Madeline Shue ElevenLabs - Create Professional Audiobooks for $100-200 Using ElevenLabs AI (plus how to get Michael Caine to be your narrator)

Madeline Shue is the Publishing Lead at ElevenLabs, an AI audio platform founded in 2022 and based in London with approximately 400 employees worldwide. ElevenLabs builds AI audio models including text-to-speech, speech-to-text, music, and sound effects, bringing these innovations to consumers, creators, and enterprises globally. Madeline works specifically on everything related to authors, publishers, and audiobooks, helping creators who previously lacked resources or ability to reach global audiences share their stories in audio form. She manages the journey from manuscript to production, post-production, and distribution through ElevenLabs' audiobook products and their consumer app, Eleven Reader.

In this episode:

• ElevenLabs history: from 250-word text boxes to full audiobook production
• The first beta tester uploaded entire manuscripts 250 words at a time
• AI audio quality now indistinguishable from human narrators for many books
• 90% of published books don't have audiobook counterparts
• ElevenLabs Creative: new consolidated audiobook hub
• Two production options: Dynamic Narration (free) vs Original Audiobook
• Dynamic Narration: listeners choose from 500+ voices including Michael Caine
• Original Audiobook: full creative control, voice selection, editing capability
• Voice cloning: narrate your book in your own voice
• Audio drama creation: Zephyrus One sci-fi example with music and sound effects
• Judy Garland's voice clone narrating The Wizard of Oz
• 6,000+ voices in the library from real people who earn when voices are used
• Design custom voices with prompts for specific characters
• Voice library filters: trending voices, usage stats, genre collections
• Iconic voices: Albert Einstein, Michael Caine, Robert Reynolds
• Dual POV narration easy for romance with alternating voices
• Pronunciation dictionary for fantasy names, spells, unusual terms
• Direct speech feature: record how you want words pronounced
• Editing typically takes equivalent time to audiobook duration
• Free Dynamic Narration option takes 5-10 minutes to publish
• Quality requirements: proper formatting, no table of contents in audio
• Copyright ownership: you own everything you create with ElevenLabs
• Eleven Reader royalties: 25 cents per hour streamed, 60% on direct sales
• No exclusivity requirements on any platform
• Distribution integrations: Spotify, Findaway, direct MP3 download
• Production costs: $100-200 for full-length books ($10-20 per finished hour)
• Multicast auto-assignment or manual voice selection by highlighting text

Resources mentioned:

• ElevenLabs: elevenlabs.io
• ElevenCreative: https://elevenlabs.io/creative
• Contact: reader@elevenlabs.io

Connect with Madeline Shue and ElevenLabs:

• Email: reader@elevenlabs.io
• Facebook Group: Authors of Eleven Labs
• Website: elevenlabs.io
• Twitter: https://x.com/elevenlabsio

Connect with Teddy Smith:
@teddyagsmith
Website: https://publishingperformance.com/?ref=ywm3mtc
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/publishingperformance/
Pinterest - https://nz.pinterest.com/publishingperformance/
Instagram - https://instagram.com/publishingperformanceinsta
Youtube -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHV6ltaUB4SULkU6JEMhFSw
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/publishing-performance/

Transcript

Teddy Smith (00:02)
Hi everyone and welcome to Publishing Informant Show. Today I'm really happy to be joined by Madeleine Xu who is the Publishing Lead at 11 Labs. So thanks for joining Madeleine.

Madeline Shue (00:09)
Thanks, Teddy. Great to see you. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Teddy Smith (00:13)
Yeah, no problem. So why don't you just give us a bit of an overview of what you do and what 11labs does before we get into it.

Madeline Shue (00:20)
Yeah, awesome. for those of who aren't familiar with 11 Labs, 11 Labs is an AI audio platform. And so we build AI audio models. So text to speech models, speech to text models, music, sound effects, anything touching audio innovation. We build those models. have research team who does all that in-house. And we build lots of products, leveraging those models and bring those to consumers and creators and enterprises all over the world.

