AI is coming for voice talent. Are writers next?
An Amazon offer I cannot accept even though it might help my book sales
Audiobooks are the hottest segment of the book market. And your next audiobook on Kindle might just be narrated by voice bots.
Kindle Direct Publishing recently sent me a breathless email telling me that I am among a select few authors chosen to try out Kindle’s virtual voice beta. Who me? Selected? Well blow me away (figuratively speaking).
KDP wants to turn one of my indie published novels into an audiobook—without any human voice talent involved.
All at no cost to me—except for my soul and ethics. Not much use for either in this brave new digital world.
What’s next? Perhaps another email canceling my KDP author account because only AI generated books will be sold through Kindle from now on.
Score another big one for Amazon. No more pesky royalties to pay out to real flesh-and-blood human authors!
Jeff Bezos gets to keep all book sales. The rest of us get soulless garbage to read.
The voice bot offer email even claims I can produce an audiobook with a few simple clicks. Fat chance!
There is absolutely nothing simple about KDP’s author dashboard whatsoever. It is a nightmare of epic proportions for scribes who just want to spend their time writing, not figuring out KDP speak to get things done.
I suspect the complexity is deliberate but for reasons I cannot fathom. Contempt for self-published authors, mayhap?
No thanks to the voice bot audiobook offer. I would love to turn the books in my series into audiobooks but I cannot afford real human talent, and I won’t support screwing them out of their livelihoods.
Instead, here is my list of KDP offers I do want to see in my inbox. (Hey. I write fantasy so I know it well.)
Offer #1: Stop making authors join Kindle Select (Kindle Unlimited for readers) to be allowed to promote a freebie book for a short time. I have so many issues with KS, I scarcely know where to begin. Here are three:
A. If an author puts a book into KS, she cannot then sell it anywhere else online, only on Amazon. Illegal restraint of trade, anyone?
B. Authors must wait an entire month after they put their book into KS to run a freebie promo? Why?
C. KS pays authors according to the number of pages in their books that readers get through. Since I have family trees and a lengthy glossary at the end of each of my novels in my fantasy series, readers will never reach the last page. That reduces my royalty payments.
I could yammer on, but point made.
Offer #2: Stop playing games and fiddling around with royalties. Set up percentages that are easily understood and be done with it. Ooops, no can do. Massive conflict with complexity by design.
Offer #3: Select my novel for “Sarah Selects.” Sarah Gelman is Amazon Books’ editorial director who chooses certain tomes to spotlight. Tons of promotion with that sweet deal.
I’m not holding my breath. Most likely those few coveted selects go only to the big publishing houses for a certain consideration.
So, ghosting the voice bot, I spend my days pulling out the last of my sparse-to-begin-with hair trying to master book marketing. The writing part I can swing.