On the Creative Self-Publishing stream of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast, Orna Ross and Joanna Penn discuss their latest creative projects, insights from the London Book Fair, and the evolving role of AI in publishing. Orna shares her thoughts on how the fair is shifting away from being author-centric, while Joanna explores AI narration and its growing impact on audiobooks, including new developments from ElevenLabs and Amazon’s Audible Virtual Voice.
Listen to the Podcast: How AI in Publishing Is Changing Audiobooks and Author Opportunities
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About the Hosts
Joanna Penn writes nonfiction for authors and is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F.Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker.
Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller’s “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.
Read the Transcripts
Joanna Penn: Welcome to The Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast with me, Joanna Penn, and Orna Ross. Hi, Orna.
Orna Ross: Hi, Jo. Hello, everyone.
Joanna Penn: Hello everyone. Now, this is the new format of our conversations where we talk about what we're up to, creative challenges and solutions, and hopefully giving you some tips for your writing and your author business.
So, we're going to start today, Orna, you were at London Book Fair last week, and I was sorry to miss it. It was my 50th. So, I was in Iceland, which we can come back to, but I've been coming with you for a decade now. So, I was sorry to mess it. So, give us a bit of an update. How was London Book Fair?
Orna Ross: So, we are still in that situation in the Olympia whereby they don't have the full amount of space that London Book Fair has traditionally had. There's building going on there, and it'll be the same again next year.
Last year we found the space very cramped, and we decided the Alliance of Independent Authors, who's been there every single year since we launched there in 2012, we decided not to take a stand this year, and I was pretty glad about that.
There's new management in place at Reed, the company that organizes London Book Fair, and authors were not central, let me put it that way.
The first thing you met when you went in was a list of the people who were at the fair, including trade publishing, academic, children's, tech, everybody, and nothing about authors. That kind of summed up.
I mean, there was the usual space for authors to hang out, the author lounge, and that was great because we were in a nice, old wood panelled building that felt very writerly; that was the highlight. But the space where the author lounge was, was really cramped up on the balcony.
So, it was very sort of length ways, and when you were speaking on the stage, you had to turn your back to one half of the audience, so it really was not ideal.
And any authors that I was speaking to generally felt that the education, as well, wasn't all that great for authors, the education at Author HQ.
The decision has been made that next year we will do a London Book Fair, Indie Author Fringe live event for indie authors, and we will link in with the fair in some way, and I'll be feeding all of this back to them because I am on the board and it is a new team in place, and they obviously don't quite get how central authors are to the business.
Another thing is they were doing a lot of branding about creative this year rather than books, and I felt that might be an indication that revenue isn't coming from the traditional areas.
It was very quiet. Now, the official figures are the same. According to LBF, there were 30,000 visitors there, which is the same as last year. Last year felt quiet, down on previous years, and this year felt much quieter, particularly the Wednesday, which is usually very busy.
So, I'm wondering if they're trying to stretch out into creative arenas, where I feel the growth for them lies in the area of author publishing and services for authors, and recognizing that authors are publishers now.
But as I said, a conversation we will have.
Joanna Penn: On that, because I'm, in terms of the AI stuff and the tech stuff, for example, talking to Eleven Labs, and we're going to come back to them, but they were at the fair. They had quite a big booth, I believe, and there's quite a lot of, when you say services, they're services for the publishing industry as well.
In fact, I just did my first contract. I haven't told you. I'm actually working on my first contract for AI-narration of a French translation. So, this is starting to happen.
So, what did you get the sense in terms of that side of things at the fair? Last year there were sessions on AI and audio, and all of that kind of thing. Did you see that coming out or was that not so visible?
Orna Ross: It was visible, but you had to go looking for it. So, I found it because I was aware of that and a lot of the talks on the tech stage, and indeed on the main stage, were better for authors than what was going on up in Author HQ.
So, yeah, there was a lively tech services area but there's no recognition that authors are going to be using that. It was very much removed from where we were, which I feel is a mistake.
There's this whole sense of authors being in a corner, and before they used to be invited in and there were free tickets and things. Now, that invitation is not forthcoming. It's a 30% discount on your ticket, and it was just less and less understanding.
