Audiobooks have always been the slow, expensive part of publishing for me. A traditional narration means booking a narrator months out, paying by the finished hour or splitting royalties, and waiting while the files come back for correction. For a book the length of Paris Reckoning, my new novel, that’s a real sum of money and a long wait, and every time I priced it the audiobook slid down the list behind the next manuscript.
This time I tried something different. Amazon now lets authors produce audiobooks with what it calls Virtual Voice — a computer-generated narrator. I want to be upfront about that, because you’ll see the “Virtual Voice” label on the product page and I’d rather you hear it from me first. There’s no actor in a booth behind this one.
What there is, is a fair amount of work on my end. I listened to a lot of voices before settling on one: an American woman who sounds like she’s in her forties, with a lower pitch than most of the options. That seemed right for Sandi, who spent twenty years in the Army, rose from military police to CID investigator to lieutenant colonel, then spent two years with the CIA in Africa and doesn’t raise her voice when she doesn’t need to.
Then came the pronunciation. Paris Reckoning is full of French — street names, cafés, a mairie (town hall), characters who don’t bother switching to English. The software gets most of it right on its own. The name it tripped on in the first chapter was Sandrine, which came out sounding vaguely Texan. I respelled it phonetically and it now comes out the way a Parisian would say it. If you hear something else that grates, tell me. I can still fix it.
The trade-off is a simple one. A human narrator would bring things a machine can’t. But going this route meant Sandi’s story reached your ears in September rather than sometime next year, and at a price that doesn’t punish anyone for preferring to listen.
What the book is about, for those who haven’t read it yet
Sandi Brennan came to Paris after the Army and the CIA to be CEO of a startup security consulting firm. She met Steve Banvers in a French class on the third floor of a language school, and when he disappears, what he leaves behind is a photograph taken at a drone base in the Sahara, a man she can’t identify, and ten million euros transferred to her name.
It isn’t a gift. Steve was buying insurance, and the people looking for him are moving a new class of synthetic opioid into Europe — one that makes fentanyl look mild. Sandi knows more about these drugs than almost anyone in Paris. She’s about to find out how much that’s worth to the wrong people.
Readers of the Eddie Grant books will recognize their old friend along the way.
Where to find it
The audiobook is on Audible and in the Amazon store alongside the Kindle and paperback editions. It’s available in the U.S. for now; Amazon’s Virtual Voice program hasn’t opened other markets yet.
A favor, if you listen
Reviews matter more for audiobooks than for almost anything else I publish, because listeners have fewer ways to sample before they buy. If you listen to Paris Reckoning, a line or two on Audible or Amazon would help the next person decide. And if the narration works for you — or doesn’t — I’d like to hear about it in the comments. This is my first time with a computer narrator, and your reaction will shape what I do when Sandi's next book is ready.
À bientôt,
John