Virtual Voice Audiobooks

Virtual Voice Audiobooks


The Girl in the Box
15. Tormented
16. Vengeful

56. Stolen

The Sanctuary Series
4.5 Thy Father's Shadow (Coming Soon!)

Southern Watch

1. Called
2. Depths

Liars and Vampires

1. No One Will Believe You

Ashes of Luukessia

1. A Haven in Ash
2. A Respite From Storms
3. A Home in the Hills

The Mira Brand Adventures

1. The World Beneath

You can find my human-narrated audiobooks that include Sanctuary 1-2 and Girl in the Box 1-14 HERE.

Many more coming very soon! (As in within two weeks.)

I have long wanted to have audiobooks for every single book I release. The problem is...my audiobooks don't sell particularly well. I've self-financed almost every audiobook currently out there for me (the exception being Girl in the Box 11-14, which was put out by a company that paid me for the right to do so), and as you may imagine, paying a narrator and having someone supervise the process is fairly expensive, because the narrator doesn't just narrate, they also edit the audiobook for quality. Someone then has to listen to it for error correction, then the narrator corrects the errors - it's a whole process. I believe narrators, especially the two I've worked with, do a magnificent job in their performance.

The problem is that my books simply do not sell well enough in audio to afford to pay them. The last Girl in the Box audiobook I financed that has broken even (not even turned a decent profit, just earned back what it cost to produce) was book seven. (I've released 8-10 now.) Avenger, the last Sanctuary audiobook I self-produced, took five or six years to break even and has turned less of a profit than my lowest selling ebooks. I know people think authors are all super wealthy, but I'm going to tell you right now that most of them (like 99.99%) of authors whose books you see on shelves in stores have another job because writing don't pay the bills for them. I've been very fortunate in my writing career to do well with my ebooks, but my audiobook program is probably break even in total at best, and may be operating at a slight loss. I'd decided to finish Girl in the Box with my narrator because I wanted the first ten completed for fans, even knowing that yeah, I was going to invest this money on the last three, and I might not see a return for years, if ever. But after that, I was going to be done.

Enter Amazon with a new program that allows an author to generate an audiobook from their ebook in mere minutes, at no cost. Yes, it's computer generated narration. Yes, it will probably stumble over pronunciations. There might even be massive errors in parts of the book (which I will try and correct if they are brought to my attention).

If product development is a three legged stool - you can have it fast, you can have it cheap, you can have it good, and you can only pick two out of the three of those - Amazon's new program reflects the fast and cheap option. As a result, I have priced these audiobooks accordingly - $3.99 USD (Or $1.99 if you already own the ebook!).

(Note: the program is only in the US for now. No, I didn't choose that. Yes, I suspect it will roll out internationally, but I'm not in their consultative group and don't know when, I'm just over here making audiobooks at speed to hopefully satisfy readers/listeners.)

Hopefully this satisfies most of you who have long been requesting audiobooks. If you are pleased with the results, let me know. I'm perfectly willing to put more books in the program, I just want to know that readers are happy with the end product first.
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