As authors become more and more important to the publishing industry, London Book Fair is not reflecting that. It used to be the most author friendly of the fairs of all of them, and I remember BEA going in exactly this direction and we know where BEA ended up.
Joanna Penn: Some people might not. What happened to BEA?
Orna Ross: Well, we don't want that to happen to London Book Fair, do we? It's an important fair.
Now, the rights area was very lively, and it was interesting to see that authors were taking tables in the rights center.
I did an interactive panel with some agents. There were some interesting findings, and we'll talk about that a little further on today.
But yeah, all in all, I think we just need it to recognize what's actually happening in author publishing.
Joanna Penn: On that, agents and traditional publishing. So, people might remember from our last chat, which was three months ago, I have a book out, Blood Vintage, with an agent and in submission to traditional publishing.
We still hate the word submission, obviously. But six months now. It was September when those original things went out. We've sent out some more. We have had some rejections, but basically, it's been pretty quiet. So, I had originally set a deadline for December, and then I've said, okay, now my deadline is one year.
So, September, if I haven't had any kind of decent deal, it's coming back to me. But it's so funny because everyone tells you how long these things take, and you're like, no, surely it can't be that ridiculous. How can anyone run a business like this? And then it is.
Orna Ross: Yes. Traditional publishing, the wheels move exceedingly slow.
I do think it's interesting that so many authors are taking it into their own hands now, because that's something we've been talking about at ALLi for a very long time.
Licensing rights is essentially an administration job. You find out where the subagents are around the world, if you're interested in translation, and you go directly to them because they know the marketplace.
Or you can go directly to a small publisher, or even a larger publisher who appeals to you in a particular arena. So, that is also a possibility.
However, it's not a fun job, to put it mildly. So, having an agent to do this and being invested in actually making the sale is a good thing. One thing that we saw a lot of, when I was chatting to agents at the fair, was print-only is definitely on the rise.
That is obviously a really good deal for indies. The best possible deal you can get is a print-only deal for five years or something and see how they get on in the stores.
But on the other side of the equation, just speaking to publishers about books in stores, it's becoming almost impossible to sell fiction into what they call retail, and deals with traditional publishers are based on retail. That's essentially still how they measure their sales, even though they now do eBooks.
They don't tend to do audio themselves. They tend to sublicense audio, but they do produce their own eBooks. But even though they do, all their calculations on a book are based on retail. And the books that are selling in the shops are non-fiction, celebrity, cookery, children's. All those, what you might call colorful, expensive, beautiful books still sell, but your average novel is down again.
Year on year we hear this story. So, fiction is selling largely in eBook, and it has to be a very exceptional author or an author who's been around for a very long time.
So, that's why you're still seeing fewer debut authors in fiction in the stores than ever before, and it's full of people who've been in publishing for a very long time. They're just working. They're still paying because their readers are used to going in and buying their books in stores, but that generation of readers is going to be gone in the not-too-distant future.
Joanna Penn: Oh no, everyone lives forever.
But it's interesting you say that, because our local Waterstones here in Bath, and Bath has a lot of bookshops, and this Waterstones is big. They used to have the ground floor, that when you walked in it was fiction, and now they've changed the store. You walk in, it's nonfiction, travel, cookery, children's, on that ground floor, and then they've pushed the fiction into the basement.
Orna Ross: That's exactly what's happening. So, good for them in the sense that they know what they're doing, but it's the same in the chain stores in the US and I think it was happening there in Barnes and Noble, first of all.
So yeah, it's a worldwide trend. Fiction is just not selling in print, in stores, and yet we. Still see members coming into ALLi who, in their heads, that's what they're looking for. They want their books in bookstores.
But actually, the other talk that the Alliance organised at London Book Fair was with Sacha Black and Adam Beswick, and it was called New Models in Self-Publishing.
It was very much about showing those authors who were at the fair a different way of doing things, because now they're doing something that not every author is going to want to do by any means. Most authors are not going to want to do it, but if they are, showing what is possible in the sense that they are handling their own warehousing and distribution now for their print books and other merchandise, and that's really interesting.
We're seeing it also with the LitRPG authors, which I think is possibly the next romantasy. It's definitely on the rise. So, what was interesting there was, first of all, authors can do anything now that traditional publishing could only do before.
