with audio books, right, like you're not. It's not a physical product, so it's a lot easier to distribute on other channels, because you don't have to worry about buyback, because if someone doesn't buy it, they're not going to right. So that is definitely a different story, for sure. All right, so I know they're having people out there. They're like I'm going to DIY it. Let's first talk about just AI and DIYing it. Why does someone not want to use AI when they're doing a voiceover for their book?

Trenton

11:31

Well, first off, to talk about ACX and Audible, using an artificial intelligent voice is against their terms of service, so you would get kicked. You wouldn't be able to publish that to their platform Now. At the same time, if you go to Audible, you will find that there are a number of titles that are labeled virtual voices. I have not been able to get a direct answer as to how this program works, but Audible does push virtual AI narrated books and the majority of these titles. Unfortunately, because the whole system of the AI voice is kind of automated, you end up with a whole lot of titles on there that have that label on them, that are actually kind of scammy, where someone gets an AI to write a short book, then they get an AI to narrate it and it's an hour long and it sells for $2, and they don't care whether the book sucks and people buy it. They hate it, they give it bad reviews, and they start to get a negative impression of virtual voices. So you put yourself kind of in that camp when it comes to Audible if you go that route of virtual voices. Outside of that, though, I'll make a couple of observations here. The first is you can use AI to narrate a commercial and sell a product and it can get enthusiastic. It may even sound like it has some emotional about your product and hopefully it doesn't end up sounding that hammy. But that's a 30-second read or a 60-second spot and, to be honest, humans have kind of an uncanny valley of the ear and maybe in 30 seconds or a minute because they don't like commercials anyway they might not really notice.

13:02

But when you get into long form narration the uncanny valley of the ear gets very troublesome because as a human being you hear me talking and even though we're not in the same room, you can tell from my body language and the sound resonating from my voice that I am a human.

13:19

I got these mouth thingies that move back and forth and they make the sounds happen and on an instinctive level you know that. And when you hear a virtual voice that you have committed to listen to for 10 to 12 hours, especially if that voice is going to be acting characters out where they might have emotions, he said angrily what happens is the person listening to that title is going to feel very uncomfortable and they're not going to know why. It's not just a matter of whether a virtual voice could dub in the sound of someone breathing air in to make it sound like a human. There is a nuance to it that you instinctively know and over the course of 10 hours you're really not going to enjoy it very much, unless it's a listener who listens to their books on double speed and barely pays attention. Anyway, those of your listeners, your readers, who are there for a performance and they want to get immersed in your story, need a human being to deliver that.

Lynn

14:15

Yeah, I completely agree. And yeah, when I actually hear AI voices talk, I kind of cringe because not a kind do cringe, mostly because it's like you can tell it's not a real person and something in your being just goes, something's just really not right, like something's really off, and you can definitely tell when it's AI. A lot of times it just doesn't sound right. All right, my friends, we're going to take a break right here. We come back. We're going to talk more to Trenton about DIYing your audio, why you want to hire an audio narrator and how you can go about finding a great audio narrator for your book.

Trenton

14:52

Great.

Lynn

15:10

Hey friends, we are back with Trenton Bennett and he is an amazing voiceover actor. If you are looking to hire a male voiceover actor, definitely connect with Trenton. I'm putting his information on the bottom in the ticker on the video and we'll also talk about his information at the end and his information will be in the show notes underneath. If you're listening to the audio version of this, just scroll to the bottom of this episode and you'll see his links. You can click on them there to contact Trenton.

15:36

So, trenton, in the first half we talked about ACX, audiobooks, the basics of publishing on audiobook, and then we talked about AI and voiceover. So if someone says, okay, I don't want to do like, I don't want to do an AI voiceover, I just want to do it myself, I know there's a reason why I hired you is because I didn't want to go through all of those steps of DIYing it. You need a studio, you need to have it sound treated, because one of the things a lot of people don't understand is that you have to have a certain sound floor and a certain quality of audio in order to publish it on Amazon. You can't just record it like in your kitchen and put it up on Audible and Audible's going to be like okay, cool, we'll publish your audio book. So let's just go over the basics of what you need to have if you want to DIY it and then, if someone doesn't want to DIY it, what's a good way to like, find and vet a good voiceover actor or actress.

