When we tell our friends and family that we write and
have published paperbacks and eBooks, some have answered, “I’d rather listen to
an audiobook.”
Well…we’ve heard you and have recently published
several of our stories as auto-narrated audiobooks. Auto-narrated? “What’s
that?” you ask. Well, in our case it means using Google’s text-to-speech
technology which creates amazingly realistic voices. And it’s free for writers to use.
Amazon requires writers to hire a professional narrator for a book. It costs a bundle of money. For indie writers such as us, we simply can’t afford to shell out thousands of dollars for narrators. So now, we are creating audiobooks for our titles on Google Play.
Google allows writers to choose from several different
narrators: Male or Female Americans, British Male or Female, or Indian Male or
Female. We were surprised by how natural these voices sounded. We were also
able to change the speed and pitch of the voices.
You can use one narrator for the entire book or choose
a specific narrator for each character. It’s as simple as that.
We are also able to edit the pronunciation of words. For
example: words like “Live and Live” have two different meanings. We could
choose which pronunciation was the appropriate one.
As readers, would you like to know how to find and listen
to our audiobooks? Here’s a quick how-to:
- On the device you'll want to listen to the audio book (iPhone, Android, etc), go to play.google.com/store/books.
- Find the book you'd like to buy and pay for it
- Go to the Google Play App on your device and sign in with the same account you used to buy the book. (You can install the Google Play App from the App Store)
- Your book should be there waiting for you!
Our audiobooks are all priced under $3.00 which is cheaper than most audiobooks.
Here are all our audiobooks currently available in the
Google Play Store:
Travelers
in Time Aboard the California Zephyr
