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.