On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway examines major developments in AI-generated audiobooks. Eleven Labs has launched direct audiobook publishing, offering authors new distribution options and competitive royalties. The company has also expanded its speech-to-text services, allowing authors to transcribe and produce audiobooks seamlessly. Meanwhile, OpenAI's video-generation tool Sora is now available in the UK and EU, and Twitch has expanded monetization features, creating new opportunities for authors to engage with audiences.
Listen to the Podcast: AI-Generated Audiobooks Gain Momentum
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcripts
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another Self-Publishing News podcast, the first podcast of Spring here in Oxford, of autumn/fall in the Southern hemisphere.
It's been a rather quiet time, the past week, in the self-publishing news world. Partly, it may seem to me as though it's been a quiet time because I, get the violins out, I have been somewhat under the weather. You may have noticed that in the last podcast my voice was a little hoarser than it usually is. It probably still is somewhat hoarse. I've had the throat to end all throats and I'm slowly recovering, but that means that I may not have picked up all the things I may have otherwise picked up. But I have nonetheless picked up enough to bring you some news.
Eleven Labs Offer Direct Publishing to Authors & Partner with Spotify
The main news I can bring you is around audiobooks, and in particular around Eleven Labs. Eleven Labs, I do wish they'd called themselves something else, especially when you've got a slightly dodgy voice, trying to say Eleven Labs that many times really is a tongue twister from hell.
Eleven Labs is the most high-profile text-to-speech generative AI platform. It's now a multi-billion-pound company. I think the most recent funding round it got was several hundred million, valuing it at well over a billion dollars, and it has partnered with all sorts of companies to bring them AI-generated narration.
They have all kinds of voices in their toolkit that they can use. They also have many languages that they can produce AI-generated voices in, and they have been doing some things in the audiobook space, but they've really upped that over the past week.
I guess two really big things that they've done. The first is that you can now publish an audiobook directly with Eleven Labs, so that's big news. Obviously, it's controversial. There are a lot of people who are not going to do so, and a lot of people who are going to object very strongly to doing so.
But as of the 25th of February, it is possible for authors to publish audiobooks direct through Eleven Labs, upload their manuscript, choose the voice they want to publish in, and then have their book go straight to the Eleven Reader app. So, Eleven Reader is the audiobook app from Eleven Labs. It has been available in beta for some time. It is now available to all authors so everyone can publish their books through there.
This is one of those delightful things. It's called Eleven Labs, you, in order to gain a royalty, need to have a reader engage with your title for 11 minutes. If you do that, you will get paid the sum of $1.10 cents, i.e. a multiple of 11 for the book that they have engaged with, and you can do all of this through one of their subscription plans.
Can you guess what the cost of their subscription plan starts at? Yes, that's right. It starts at $11 per month.
So, it's not free. Obviously, this is a very different level of cost though, from the sort of cost that we're talking about for a voice narrator, but obviously there are lots of ethical issues that you will need to contend with.
Nonetheless, Eleven Labs is very ambitious. They have said that they want to be a major player in the audiobook market, and at the moment they are doing that by trying to bring authors on board.
What that means inevitably is that at the moment, early adopters, there is the opportunity to make possibly higher royalty rates than you make in future, better terms than you might have in future for 11 minutes of listening is not bad as royalty rates go. They're clearly using the royalty rates they pay as an aggressive tool to try and gain market share from Audible.
They've stated that they're not necessarily in competition with Spotify, however, and that we can see, because they have partnered with Spotify, you can now create an audiobook through 11 Eleven Labs and have that book distributed to Spotify. You would do that through Findaway Voices. So, the process would be, you create an Eleven Labs account, you use that to create an audiobook. You then send that audiobook to Findaway Voices, and Spotify will accept it.
So, it's not really a partnership so much as Spotify flexing their rules around AI, if the AI you use is Eleven Labs.
So, some really interesting developments there. For those who are happy and want to use AI to produce audiobooks, you now have much more opportunity to do so and get your books direct out in front of readers, and none of that involves Audible, which is really interesting.
Final point on Eleven Labs, they've clearly been busy. The other thing they've been busy doing is entering the speech-to-text market. So, they now have, basically, a note taking, transcription tool, and they claim to recognize more than 20 languages with what they call their level of exceptional accuracy, which is 95% or higher.
Many more languages with moderate levels of accuracy or good levels of accuracy, but English is one of those with exceptional levels of accuracy. So, in theory, you can now dictate your book into the Eleven Labs speech-to-text app, and then turn that straight into an audiobook using their text-to-speech tool, should you so wish.
New AI Video Generation Available in the EU and UK
Several more things, in terms of tools that have become available over the past week. Starting with AI, it was really interesting to note that SORA has now become available in the EU and the UK.
So, Sora, of course, is the video generation app that was causing all sorts of controversy and all sorts of oohs and ahs of wonder when it was launched last year. It's an Open AI tool and you can now access it in the EU and UK.
Twitch Opens Tips to All Streamers
The last thing to bring you is the expansion of monetizing opportunities through Twitch. So, Twitch have a way for streamers to make money through tips. I think they call them bits. That has been something that has been available to high-profile streamers for quite some time. It's now available to pretty much everyone who streams through Twitch.
As a performance poet, this is something I found of interest because it's a potential platform for streaming live readings, for example. Obviously of your own work because copyright, but if you wanted to stream live readings of your work, whether that's poetry performances, or readings of your first chapters, or just very dynamic chapter by chapter sessions of your audiobooks, you can now stream them through Twitch and people can pay you directly as they watch, which is, I'd say for me as a performer rather than a sort of more traditional writer, that's something that I find a really exciting possibility, and I am sure that you will find me over on Twitch doing poet things at some time in the very near future.
Basically, lots of tools for authors in the news this week.
I hope that my recovery continues and I'm able to bring you much more news next week when I will be gearing up to go and meet the ALLi crowd and everyone else who might be there at London Book Fair, and as is traditional, enjoy the fare at the Amazon after party, because even if they don't pay me any royalties, which is my own fault because I don't sell many books, I can nonetheless enjoy their hospitality, which is always fabulous.
If you are around, I will be around on Wednesday at London Book Fair. Do come and see me, say hello and have a natter, and offer me a quote for the podcast.
Then, who knows, at some point in the next couple of weeks, your quote will be on this podcast.
I will speak to you next week. In the meanwhile, enjoy the spring or autumn.
