Show; don''t tell ? Not for audio books (yet)

There is a common advice many fiction authors give when it comes to writing style, and that advice is: "Show; don't tell". The idea is that the reader gets a more emersive experience when language is used to substitute for multiple senses instead of writing like a tour guide on a touristic buss tour through Rome.

As someone who enjoys lore-heavy fiction, I've never been a big fan of this idea, a telling writing style can actualy help emersion into the lore and world buikding of the complex universe that is the setting o your story, but my own writing has grown more balanced over the year. It used to be all tell and no show, and now it's somewhere halfway between the two extremes.

When you self publish books as e-books, Depending on where you live, Amazon or Kobo is probably the prime channel for selling e-books in your region. I live in The Netherlands, and over here Kobo has historically been the bigest player on the e-book market, mainly through its partnership with Bol. In other regions, Amazon is the absolute number one.

There are however other channels, and with the big two, or rather with channel bound e-readers no longer being the top dogs in the e-reader market, more and more readers now own an e-reader that allows them to shop arround for e-books. One channel that has become e good place to go for ebooks is the Google Play store. The Google Play Store has it's own books section, and e-readers like the Onyx Boox readers, next to the native App for side-loading, the Amazon App and the Kobo App, also can run the Google Play Books App on e-paper, what is great to have as an option.

With all the fuzz lately about AI, one side of AI is pretty interesting and that is text to speach. Audio books are an interesting market to branch out into, but for most self published authors getting voice actors to make an audio version of your book isn't going to give you a triple digit ROI on audio books.

But now Google has a really interesting option:

When you have an e-book published on Google Play, the partner center now offers the possibility to try and turn it into an audio book, and that is pretty interesting. There are a number of AI voices to choose from and you can even combine voices in the same document and give differen speakers a voice distinct from the main naratot. You can speed up a narator, flow him down, add pauses where apropriate, change the pronounciation of words.

All and all the tool is quite interesting were it not for one thing: Every AI pretty much sounds like (s)he is doing either a business presentation or is presenting a school project before the class.

It does this though in a quite impressing text to speach implementation with quite some tuning options.

Now after trying with my novel, Ragnarok Conspiracy, I basicly came to the conclussion that the Google auto-naration is still a pretty unsatisfying fit for the show-style part of my fiction and as such my novel would still be too bad a fit.

My first attempt at writing fiction though, a dense tell-only novelette about an ant-monkey revolt in a star system not so far away but pretty long ago, turned out to be quite a decent fit.

I don't currently feel I should be charging for an AI generated audio-book that isn't exactly my best writing. but it's good enough I think to post on YouTube. So that's what I'm dong right now. I have zero followers on youtube right now, so it's more of a excercise to see that it can be done than that it's something that is going to be giving me a new audience for my fiction, but it's fun.

There are now four chapters in this playlist. Have a listen, and let me know what you think. I'll try posting a new audio chapter to YouTube a few times a week, and it's a short novelette, so in one or two weeks everything should be up there.