Trenton

16:30

Perfect. This is great. Before I get into it, I do want to say that one of the downsides to narrating your own book is it takes away the time for the one thing that you do best, which is writing, and the more you can write, the better off you are, just because that's more important. But let's talk about that for a minute because, first off, as Lynn said, there are technical specifications. Now the good news is, if you've ever done commercial voiceover for animation, video games or commercials, the bar is technically very low compared to those things. It is very high compared to podcasts, and I'll briefly do this. I won't digress too much into it. But you need to record with a recording space that has been acoustically treated so that it has a negative 60 dB noise floor. You cannot have any outside sounds coming in. When you record, you will eventually compress and then normalize to negative 3 dB, and when you do this, your recording must have a root mean square calculation of negative 23 dB or less. These are hard requirements for ACX, and they will not allow you to finish uploading a file if it has a problem with that quality. Other publishing houses look to this standard as the gold standard for their work too. So while you could say, well, I'll just record it in my kitchen and I won't sell it in ACX, your readers will not appreciate that. They actually will not be very happy with a product that doesn't sound good and give them the same joy of reading your story. So that's part of why you would have to have an acoustically treated space. I'm in a 10 foot by 11 foot room that I consulted with a voiceover engineer to have built, and then I built my own panels and hung it all together myself. There's a video on my YouTube channel as to how I did that if you want to do that yourself.

18:16

But the second piece of that puzzle is you need to know how to deliver speech. So if it's a self-help book, if it's nonfiction, it's easier for you to do, or if there's a limited set of characters and you're not going to do too much acting, maybe you can do this. But you're going to have to do the following things. You're going to have to read your book very carefully. The words that are setting the table mean that you are the main character, the villain, the supporting characters, the set, the weather, the lights, the mood and the action that's taking place and that all needs to come through in a way where you read the words slow enough so that the pictures have a chance to land in the ears of the listener and form in their mind. You need to be able to narrate that story at a pace continuously that sounds steady, because they need the reassuring steadiness of a continuous rate of delivery that gives them time to build the movie in their mind and see the picture you're trying to tell them.

19:17

And during that point, if you make any mistakes, you have to stop, you have to roll back further and you have to come in again from further back, because you need the voice not to sound jarring and obvious that you just spliced in a correction. We call that punch and roll and what that means is you'll go back to the beginning of the sentence or the beginning of the paragraph and have to reread that whole part all the way up to the mess up and patch that in over it. And once you do that, you have to do that for every mistake. And you also have to do that if you have plosives, which means a little bit of air goes into the mic. That makes a popping sound. It's distorting to the ears, it's not allowed by ACX and you'll have to edit that out and re-record it again.

20:02

Then there's the nature of does my voice sound pleasant? It may, but there are some things you still need to treat that voice with. There are many people, myself included, that sometimes when we say those S's, the silly things just sound like silly snakes and the S will go really hissy and shrill. That's called sibilance. You have to treat that. If you know how to use EQ, you can EQ out the sibilance by hunting for it, using a little method which I learned from a sound engineer, and then you would create your own EQ that kills sibilance. But it's not something you can easily just make happen. The last little bit is a lot of people say oh, it's okay, if the space isn't treated, I'll just use noise reduction. Don't use noise reduction software. Do not use it. It will degrade the quality of your voice. It will change the way you sound and it is noticeable to someone listening to the book, just like they'll notice if it's a robotic voice that does not have the emotion. That's all what I'm saying for nonfiction.

21:03

For fiction there are two camps. There's the one camp where if a character says something, the narrator slightly changes their voice. He walked over to me and then he said I'm really angry at you in a slightly shrill tone, versus he walked over to me and then he said I'm really angry at you In a shrill tone. Those two camps, some of them go the actor route and they will act out and perform the characters. That's typically what my authors really love for me to do, and then others will just do the former, which is a little more laid back. But you will have to keep track of those shifts in tone. You can't use the same shift in tone for every character, especially if the same two are talking in the room, because no one will know who's talking. And if that character's voice changes from one paragraph to the other or one chapter to the other, listeners will notice that too and find it just annoying.

