A Better, Simpler Business Model for Self-Published Narration
A few weeks ago, I attended a podcast production meetup at the Worldcon sci-fi/fantasy convention in Glasgow. I shared that my team and I had just launched Spoken, a self-publishing platform for streaming narration where 50% of a listener’s $10 subscription goes directly to the writers they listened to. As a self-publishing sci-fi writer myself, it’s a service that I had long wanted for my own works.
I went on to describe that in order to make the business model as lucrative for writers as possible, if they don’t already have studio-recorded audio to upload to Spoken, they can generate great narration using Spoken Studio at a very low cost. Spoken Studio is our unparalleled technology platform that prepares the writer’s text for great narration (including multi-character / multi-voice), combined with hundreds of high quality AI clones of voice actors who get paid for every use. You can imagine that a few hackles were raised on the mention of AI narration, but I was surprised that almost everyone asked for my card.
“How is this not already a thing?” the moderator asked, and a lively discussion ensued about how such an approach would address several fundamental problems in the self-publishing audio world. For starters, the listener and writer business relationship today is overly complicated. Listeners don’t have a single “all you can eat” listening subscription service available for long and short-form narrated works, and on existing platforms writers don’t benefit financially and equitably from every minute listened. For long-form works, this would be a welcome reprieve from complexities of the token and royalty structures of Audible and Spotify. For short-form, where self-publishing writers rarely monetize anything, Spoken’s approach would be transformational.
Next, while creating audio through studio recordings will continue to be the gold standard, it is costly and time consuming. Unlike KDP where the writer can easily DIY self-publish their written work, self-publishing audio is anything but DIY, and the average audiobook costs a thousand dollars or more to produce. The return on such an investment for the indie writer is anything but certain, and it can take weeks or months to nail down the final work.
Amazon recently announced that KDP Select writers have access to Virtual Voice to narrate their works using AI, but there is one potentially huge flaw. Leaving aside the deficits in the narration product (limited voice selection, none are voice actors that get paid, limited to single narrator, and the lack of control over passage delivery), if being in KDP Select is a requirement, that means all those works are e-books that further dilute the royalties writers get from the Kindle Unlimited Global Fund. That would be a bad thing indeed.
We think the timing is right for this approach. Clearly, self-publishing eBooks is exploding, and several people in the audiobook industry are now saying that audio has now become the dominant modality of consuming written works, that “listening is the new reading,” and yet the era of truly DIY self-publishing is just dawning.
As for the question “How is this not already a thing?” we don’t know, but we’re grateful to be making it a thing with the free beta now available. With no rights taken from writers, 50% of revenue for endless listening subscriptions going directly to writers, the leading narration tech that pays voice actors, and with a ton of social community features coming that will connect writers and readers like never before, we feel good about the future for writers and their ability to create, self-publish, stream, socialize and monetize the audio of their works.
The audio of this piece, as you might expect, is on Spoken.