So we were founded in 2022, based in London, now have offices all over the world. I'm based in New York. We've got about 400 employees or so. And yeah, so it's exciting. And actually, it's interesting. So one of the earliest use cases of 11 Labs when the company was first started back in 2022 was

At the time, it was just like a little text box, and you could upload maybe 250 words or something like that and have it read back to you in very realistic sounding AI voices. And so a couple of authors kind of caught on to this. And many of them, these independent authors, had for many years kind of been kept out of audio as audio started to rise as a very popular format. Of course, it's expensive. It's hard to access.

for most authors, it's really hard to get an audiobook. And actually, I think maybe 90 % of books published don't even get a, don't have an audiobook counterpart. And so there were a bunch of authors who started recognizing that this tool could be really powerful to help them create audiobooks and reach listeners and readers through audio. And so there was one author who would actually come on and

Teddy Smith (01:50)
Yeah.

Madeline Shue (02:05)
At the time it was only 250 words that you could put in. so he took an entire manuscript-length book and would upload it kind of 250 words by 250 words and download the MP3 files so that he could have a fully produced audio book. So he was one of the first, I think, 10 beta testers, still very close to the company today. He's great. And yeah, so over time it really caught on and has been...

Teddy Smith (02:15)
Thank

Madeline Shue (02:32)
used by thousands and thousands of independent authors to produce lots of audiobooks and now publishers as well. And so I, at 11 Labs, work on everything related to authors and publishers and audiobooks and helping anyone who has a great story and who maybe before 11 Labs and before AI Audio might not have had the resources or ability to reach

global audiences in any language to share their story in audio form. I work with them to help them do that and to leverage our products, our audiobook products specifically in our consumer audiobook app, Eleven Reader, to share their stories globally in audio. Yeah, so that's my role here. It spans lots of different things. And yeah, I love books and audiobooks. And so it's really fun to be able to work on.

Teddy Smith (03:16)
Yeah, definitely. think audio books was one of the first use cases of 11labs to really come out and to stand out, think. know, it was one of the first times people thought, okay, this is actually going to be quite useful.

Madeline Shue (03:28)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It was kind of one of the first very obvious use cases. And now we do lots of things in addition to audiobooks, but continue to be really invested in the audiobook use case and building out a product specific to authors and publishers and helping them kind of go from manuscript to pre-production, you know, the full audio production process, post-production and distribution, all in one hub through 11 Labs.

Teddy Smith (03:55)
One of the things I was joking with you about before was I created a video about how to make an audiobook with 11 labs. And then literally the day afterwards, 11 creative capes absorbed it all and it all changed. So my video became redundant straight away. It showed how fast AI was moving. what do you think it is that's happened in the last maybe 12 months that's allowed AI to become more viable for creating audiobooks? What's the change that's happened, think?

Madeline Shue (04:06)
Yeah. Yeah. I love you, Natalie.

Yeah, so I think the most fundamental one is just the quality of the models has really improved. We've now gotten to a point where for many, many books, you can listen to a book with 11 Labs Voices, and it's pretty difficult to tell if it's a human narrator or an AI narration. so of course, that's not the case for all books if there's kind of very complex emotion or

or things that need to be conveyed that the AI still can't quite do. But for many books, it's really hard actually to tell the difference. And so you can get a very high quality book produced just leveraging 11 labs today. And I think once people started to realize over the last year that AI voices didn't mean robotic text to speech that you might think of when you think of Siri or Amazon Alexa from five years ago.

that actually AI voice and AI audio, it means something totally different. I think that you started to see a bit of a shift and then adoption has become over the last year, we've seen definitely more mainstream and you're starting to see more audio books showing up on lots of different platforms that have been created using 11 Labs.

Teddy Smith (05:30)
Yeah, definitely. And the thing that changed when I made that video was the upload process and using 11 creative to manage the whole process basically. So if anyone has previously done an audio book with 11 labs, what's different about how they would do it now? Like how does that 11 creative process look differently to what the previous process looked like?

