Meet the author: Leeanna Morgan

Leeanna Morgan has spent her life surrounded by books. First as a local librarian in her hometown, and for the past few years as a best-selling author of romance novels. The native New Zealander has written some forty-six books to date, mostly based around sweet small-town romance stories set in Montana in the USA. It wasn't an easy road to success. As with many newcomers to the writing profession, she's had her share of ups and downs. But one thing that's stayed constant has been her love of technology — she's never shied away from using new tools and methods to improve her writing craft.

It took Leeanna about a year to complete her first book, Forever Dreams, using her mum as an unpaid proofer and advisor. She kept going because of encouragement from friends and family, and also because the first three chapters of the book managed to impress the judges of some writing competitions she applied to. Choosing to set the book in Montana may seem strange from somebody who's lives half a globe away, but it's an example of how meticulous Leeanna is in her research — not just in terms of her books’ plots, but also in how to market them. 

Leeanna didn’t initially intend to be a self-published author — she planned to take the traditional route of getting an agent and a traditional publishing contract. She managed to attract an agent, but the contract remained elusive. So she bit the bullet and decided to try producing the book herself. In those days, self-publishing was still somewhat stigmatized by authors and would-be authors, with some seeing it more like a vanity project than a genuine literate endeavor.

Her early writing schedule was grueling. She was working full time, so had to get up at five o'clock in the morning, write until 7 a.m., get the kids ready for school and then go to work. She'd return home and write from 7 or 10 p.m. until midnight. She did that for three solid years, which is another measure of her dedication to the craft.

To her shock and surprise, she struck gold in those Montana hills, earning just over $50,000 in her first year. The rest, as they say, is history. Her extensive stable of titles now generates nearly half a million dollars a year, alongside her merchandising and other activities. She's now a USA Today top author in her own right — not bad for a librarian from the sun-kissed Kapiti Coast.

"America was where lots of sales are for e-books. So I thought okay, let's set it in America," she says, "And it just so happened that Montana, with cowboys, was selling really well 10 years ago."

Leeanna’s experience with ElevenReader 

Leeanna's interest in audiobooks first began around ten years ago, when the market for audiobook sales started to surge, spurred on by a seismic shift in the acceptance of audio as a way to access legacy content. At this point, mainstream authors were publicly and loudly endorsing the transition to audio as a legitimate medium. However, for smaller authors, the story wasn’t quite so simple. For one thing, producing an audiobook was extremely expensive, as Leeanna explains.

"I didn't realize how much it cost or how much time it took for a human narrator. I found a narrator that I absolutely adored, which would work out to around 7,000 New Zealand dollars for each book, or $28,000 for a four book series. It was likely to take me 10 years to recover the cost at that time."

The result was that she put aside her interest in the audio model, and carried on with her focus on print. However in spring of last year, Leeanna was introduced to ElevenLabs’ AI technology at a writer's conference in Spain. 

"I rushed up to my hotel room and put one of my manuscripts into ElevenLabs to listen to the dialogue, and I was so excited, it was amazing," she says. "Compared to other AI text-to-speech models on the market, it was 10,000% better. I knew I had just found my audiobook producer."

Fired up with enthusiasm, Leeanna returned home from Spain and immediately started work on creating a new audiobook. At that time, the technology was still in a fairly early stage, so she enlisted her mother again to help with the editing. Leeanna has since converted her entire complete catalog into audiobook format — not only in English, but also translated into German and Spanish too. 

Leeanna has been impressed by the continual improvements in ElevenLabs’ product over time. "ElevenLabs just keeps improving. The voices are more natural, there are hardly any glitches, and the editing tools now make it much easier to create a great product." 

As part of her growing portfolio, Leeanna now teaches existing and aspiring authors how to use modern tools to improve and promote their craft. This of course includes the production of AI narrated audiobooks. Her AI Audiobook Creator course is now an increasingly popular resource for would-be authors around the world. 

In the course, she outlines the options available to those who can't afford human narration, but who would like to expand their reach to new audiences through the power of audio. The 14-module course provides a step-by-step guide to using ElevenLabs technology to produce audiobooks quickly and easily. The modules range from formatting a manuscript to choosing an AI voice and setting up a delivery BookFunnel for your title.

Hints and tips

Leeanna has compiled 6 top tips for authors looking to get started with using AI to produce audiobooks.

1. Get to grips with the ElevenLabs Studio

I would definitely recommend making full use of the ElevenLabs Studio because the editing options are excellent. You can listen to the playback immediately, and make changes to your scripts on the spot. It's really important to have that speed and flexibility to hand.

2. Test the result in ElevenReader

You can quickly upload the result from the ElevenLabs dashboard into ElevenReader, which is extremely useful. Try out the story with different voices immediately at the press of a button. This allows you to hear exactly how your story will sound with different voices — for example a male or female voice, or even different accents. It's extremely powerful that you can do all this work digitally from the ElevenLabs system, and then be able to distribute it to the world immediately.

3. Find your favorite voices in the Voice Library 

There are literally thousands of voices in the ElevenLabs library, so it’s worth going through it to find your personal favorites. Personally, I love Deb’s voice. There's also a male voice which I particularly like, with an awesome, deep, sexy voice. The Lily voice is also fantastic, and I even like some of the British voices a lot. You just need to focus on getting the right tone and the right emphasis from the voice to do justice to your story. ElevenLabs gives you enough flexibility to deliver that kind of customization.

4. But don’t obsess too much over the voice you use

It’s great finding voices you love. However, now the ElevenReader app has arrived, it's probably going to transform the way people make and consume audiobooks. Listeners can choose the voice they want to hear narrating your story, so I now tell authors to not be too worried about getting the voice incredibly tied down. 

Just make the voice sound how you want it to. After all, if a listener chooses to use a different voice to listen to your story, it's going to sound completely different anyway. 

5. Use capital letters to emphasise different words

It's crazy how well the ElevenReader app and ElevenLabs can automatically pick up what you want in a speech — the different kinds of emphasis on different words. I think it's amazing. I get loads of questions on my course about editing tips and tricks, and how you get the best out of the ElevenLabs AI at that stage. One tip I can definitely give is to put emphasis on different words by using capital letters. That really helps to emphasize a word more when you need it. 

6. Don’t waste excessive time fine-tuning

What you want is a fabulous manuscript that's been well edited, with all the glitches taken out. However, don't get too caught up in the pronunciation or emphasis on words, because that can change with the listener's choice of narration voice.

You can waste a lot of time fine-tuning. In the past that was really important, because if I produced a book in Deb's voice, then my listeners only got to listen to it in Deb's voice. So I had more control over how it sounded. But now if the listener wants to hear Brian read the book instead, he’ll read it out differently to how Deb would. With this in mind, there’s no point in spending ages fine-tuning — just get it to a stage where it’s good enough for all voices. 

What does the future hold?

As for the future, Leeanna is confidently optimistic as you might expect. "I think AI audiobooks will be the standard mainstream method of producing audiobooks in the future. The listeners are going to hear no difference between an AI or a human narrator." 

She believes the emphasis will shift onto the quality of the AI narration that users receive. Which means that companies like ElevenLabs will be very important because of the quality of their product. Things like high bitrate, top quality sound and of course superbly natural speech will be paramount. 

Her final words? "The jump in the value to users will be exactly the same as when we moved on from traditional publishing to self-publishing."

Ready to follow Leeanna's lead and get started with the ElevenReader App? Sign up today.