Lynn

21:59

Oh for sure. Yeah, and it's almost like talking to a robot, right? Because robots talk in that same tone all the time, exactly, oh my gosh. And so, yeah, this is great information. This is so fabulous.

22:12

All these reasons you listed of all the treatment is the reason why I hired you and I was like, no, there's no way I'm going to learn all of that and actually publish my book on time. And, like you said, my specialty is writing, so I would rather be writing than doing all of those things. So, for the people listening, the professionals listening to this podcast, I'm sure they would rather be, you know, like closing sales deals or, you know, attending that important conference, instead of doing all of those little things that you know. That's why we have professionals right To hire those people to do the things that they do 24-7. To hire those people to do the things that they do 24-7, even if it's something small like cutting your hair. I don't want to cut my own hair because I don't do a good job. Maybe I could cut my own hair, right, all right. So how does someone?

22:59

So if someone decides they don't want to DIY and they don't want to go through that process, what's a good way to find a good qualified voiceover artist, because I know there's always people on Fiverr or one of those types of platforms. But I try to steer people away from Fiverr and these types of platforms because you get a lot of people who aren't really professional on there and they try to come off as professional. One of the things I recognize on Fiverr is that I I've hired a couple different people for book design just to see like what they would do, and the book covers they have on there are clearly not what they're producing Like. I feel like a lot of people on Fiverr put work in their portfolio that is not theirs and that's my experience I've had. I don't know if you have seen that or have that same experience on Fiverr Upwork. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then also how to find a good voice over artist? Maybe that's not on Fiverr. That will give you a quality product.

Trenton

23:53

Yeah, my kid's a digital artist and they have their artwork stolen all the time and it frustrates them because they can send a letter or say to stop that, but most platforms don't have a mechanism to enforce that. So, yes, that's a very valid point. Now, that said, to find a good narrator, your best bet, I think, if you listen to audiobooks already look at your favorite audiobooks and who those narrators are, and listen to them, especially if it's a multicast or a duet and go, okay, well, I like the male lead or I like this other character, and look at their websites, listen to samples of other titles they've done and see if that person has the magic that you think would be for your book. Now you want to do that within the same genre as well. We're not locked into genres. I've done all sorts of stuff, but some of the things that we know and are good at are in our wheelhouse. Like, I'm very good at science fiction. I have not done a lot of fantasy. I know someone who's extremely well known for fantasy and has done a little bit of science fiction. So that can also have an effect, because genre familiarity and a little bit of that love for that genre can affect the performance out.

25:07

There's absolutely nothing wrong with you looking up a narrator on their website or their social media, messaging them and saying hey, I loved your voice, give us what you liked it in, because we do get a lot of scams where they go. We thought your voice, mr Bennett, was fantastic, mr Bennett, and your Mr Bennett performance was wonderful. So to make sure you're a real human, you can say Hi, I'm a writer, I love your voice in that Tom Clancy book and I have a book that's a military adventure. I'd like to, I'd like to ask you to audition for that. Would you be willing to do so? And most narrators will be happy to do that.

25:41

In the meantime, when you do put it out on ACX, you will get anybody and everybody narrating, but that per finished hour rate should help differentiate, kind of the level of professionalism and you can also look for talent yourself on ACX. That's actually how several of my books were landed. Someone looked me up on ACX. They saw one of my demos, they liked it and so they messaged me privately and said I'd like for you to audition for my book. Would you do so? And gave me a link. And I landed a couple of books that way where I said, oh hey, this would be fun. Yeah, let's talk about this.

Lynn

26:17

So if somebody says like hey, I want you to audition for the book, like do they send you a chapter and kind of explain a little bit about the background, and then they say I want you to read this character, and then you read that parts of the character.

Trenton

26:29

I am so glad you mentioned that. This is one of my favorite things to tell people, because the worst thing you can do is upload the whole book, hand it to him and say I got a sci-fi fantasy book and it's both, and um, I just want auditions and that's it. What we want is take a section of the book that you think really represents an important moment of character interactions or a key piece, something like that. Give us a piece that you really want to imagine in your mind when you're thinking of who you want to cast. Then, when you post that in the acx profile who are these people? What is their situation, what is their background? Tell us that in this scene, these two people what is their situation, what is their background? Tell us that In this scene, these two people are arguing they're brother and sister and he wants this, she wants that they both live on a space station. All of those little details are really helpful for us Because a good narrator. Then, when they engage with you when it comes to the characters, they would love to have your notes.