Madeline Shue (05:48)
Yeah, so if you previously were interested in creating an audiobook with 11 Labs, you had a couple different options and they were in different places all across the 11 Labs suite of products. So you could go on to 11 Labs to our studio product and you could create an audiobook there. You could upload your manuscript and turn it into an audiobook and then you could download it and you could put it on different platforms. You could share it on 11 Reader, which is our consumer platform, but

the process there was quite disjointed. Or you could go straight to 11Reader and you could upload your e-book and you could share that e-book on 11Reader with streamed dynamic narration on the end user's device. And it was totally free for authors. And so what we did was we found that that was kind of complex for users to figure out where to go and what fit their needs. And their books would be

hosted in different places. And so we consolidated all of it in a new audiobooks tab within 11 Creative, which is 11 Labs suite of products specific to creators and anyone doing creative use cases. And so the idea with the audiobooks tab is anyone who's looking to create an audiobook, it's in one place. You go to the audiobooks tab in 11 Creative, and we now are

building that specifically and continue our roadmap there is completely dedicated to authors and publishers. so as 11 Labs continues to expand with different use cases, we now in the creative platform offer video and image models. And so lots of kind of a whole wide range of things for creators. The audio books tab is the place that's audio book specific and it's a one stop shop, kind of central hub for everything from

uploading your manuscript, preparing it for narration, selecting voices, casting characters, all the way through to distribution on 11 reader and then also on Spotify and through in audio and some of these other distribution partnerships that we have that make it really easy to then share your audio book with the world.

Teddy Smith (07:46)
Great.

We're going to do distribution at the end. I've got some questions about making the book first. say I'm an author and I've already got the manuscripts ready. What does that process look like? What's the workflow look like from getting it from? Well, just let's start with how do you get it started?

Madeline Shue (07:49)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so just to kick things off first, so as an author, you have two options. The first is you can upload your ebook or your manuscript directly to 11 Reader and you can stream it on 11 Reader. This is consumer audiobook app with something called Dynamic Narration. And so this is completely free to you. What the end user experience looks like is the consumer would download the 11 Reader app and they can stream your ebook.

or your manuscript with audio. And they can select from, you know, at this point, it's like 500 different voices that are on the 11 Reader app that they want to listen to your audio book with. Exactly, yeah, the listener chooses who reads it. And we've got some iconic voices on there as well. So the listener could have Michael Cain read the audio book to them, Robert Reynolds, or any of the voices from the 11 Labs library that are on the app.

Teddy Smith (08:40)
so the listener chooses who reads it. ⁓ okay.

Madeline Shue (08:56)
And these are some of the highest quality voices that we have available in the broader 11 Labs library are available on 11 Reader. And so that's option one. It's totally free. And so all it really is, takes about five minutes. You just upload your ebook. You can make any text edits, but you're not generating any audio on the 11 creative platform. And then you're uploading it straight away to 11 Reader. You're filling out your metadata.

And then anytime it's streamed or purchased directly, you're either earning from the stream, if you've included in our subscription, or you're earning directly from a la carte sales, if you've set a price to list it up directly. And so it's a great way for authors who, you know, they maybe don't want to pay to upload, to create an audio book, they want a completely free, you know, sub 10 minute, five minute option to get all of their books available in audio.

Teddy Smith (09:33)
Right. you

Madeline Shue (09:47)
This is a great option for them. If, say, you want a bit more creative control, you want to actually go through and listen to the full production and direct it yourself, find specific areas where you want certain pronunciations or ⁓ tone or you want to select the voice and have more control over the end experience for listeners, you can do that within the 11 creative platform and you

can go through and perfect the full output of your audiobook. And then from there, because you've used 11 Labs credits to generate the audio, you're able to download it, you're able to distribute it on other platforms, and you're also able to put it on 11 Reader. So those are the two distinctions. First is dynamic narration. The second is creating an original audiobook. And you can go back and forth within the same manuscript for the two. So if you've uploaded it,

just to a live in reader with dynamic narration. And then later you decide, actually, I want to go through and really perfect this audio book. You can go back to the manuscript and edit it entirely and then upload it wherever you'd like.