But secondly, the way in which an author's book gets into a bookstore now is to succeed outside of the bookstore.
So, sell on your own website. Sell well in the retailers, and then you will find that readers go into the bookstore and ask about your book, and then they begin to stock it.
It's an organic thing that happens through Ingram Spark still mainly, or through Book Vault in some areas.
I think that's interesting. Rather than, we have a guide to get your book into bookstores, and you could nearly scrap that guide and just say, sell well everywhere else.
Joanna Penn: That's the other thing about translation deals. Often, they come to you if things are working.
So as ever, sorry everyone, it is about still marketing your book, getting noticed, selling some stuff.
But let's just go halfway between because there might be some people feeling like, I don't want to do what Sacha, as Ruby Roe, and Adam Beswick do, and I certainly don't want a warehouse, you don't want a warehouse. 99.9% of authors do not want to do that model.
But I am about to launch, and obviously we've both done Kickstarters, I'm about to launch my next one, which is Death Valley, which is a thriller. It is the first book I think I've written with no supernatural element, which is crazy, but I've written it for a number of reasons.
One of which is film, and I'll come back to that. But I wanted to talk about this.
So, people know, I'm not warehousing. So, I get the orders from Kickstarter, Book Vault print them, Book Vault send them out to customers. So, you can do a print heavy focus, but without handling all the stock yourself, which I think is really important.
I'm doing the sprayed edges and the foil and all those lovely things that most traditionally published authors don't get anyway.
But I wanted to mention it also because my process has changed. I started fiction in sort of 2009-ish, so this is the first time my process has really changed.
So, before Christmas, I went to Death Valley in California, and then I worked with Chat and Claude, claude.ai, who I like, it's got a real personality, and I did an outline. I'm a discovery writer, so doing an outline was a really new process, and then I worked with my editor, Kristen, human editor, and we finessed the outline.
Then I wrote the thriller in January/February, and there's this thing going around the AI tech community called “vibe coding”.
Vibe Coding is a sort of, one, you don't need to be a programmer. You tell the AI's what you want, and it will code it, and then you say, no, do a bit more of this and it will recode it. But it's more of a sense of flow.
There's a lot of discussion of flow, creative flow, when vibe coding. I was like, okay, wow, this is exactly it, this is how it feels.
So, I would have my writing session, and I would open Chat, I would open Claude, I open Scrivener, I open my outline. Then essentially, I would feel like I would go into a sort of flow process between one to the other. Writing some stuff, putting that writing in. Saying, what could happen next, what might this character do? Putting that back in, editing that, and just going backwards and forwards.
It was, I have to say, it was like a joyful, creative process, and I just love this term “vibe coding”.
I wonder what you felt about it, because I just feel my brain is on fire when I work this way, and it's a very different process. On fire in a good way, by the way. A very different process from me sitting alone. I am still alone, but I don't feel alone. I used to just sit and type, and this process is so joyful. I wondered what you felt about that.
Orna Ross: I haven't done or wasn't even aware of the term “vibe coding”, and I think I'd call it something else if I was in charge.
Joanna Penn: That's the programmers.
Orna Ross: The things they come up with, honestly.
From a user perspective, it sounds awesome. My go-to before, you know when you've just stopped and you can't go any further, it used to be to get to get up and make a cup of tea or coffee. Now, my process is to throw it into some AI and see what it throws back.
So, it sounds like I'm very early in the evolutionary scale of vibe coding, but what I'm trying to get at is that response. That sense of being supported is something that I value very much, even when I don't use what comes back and I often don't, it sparks something and there's that sense of support.
I feel like I have the most loyal and intelligent assistant that it's possible to have, and I only use Chat really. I haven't gone there, even with Claude. I know you've been saying Claude, Claude, Claude, Claude, Claude for a long time, and I will.
I'm not in a major writing phase at the moment, just for personal reasons, but it sounds awesome.
Joanna Penn: It's really fun. Then, of course, my editing process is the same. I print out the book and hand edit, put my edits back in.
So, just to be clear, every single line in this book is touched by me, from my original ideas. I totally feel like it's my book, there is no sense that it's not.