27:25

One of my favorite authors to work with in the beginning was someone who, when he reached out to me and then I agreed to take it. He said, by the way, I've got any notes you want on characters, including their favorite Scotch, and I said give it to me, I'll take it. Tell me their favorite car, their first car as a kid or whatever. Whatever you've got in your head about those characters, I want to know that so that I really get into who they are. We love those descriptions.

27:48

We want specificity with what you want us to audition and you should expect that typically an audition for you will be about one to two minutes, maybe five minutes tops. I'm going to give you a little bit of an industry secret. Whenever we submit auditions, if we are auditioning for a publisher, chances are we're just going to do something for two minutes and stop, because publishers will typically have listened to thousands of these a week and they will know in the first 30 seconds whether we're the right fit for it or not. So, and you haven't prepared it for us with a little vignette of a scene we might take, if you like, give us chapter two and say give me anything from chapter two. We might look for a particular part that has a beginning, middle and end that wraps up in about five minutes of speech, and we might give you a five-minute audition, because we know that you're listening, differently than a publisher or a producer.

Lynn

28:44

And I think it's also really important coming back to being a science teacher, right, in order to really get an understanding of who would be the best person for the part to give everybody the same part. Because if everyone's reading different parts, right, that gives us those different variables into it, because it's a different scene, it's a different character, they're in a different place or in a different follow, you know right. So I think, yeah, that's really important that if you're listening to this and you are auditioning voiceover actors, make sure to give everybody the same. Now, obviously, if it's a male and female part, maybe the same scene, now the same chapter. But I get that as a writer and a book editor.

29:19

People are like, oh, can you edit a whole chapter for free as a sample? And I'm like no, I'm not going to edit a whole chapter for free as a sample. I'll edit a page for a sample, but not a whole chapter. You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere and anybody who is worth their salt is not going to do that much work for free. That's just A not fair to the creative. And B it just shows that you're just trying to get away with just being really cheap and you don't value the work that you're getting back from that creator. So, oh, absolutely, this has been super awesome. And so I always I'm like a kid in a candy store and I hear you talk and even at like workshops and stuff. So I'm like, oh, this information is so great. Where can people find you if they want to talk to you more about voiceover acting, or they have more questions, because they've heard you talk on this podcast and they're wondering more about voiceover acting in general, or they're looking to hire you as a voiceover actor.

Trenton

30:15

You can easily find me at trentonbennettcom T-R-E-N-T-O-N. And then Bennett has two N's and two T's B-E-N-N-E-T-T. I try to make my demos pretty obvious there. I also have links to my socials. You can email me at trenton at trentonbennettcom. I am happy to talk to you. I spend a lot of time on Facebook when I'm on social media, just because there's a lot of connections and groups there, so you can find me as Trenton Bennett on Facebook. You can also find me on Instagram as voice of trenton, and I'm trying to get to where I post more little samples and shorts of me narrating stuff because it's fun. So you can also see me at work there in some of the stuff that I post. And last, if you're looking for me on other platforms whether that's discord or whatsapp or what have you um, it's going to be voice of trenton most of the time. If it's not trenton, bennett voice. Voice of Trenton is the other name that I'll use.

Lynn

31:07

Awesome Thanks. Well, this has been so great having you on today. Trenton, Thank you so much for coming here and bringing your voiceover artist expertise to the Publishing for Professionals podcast. I really appreciate your time.

Trenton

31:18

I am so glad to be here, lynn. You have been great to work with. You're a great author author. You're very helpful with a subject that I personally had to go through with the senior care thing, and it meant a lot to me to be able to do your book just because you had the details well organized and I really appreciated how easy it was to work with you.

Lynn

31:34

It was fun, Thank you. Thank you Same same. I gotcha All right, my friends. So if you love listening to this episode and you found a lot of value out of it, make sure to give it a to like it if you're watching this on YouTube, and also make sure to follow and give a review wherever you are listening or watching to this podcast.