This is the first step on my six steps to relaunch a book.
Because this is an experiment I’m using AI voices from Amazon.

This is the quickest, and cheapest way to convert an existing book to an audio format. Fiction and business books do really well as audiobooks, travel books not so well – after all, if you are travelling wouldn’t you like to see the information?

Before you start you need your book content available to cut and paste – Generate the latest version of the book as an .rtf file. I would have preferred a text file, but that isn’t possible from the application I use to format my books.

Six Steps to Set up an audiobook for (nearly) free

1. Set up an AWS account with Amazon, with an S3 tier. Set up a bucket for your audio files.
2. Select Amazon Polly the AI audio application from Amazon.
   Select the voice you prefer, in a variety of languages – in English alone there are US, British, Australian and Indian. I recorded all four and asked my launch team which one they preferred.
3. Start recording by cutting and pasting into the Text to Speech box.
   Click Listen to listen back to uptown 3000 characters. Test this a few times.
   Use SSML switch to add some codes to indicate which words are Spanish, for example, or to add a longer break between sentences. Download to the S3 tier. If there are errors, fix them.
4. Download from S3 to your drive.
   You can listen to it here, and maybe repeat from step 2 if you aren’t happy.
   Rename the file to a sensible name.
5. Create your blog post/social media post, and link to the file on S3 or platform, such as Adilo.
6. Set up a podcast, or streaming service, such as Anchor, or soundcloud. Or create a page with the files as a bonus for your readers.

Your audio is live! You have your book in audio content.

Samples

The audio file streaming from Adilo

The audio file streaming from AWS S3.