Then I edit, hand edit it, and I share the pages of my edits, there's a lot of hand edits. Then I work with Kristen, my editor, on the line edits.
I've also worked with a Death Valley specialist, which has been awesome. It's so lovely when you get a beater reader who's not a writer, and his comments were just lovely because they were from a reader's perspective. So, that was a wonderful process, really, the first time I've worked with a beta reader who's just a reader.
So, if people are interested, jfpenn.com/deathvalley. That will go to Kickstarter or in the future it'll redirect.
The other thing I should say, I also did the book trailer, which is on YouTube, and I did that with Midjourney.
You know how much I love Midjourney. I've been using Midjourney for maybe two years now, and then I animate that with Runway ML. That is just getting more and more fun as well, and then I also work with Canva to put it together.
So again, my book trailer process is different. It probably took me about four hours to do the book trailer, and people are saying they really love it.
Orna Ross: It's really good.
Joanna Penn: Oh, thank you.
It's mainly characters, and this is really the first time, and I think this is another way that working with the AI's is so good, because dialogue is a real weakness of mine. I spend so much time quiet, and I don't particularly like talking with people. But once you get into a character, and my dialogue is really clunky, and then I say, rewrite this in Jack's voice, and this is Jack, and it will just do such a better job.
Jack is a prepper in the book, and it's just so much better. So, that's a really interesting way.
So, let's say my process of collaboration with AI tools is just getting more and more interesting, let's say.
But you've been doing something around illustration, haven't you, as well?
Orna Ross: I have, though not as hands on as you.
I just want to, before we leave what you're saying there, because you are our indie AI pioneer out there, trying out everything and bringing it back to the community in a really generous way, and it's so interesting to watch your process evolve.
I think this, to go back to LBF, there was a very polarized discussion going on around AI and authors and yes, of course, we need to work on the licensing thing and absolutely there are copyright issues and all of that, and we at the Alliance take all of that very seriously.
But there was no discussion whatsoever about ways in which authors are using AI in that creative way, and I think it's so important that understanding does get through to the author community.
Because there were people grandstanding and doing this performative thing, oh, we hate AI, and then authors giving them rounds of applause. That gets us all precisely nowhere.
Joanna Penn: Stop using Amazon then, and Google, and all of them.
Orna Ross: Yes, stop using every tool. Not to mention your personal life where it's also involved. Yeah, all of that.
But it's just such an important message, and it strikes me as you were talking, we always talk about “be more you” when we're talking about the doubling down on being human, that sort of cliche almost now, and it's clear that your process with AI is becoming more you.
So, that you-ness is becoming embedded in the using of the tools as well as in the things that are not the tools. So, I think that's interesting.
Joanna Penn: Oh, good. And illustration?
Orna Ross: Illustration. My beautiful daughter, you mentioned Runway there, I've been listening to words like Runway. Like you, she has all this software in her back pocket, and she's an artist.
When I started producing a series of gift poetry books about two years ago now, probably. I'm doing the final one. It was supposed to be for Easter this year, probably won't be, but later on in the year.
This year, I started to use AI illustration and had great fun with it, and put out two of the books or three of them, I think.
The first one, I worked with human photographers and then after that I did some AI illustration myself. I took a look at them recently and you were very excited, bless you, about what AI could do.
Joanna Penn: Things have moved on.
Orna Ross: Things have moved on, absolutely.
Then I thought, my daughter. So, we've been working together on AI illustrations.
Now she, like the skills you are bringing as a writer to the stuff, she's bringing as an artist, and we're getting these beautiful pictures.
The other thing that was happening was my illustrations were all over the place. If I'd liked it, I settled on it and put it in, but there was no sense of continuity across the book, never mind across the series.
So, we're going back in, and she's done up an aesthetic style for the books and we're working on it, and it's such fun. It's so nice. So, there are three of us, if you call it AI, or about 25 of us, if you call it all the different little software that she draws on when she's doing her work.
It's just such a lovely thing, and it's really interesting to see her and to talk to her about her process with the AI tools as well, and how she gets the best out. So, I see an image and then I see each stage of the image evolving and it's just like how the writing process evolves.
And it has fed back into how I use AI in writing.
Joanna Penn: I think this is the point. If you already have skill in an area, if you're deeply knowledgeable, you are going to be better.
