Jonathan Moeller vs. text-to-speech!

Recently I got an email from a reader informing me that because there were no audiobook editions of the SILENT ORDER books, he (I assume the correspondent was a he) was going to go ahead and use text-to-speech to listen to the book whether I liked it or not.

That was odd, because I certainly don’t object to it. I think text-to-speech software is great. I use it all the time on my Fire tablet. Both the Amazon Fire tablets and Google Play Books have a built-in feature to read aloud books to you, and I think iBooks does as well though I’ve never used it. Back in the last decade, a writers’ advocacy group called the Authors’ Guild was making a stink that text-to-speech was stealing a derivative licensing right from writers, but I think that’s misguided. Text-to-speech a welcome technological accommodation for the visually impaired, and anyway a computer-generated voice can’t match the performance aspect of a good audiobook narrator. Go listen to Steven Crossley read the sample text of FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT, and then listen to a text-to-speech program read the first chapter of the book aloud, and you’ll hear exactly what I mean.

So you want to use text-to-speech software to listen to my book? Go forth with my blessing and listen. Just don’t post the recording or try to sell it, because that would be illegal, and worse, just plain tacky.

As for why there aren’t audiobook editions of the SILENT ORDER series, it comes down to economics. To calculate how long an audiobook is going to be, narrators and producers use the “finished hour” – how many completed hours the finished audiobook will be. Like, a finished hour is usually around 9,000 words or so, and FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT came to 10 hours and 56 minutes. Narrators charge by the finished hour, and a good narrator, generally speaking, will charge $250 and up per finished hour. (In fact, I believe narrators who are part of the Screen Actors’ Guild are required to charge a minimum of $250 per hour.) A good narrator can charge more than $250, and $350 and higher isn’t all that uncommon.

I while back I read a blog post from a writer saying that he wasn’t going to do any audiobooks until the price of narrators came down, because he thought that narration rates were in a price bubble that was going to pop soon. I’m afraid that writer was fooling himself – a good narrator can charge $300 and up a finished hour because he can. It’s not a common skillset, and the narrator makes or breaks the audiobook. Also, narrating an audiobook is a lot harder than it looks (or sounds). Try reading aloud to yourself for 11 hours straight. It’s really hard! And you have to make it sound good, too, and maybe read in different timbres or accents for the various characters. (This link leads to a good interview with historian Dan Jones where he comments on how difficult it was to narrate his own book about the Knights Templar.) You can find cheaper narrators, but if the narrator isn’t any good, there’s no point in doing the audiobook.

Now, back to SILENT ORDER. The eighth book is coming out in the 2nd half of June, and based on my calculations, producing all eight books in the series as audiobooks would cost between $14,000 to $16,000 USD. Since the series started in September 2017, it hasn’t sold enough copies to meet the cost of producing all of them as audiobooks. It would take a lot of audiobook sales to make back that $16,000. To be honest, the cost of producing the SILENT ORDER series as audiobooks seems like more trouble, time, and effort than it’s worth. That might change in the future, but definitely not right now. (And SILENT ORDER is one of my shorter series – to do all twenty Caina books as audiobooks would cost upwards of $60,000, and probably more!)

The TLDR summary: I’m fine with text-to-speech, and it’s not presently feasible to do SILENT ORDER audiobooks. Fortunately, there’s text-to-speech. 🙂

-JM