Teddy Smith (10:55)
How much editing do you typically see, say just on average a standard size book, how much editing do you typically see the authors having to do? Because when I did mine, I sort of listened through the chapters and put in some pauses. I think that there wasn't that much more than that. But how much editing do you see people having to do?

Madeline Shue (11:12)
Yeah, it really runs the gamut on the author and their, I guess I would say like excitement about really kind of delving into the audio process. So on the one hand, we have authors who might upload it, they'll go through, set some pronunciations that they want to ensure are corrected throughout the text. And, you know, they'll maybe go through and listen to everything, add some pauses in some places.

And so maybe for a 10 hour audio book, might take them 10 hours of work if they're kind of going through and listening to everything. And there's work to be done at the outset of ensuring you spend time selecting the voice that you're really excited about. Or if you want to clone your own voice and have your own voice narrate the book, that takes a bit of time. So I would say like voice selection and then kind of going through and making some adjustments. So that's kind of on the one end. On the other end,

Teddy Smith (11:43)
Mm-hmm.

Madeline Shue (12:05)
we have creators who treat this as like a really in-depth process where they're creating an audio narrative or an audio story that might be more akin to an audio drama. So there's one creator named Dave who we work with and whose work we're publishing on 11 Reader who recently created this sci-fi drama called Zephyrus One and

Teddy Smith (12:19)
Yeah.

Madeline Shue (12:30)
It's unbelievable what he's created. It's a real labor of love and time, but he's used 11 Labs to essentially take sound effects and music and narration of lots of different characters to bring this sci-fi drama that he wrote to life over its 14 different chapters. So it's a series. And so it's really unbelievable what he's created and...

It's exciting as I've chatted with him about it, just it's not something that he would have been able to produce with hiring tons of actors and musicians and sound effects and all of that. But he had a really creative idea for a story that he wanted to tell. And he's an audio engineer. And so he wanted to bring it to life through audio, of course, and create that audio drama. And so he was able to use that using 11 Labs tools. ⁓

Teddy Smith (13:01)
Yeah.

Amazing.

Madeline Shue (13:19)
So I love that and it's gonna be available on 11 readers soon. So we'll be dropping it week by week.

Teddy Smith (13:25)
Is that one of the ones we can have an example of? Yeah.

Madeline Shue (13:27)
Yeah, I'll send over an example so you

can listen to it. There's another great example of we recently, about a couple of months ago, published on Eleven Reader this. It was the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz created and kind of re-envisioned with Judy Garland's voice clone narrating the chapter, who's one of our iconic voices in our licensed voice library.

Teddy Smith (13:44)
Wow.

Madeline Shue (13:51)
with music and sound effects. And it's kind of this new and interesting way to listen to that first

Teddy Smith (13:55)
you

Madeline Shue (13:56)
chapter and also just get a glimpse of what you can do if you really spend a lot of time mastering and learning how to use 11 Labs for full audio production with music and sound effects. So really runs the gamut, I would say, from authors who just want to have their book in audio perfect some of the...

know, slight pauses and tones and emphasis, but for a single cast narration all the way through to people who want to, you know, fully create something with, you know, music and sound effects and multicast and all of that.

Teddy Smith (14:29)
Yeah, amazing. When it comes to using multicast, are there any differences in the process? For example, is there a different royalty process or anything like that? Or you just use the voices, it just takes more time to edit it, and then you put it out there?