If you asked me to work with the AI music stuff, I'd be like, no, because I literally know nothing, and I can't even prompt about music. But visual art, I'm very visual. I take a lot of photos, and I did art history and stuff, so I have some visual sense.
But what you've said there with, and just so people know, your daughter's name is Orna.
Orna Ross: Not confusing at all.
Joanna Penn: Your daughter Orna's skill, that's incredible.
On that, is she available for other people to hire?
Orna Ross: Yes, a select group. She does some client work. She's a working artist, so she needs to keep her time clear, but yeah.
Joanna Penn: I think there is more and more work available for AI positive people who will do that kind of collaborative process for people who don't have any visual skill and can't prompt these things visually.
This is why I'm also not scared of AI taking our jobs or whatever.
It can do its own thing over there, but for us who have the skills to write, for us who have the imagination and the vision and the direction. This makes me feel a lot more like how a lot of musicians create. Musicians who obviously might play one instrument or a couple, but they don't create the entire song themselves sitting in a room, and the movie director doesn't act every scene and do all the music. The director directs everything and they're the ones who win the awards, and the musicians who use beats that they've synced in and whatever.
And photographers, my brother's a photographer, he doesn't create every pixel manually.
So, I think this is what we are moving into.
The fun and the creativity and the spark, this is what makes it worth it. Again, it's like those early days of indie when people spent five years arguing over the validation of eBooks and self-publishing, and meanwhile, we were all just getting on with it.
That's how I feel is, let's just get on with it.
So, should we move into AI audio or any other comments on that?
Orna Ross: No, I think that's enough on that.
Tell me about Eleven Labs because the whole community is talking about Eleven Labs.
Joanna Penn: So, there's been two major developments in the last few weeks even.
So, Eleven Labs, if people don't know, it is the top, I think, the best AI audio service out there. ElevenLabs.io, you can go listen to it. It's emotional. They have so many voices. They also pay humans to license their voices, and so I'm looking at that at the moment.
So, they have paid out to narrators, that's a really important point.
Also, they've been around for a while now. Authors have been creating books with them, but what happened was Spotify announced their integration.
So, FindawayVoices.com, which is now owned by Spotify, but still distributes to a lot of different services, you can now, out of Eleven Labs, click a button, output a file, which you can upload to Findaway Voices.
So, it was previously you could only sell your AI-narrated files on Kobo, on YouTube, on your own website. You can now sell them on Spotify or put them into the subscription program, and then obviously they're expanding that to other services. There's already more, I just don't know them off the top of my head.
So, that was one thing. I did a short story: A Midwinter Sacrifice. I used a male voice because the character's male. I also did multi voice, so the character in it is Irish, and I used an Irish male voice and then I had female voices. So, I used about seven voices and then I used my own voice clone for the author's note.
So, that's free, people can have a listen to that. A Midwinter Sacrifice by JF Penn.
There's also a version of me, human me, narrating it. So, we can do all these things, this is so cool.
Then what happened?
So, I was like, this is great. I was still going to do the human narrated, me, narration for Death Valley. But then, last week, I got the invite to Amazon's Audible Virtual Voice, AVV.
This has been live for about a year, but invite only, US-only, mostly romance authors, and there's probably more than 50,000 AI-narrated books out there, but they are now rolling out.
Now, I think they're rolling this out aggressively because of what happened with Spotify. It was like, this is the tipping point.
Obviously, I jumped straight on. Now, most of my books are already in audio, so obviously this is only available if there's no Audible version. But one of my books, Catacomb, I've been waiting on that. So, I went in. One, it's free, and Eleven Labs you still have to pay.
It's probably only $100-200 with Eleven Labs, but on AVV it's free. It's not available to everyone right now, so depending on when you are listening to this, it may or may not be available on your dashboard. But I've heard from other people in the UK, people in Canada, that it is rolling out. So, I would just expect it to keep rolling out.
They don't have as many voices but it's still pretty good. It's very easy. So, people who are audio purists won't want to use it because it's not directable enough, but in terms of getting audio out fast it's pretty significant, and also, it's free.
Orna Ross: And it will improve.
Joanna Penn: Of course, and right now it's in English and Spanish, but again, they'll probably expand it out.