Madeline Shue (14:43)
Yeah, it's just the latter. you'll want to spend more time going through the voice library and selecting voices that you're excited about for different characters. So in the 11 Labs voice library, there's like 6,000 or more voices that are real people's voices who they've uploaded to the library. They earn any time their voice clone is used. So you can use any of those voices. And it ranges like lots of different dialects.

you know, 30 or more different languages, different tones, different character voices, can you name it? There's a lot to explore within the voice library. And then you can also actually design your own voice. So if you have an idea in your mind of a specific character voice or, you know, something that you're not finding in the voice library, you can design it yourself and bring, you know, a new voice to life with a prompt.

Teddy Smith (15:33)
Yeah.

Madeline Shue (15:34)
So

there's lot of different options there. And so if you're creating with multicast, you'll just want to spend more time kind of digging into that and finding a voice that you're excited about. And I'd say when you're producing an audio book, probably the single most important thing is the voice that you select. can, depending on if you choose a high quality voice or not, it can really change the final output. And so I would recommend spending a lot of time

bulk of your time kind of the the outset picking a voice you're really excited about testing it on maybe a chapter or a paragraph making sure you're really happy with the output before you then decide to apply it to the full book if you're creating with that original audio option.

Teddy Smith (16:18)
Do you ever, when you're deciding which voices to use, apart from using your own imagination about what voices you'd like to hear, is there any way of seeing stats or anything like that about the ones which are more popular? Do you have any voices which do better than others in different genres or anything like that?

Madeline Shue (16:33)
Yeah, so within the voice library, there's a lot of filters that you can select for. there are some collections that have been actually put together by our team specific to like best voices for audio book narration, for example, or best character voices, if you want like a monster voice or things like that. There's also you can see there are filters for like trending voices, you can rank them by number of uses. And so you can get a sense of like

which ones perform really well and people tend to come back to you again and again. So there's a lot that you can do to sort of customize the voice library and make sure that you're picking something that's gonna work well. And then as you go through, you can sort of add voices to your own library and you can create different collections and really curate and find voices that you're excited about.

Teddy Smith (17:23)
Amazing. It's absolutely incredible, the technology. It's kind of mind blowing, I think.

Madeline Shue (17:29)
Yeah,

the voice library is really cool. I just love going through there and checking out different voices, seeing what's been added. And it continues to grow and grow as more people upload their voices to the voice library to earn from it. And as we also build out our kind of network of iconic voices from celebrity and partners like that who have recognizable voices who make it available on 11 Reader and for

for 11Labs customers.

Teddy Smith (17:56)
That's the best one really, isn't it?

Madeline Shue (17:58)
Yeah, my screen is great. Yeah,

and we also actually just released Albert Einstein on 11 Reader. So that's a fun one. ⁓

Teddy Smith (18:04)
Yeah. As

soon as you get Morgan Freeman, that's going to be game over. So a lot of the audience of this podcast are romance writers. How does the audio book handle like more, you know, sexy scenes?

Madeline Shue (18:08)
Yeah, yeah, that would be great.

Yeah, so I mean, there's not much that changes. There's probably a bit more care that you'll want to put towards making sure the emotion sounds how you want it to sound. So I would listen through to specific scenes and make sure it's conveying the right thing. And there's a lot you can do to add spaces or capitalize certain words if you want it to be more emotive.

You can also select different voices if you want a whispery voice or things like that, certain areas. But you should be able to, any content that you want produced, you can have produced unless the voice that you've selected prohibits it for some reason, and that will be clearly labeled. The other thing I would note for the romance audience is, for the first time, dual POV is really attainable because you can just

Teddy Smith (19:02)
Yeah.

Madeline Shue (19:13)
If you have alternating chapters, you can do that very easily with selecting different voices for different chapters. Or if you want a multicast back and forth between the two love interests, you can do that too. And we've seen that be very popular for romance specifically. So that's something that you can do with the audiobooks product within 11 Creative.

Teddy Smith (19:39)
The other thing was a lot of people also listen to us that they're fantasy authors. So sometimes they have quite unusual sounding names and words or like magic spells and things like that. If you wanted to get a particular pronunciation and make sure that was correct, how would you handle that in the audio?

Madeline Shue (19:46)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so there's a pronunciation dictionary that's built in. And so at the top of the editor, you'll see the pronunciation dictionary. And you can go through and add words that you might want to give special care to how they're pronounced. Or it seems like the AI would probably pronounce it wrong. And so you can put the word, how it would be written in text, and then how you would actually want it to be pronounced phonetically spelled out. And then

it should kind of every time it sees the word written that way, because it's been added to your prediction pronunciation dictionary, it should kind of pronounce it the way that you've directed it to pronounce doesn't always work perfectly 100 % of the time. And so this is an area that we're continuing to invest more in making sure that, you know, that works well. And so

I would say like definitely try it. will work a lot of the time, it's not going to be perfect. And we know that and are trying to fix it to make it better.

Teddy Smith (20:57)
so a lot of the listeners to the podcast are fantasy authors as well. So they have some quite unusual names, spells, places to pronounce. So how does the, uh, how does 11 Labs handle those specific pronunciations and make sure they get them correct?

Madeline Shue (21:11)
Yeah, so there's a pronunciation dictionary that's at the top of the editor. You'll see a little button for pronunciation dictionary. And so what you can do is you can add any words that you think might be pronounced wrong by the AI. And you can put the text of how the word is spelled and how it would show up in the manuscript. And then you put the phonetic pronunciation for how you actually would want it pronounced.

And so that will, across the whole text, apply the correct pronunciation any time it encounters a word that you've added to the pronunciation dictionary. It works pretty well. I would say it doesn't work 100 % of the time. And so in some cases, might, as you're listening back, the pronunciation dictionary is just really not capturing this exactly how I want it to. There are a couple other things you can do. There are

is a feature where you can direct the speech with your own voice. So you can kind of click on a word that's being particularly pesky and you could like record how you want it pronounced and then AI will do its best to kind of replicate what you've verbalized. And usually that should resolve the problems. I think this, you know, the pronunciations piece and QAing little things where

that the AI might not have perfected on the first go. This is where we're investing lots of resources because we want to make sure that it's as seamless and as easy as possible. And there aren't too many times that you have to actually go in and manually fix things.

Teddy Smith (22:51)
Nice. What are the biggest mistakes that you see first-time authors making when they're creating their audiobooks?

Madeline Shue (22:57)
⁓ Yeah, so I think the first is if you're doing the original audio option, you really want to make sure that you go into it with this expectation that it's probably going to take you more than five minutes to just like simply upload the text and, you know, receive an output that you're really excited about. So if you if you know that you really want to direct the performance of it, just go in with the expectation, I'll probably take you about equivalent at least to like

the duration of the book, and it might take you longer. But I think if you go in with that expectation, you should be in a good spot. And then you'll really want to spend time ensuring that you find a really high quality voice that you're excited about at the outset. And if you pick a good voice, a lot of the work is taken care of for you. So you'll just have to fix kind of small things here and there. ⁓

Teddy Smith (23:45)
Yeah, I mean, you

at least want to be listening to manuscripts, like as you're doing it, sure.

Madeline Shue (23:49)
Yeah, exactly. You'll just kind of have to listen through as you go at least like one pass I would recommend if you really want to ensure that you're happy with how every word and every sentence is pronounced. If you know that that's not for you and you just kind of want to get your books out there streamed with audio, I recommend doing the 11 reader dynamic narration option. It's super fast. It's easy. It's free. It will stream the audio on the user's device and

Well, you won't get full control over the output. It does a really good job streaming high quality audio. yeah, users can select from the high quality voices on their own device. So just kind go into it, know which path you want, and adjust your expectations accordingly. And make sure you enter the first option. You pick a good voice.