Again, Eleven Labs has more accents, more languages. So, I guess the point of bringing this up, what happened is I've changed my mind on Death Valley. So, I'm now going to use Eleven Labs for Death Valley.
But just to be clear, you cannot use Eleven Labs files on Audible or KDP. You cannot use AVV files anywhere else. So, essentially this means you may, if you want to sell audio wide, you will have to do two versions. But I think that probably people might do that because it's much easier.
Again, to be clear on our stance, we are very pro-human narrator. I am a human narrator. I have narrated most of my non-fiction audiobooks. I will still do that. But this is mainly for those books that would never have got an audiobook in the first place; most books are not in audio.
In terms of accessibility, in terms of the market, there are pros and cons, as ever. This is going to make a lot more audio available. So, I think people are going to have to think very much. The human narrators are going to have to differentiate, like, why should people hire you, what is the benefit? And you need to be able to say that.
Then a lot of people are going to just go with the free version on Amazon.
What are your thoughts on that and what are your takeaways for authors listening?
Orna Ross: First of all, we welcome technology that makes it easier for authors to make a living from their writing, because that's what we support as an alliance. So again, all the caveats that we have around AI in terms of copyright, licensing, et cetera, are on selfpublishingadvice.org/ai. We have a page there that we continue to update as things change in the community.
So yes, just like human artists, human narrators, and human writers, AI is coming into our world and making things happen.
Now, our overall position is to take a median position, which tries to weigh up all the different, like a doctor weighing up risks and benefits of a medication, we're weighing up the pros and cons all the time.
So, in terms of our conversation that we had a moment ago about the illustration and the writing, and you may or may not know this at this point, it seems to me that narration is a little bit different, is there a way human narrators can work with AI-narrated work and improve it?
Get that, what did you call it, vibe going on?
Joanna Penn: Yeah, you are exactly right. The problem is most narrators are taking a very hard stance on this.
So, there is a huge gap in the market, because most people do not want to sit there with Eleven Labs or with AVV and create their own AI audiobook, because you still have to listen to every line, and most people are not good at that.
So, for example, what they have introduced in Eleven Labs, and probably will in AVV is speech to speech. So, if a line of dialogue is not said in the right way, you can say it yourself and then turn it into the voice.
So, I could say, Orna, where are you going today, in my voice, and then turn that into, let's say, a US male voice using the same intonation.
Yes, people who are specialists in audio should be offering services or could offer services helping people create AI-narrated audiobooks for a lot cheaper, but still get paid.
But what I've seen is that a lot of the narrators are saying, no, not doing that, not working with those tools. So, I think at the moment there's a gap in the market, but I'm working with someone on my book, and I think that this is going to fill quite quickly with services.
So yes, if you are a narrator, I do think offering a cheaper service, that's not your normal human narration rate, it has to be cheaper. It can still obviously be more expensive than the credits used to create it, but yeah, I completely agree.
Orna Ross: Yeah. I think that is the way forward because, for me, I've used a human narrator for just a few of my books. I've always resisted doing my own narration, even though people have said, and I may actually do my poetry. I may come round to doing that in time. I definitely would never narrate a long book.
I just don't have the skills to do fiction at all, and I don't have the patience to do non-fiction, a large text. But at the same time when it comes to AI, just uploading it and pressing a button, I wouldn't know how to even make sure that I was happy.
I'd listen to the whole thing through, but if I wanted to improve it, I wouldn't know how. So, if there was somebody there who would hold my little hand through that process, I definitely would be prepared to pay.
I think this is the way the market's going to go. We're going to have the human-narrated, like our premium edition, like our gold edged hard back in print, then we're going to have the straight on, and then maybe a middle way, which uses both and may possibly, I don't know, certainly with writing and illustration, I'm seeing maybe better than either human-narrated alone.
The thing is that audiobooks are the area of the publishing world that is still in growth in a big way, because traditionally, so few books have actually got an audiobook license. It's tiny, the percentages are really low.
So, it's like eBooks were 10 years ago. There's a gap there that's being filled now, and it's a good time for authors to think about getting into audio if you haven't already, or taking it much more seriously. So, that's certainly on my to-do list because audio's always been kind of a poor third for me, whereas you've been very audio led.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, because I've been in podcasting so long. But also, on this, the rights stuff is really interesting.
So, you'll remember my book from 2020, my AI book, and in the chapter on voice, I said, we need rights stratification for audio, and this is the big problem right now. If you sign an audiobook deal, you sign audio, and audio now is not one thing.
So, with this contract I'm currently in negotiation, I've said, okay, you want to do AI-narrated audio, the contract has to say AI-narrated audiobook. I retain human narration of that.
What we mustn't do is just sign an audiobook deal. It needs to specify, is this human, is this AI?
A lot of publishers are just going to jump into this, but what's lovely about Findaway Voices is that you can do audio without attaching it to a book. Like I said, A Midwinter Sacrifice is available in two formats, essentially: a human-narrated author version and an AI-narrated version.
This is how I see it.
Then in the future, for Death Valley, there's going to be an AI-narrated version. What if I want to do a multicast production when my screenplay gets made into a movie? I can license that separately. So, this is what we now have to think, because our book contracts might have eBook, might have paperback, might have hardback, might have large print.
With audio, it's just audiobooks. So, how do you see that development in terms of licensing?
Orna Ross: Yeah. I mean in terms of the rights buyer, it's in their interest to keep it simple and in terms of the rights licenser, then it's important.
So, this is another education job, where authors need to become educated about what's going on, and when they get a contract or an offer from somebody, that they don't just go, yay, where's the line, let me sign. Understanding how key owning the rights is and limiting.
So, we have three principles when you're licensing rights. One is time, to keep the time as short as possible, five years or less, and not life of copyright. Territory, where exactly the book will be distributed. Then the other is to get granular about the rights themselves.
Joanna Penn: On that, on the contract, the first one they sent to me, they had literally just left the royalty percentage, and I went back to them and said, it's fair enough to have a lower royalty percentage if you have a human narrator, but this is AI, so I should get a higher royalty percentage for an AI-narrated audiobook. Come on. So, this is why this is in negotiation, but I have a feeling this is the type of thing not many people are negotiating right now, because people aren't open enough to it to even say yes, but then they're also not fighting back.
So, I feel like there's some very interesting audiobook royalty and licensing deals to be done, and this will really open things up. I think some audio publishers who ‘d go, maybe we could get rights to more books that way. So, there might be some deals available to more authors now.
Orna Ross: There are deals coming out to authors. There were a number of authors talking at the fair about audio, about significant audio deals that they were negotiating with Audible and others in a different way.
What's happening too is that authors are saying, oh, you need to know about my friend, and talking to them.
This is another way in which those authors who are saying, no AI, pulling down the blind, are effectively, though not necessarily. If that is your position, of course, and you're happy with that position and that's the position you want to take, nobody around here is going to tell you, you shouldn't feel that way.
But if you're doing that because you don't understand, then that's a different thing.
So, before you decide, no, you need to understand, because you cannot do any of this stuff that is good for your author business and by extension, what's good for your author business is good for other authors too, you can't do these things if you're not open to understanding them in the first place.
If it's a big no and you're not even listening. So, definitely anyone who's wavering should engage with this question, because it's really important.
Once you're doing well, these things become very live. Decisions have to be made very quickly, so the more you can educate yourself in advance, the better.
Joanna Penn: This has been a great discussion today. I think we are going to wind it up because we've been going a while, but next time I think it'd be nice to focus on some of the more interesting human led marketing. I am bringing back my books and travel podcasts which will be interesting because I let it go a few years ago.
So, maybe we can also talk about endings and beginnings and all of that kind of thing.
Anything else you want to bring up before we close?
Orna Ross: No, I think we've given a good airing to what's going on for us in this time.
We'd love to hear from you guys about what's going on for you and how your things are changing.
Everybody's author business seems to be diverging, and we all did things the same before, but we're all doing things quite differently now.
So, it's really great for us to hear from you, especially if you're doing something that's really exciting you. That doesn't have to be huge. It can be something that's just moving things along for you. It's really interesting.
So, if you're an ALLi member, do share what's going on for you in the forum as well as asking your questions and getting advice.
Until next time, happy writing.
Joanna Penn: And happy publishing.