Teddy Smith (24:34)
Nice. ⁓

Yeah, pick the right voice for what you're doing. I definitely. I when I, the first time I tried to upload a book to 11 Labs to do the audio book, I just wanted to experiment, see if I could one shot it and like publish it straight to 11 Reader. And I got rejected for quality issues. What are those quality issues that they're looking for that would stop a book being able to go forward?

Madeline Shue (24:57)
Yeah, so I think the on 11 reader, the things that they'll look for, it's pretty flexible. So you shouldn't get rejected too much of the time. It's things like if you forget to delete the table of contents from the beginning, we'll ask you to go back and edit it because it's a bad experience for the end consumer of then like the table of contents is being read aloud for the first five minutes of the book. So it's kind of small formatting things like that.

But otherwise, as long as you've formatted the text correctly and you've included a cover image that's high quality, then you should generally be fine and your work should get accepted unless we see any copyright issues or things like that.

Teddy Smith (25:33)
Nice.

How does the copyright work? So do you own the copyright once you've created it?

Madeline Shue (25:40)
Yeah, so you, anything that you create on 11 Labs is yours, you own the copyright. If it's published on 11 Reader, you own the copyright. There's no exclusivity or anything like that. And you're free to do whatever you want with your book. If you want to create an audio and put it on other platforms, you're welcome to do that.

Teddy Smith (25:57)
Nice. And when I just want to talk a bit about distribution as well before we finish. So we've already sort of half covered 11 reader, but I think it's quite a new concept, 11 reader to a lot of people. Like I've only heard about it relatively recently. I'm like quite in this. How does publishing on 11 reader work and what does the like the royalty and payments process look like?

Madeline Shue (26:08)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, so 11 Readers, you know, newer within 11 Labs, it's our consumer audiobook app. And the vision with 11 Reader is to bring great stories to life in any language and to make it really, really easy and seamless and accessible for anyone to take an ebook and to have it streamed anywhere in the world with high quality audio. And so we do that, you know, we have tons of content in there ⁓ from publishers, from authors.

And then we also give users the ability to upload their own content for personal listening. So if you've got an article you wanna read or if you're an author and you're in the drafting phase and you just wanna listen back to a chapter that you've written, you can do that on the 11 Reader app. So it's kind of an app for listening to audio, whether it's things that you've uploaded yourself and you wanna listen back or accessing.

and experiencing content from our library, from publishers and authors. And so how that works for authors, if you upload your content onto 11 Reader, it's not exclusive. You can put it anywhere else that you'd like. You'll earn any time it's listened to by our ultra users. So those are our subscribed users and you earn 25 cents per hour if an ultra user

listens to your content. And then you can also set your books for sale directly and you'll earn 60 % on all direct sales. And so these are some of the most favorable rates across the industry. There's also no exclusivity. And so we really just want to make it as easy as possible for authors to share their audiobooks with anyone around the world. so yeah, so that's what we're doing with 11 Reader.

And yeah, it's a great author community. Would love for as many of your listeners to, to add their books onto Eleven Reader, because we'd love to promote them and share them with our audience.

Teddy Smith (28:14)
And that's any type of books.

Madeline Shue (28:16)
Yeah, any type of book, anything you want to upload as long as you own the copyright for the text, you can upload it and share it on 11reader.

Teddy Smith (28:23)
And with the distribution to other platforms, is it just a case of downloading your content and then uploading it to Spotify or Kobo or whatever?

Madeline Shue (28:32)
Yeah, so if you produce within the audiobooks platform and you use your 11 Labs credits to create an original audiobook, you can upload that original audio to 11 Reader, but you can also upload it to Spotify. We have a direct integration there. Or you can upload it to, we've got an integration within audio, so that will send it to a bunch of different platforms. Or you can download it yourself and you can put the MP3 or the WAV file wherever you want.

Teddy Smith (29:00)
Yeah. And one question I get asked most is, people want to get their books promoted like on Amazon as well. Can you at the moment use your 11 Labs voices on Amazon if you've made the audiobook?

Madeline Shue (29:12)
⁓ so that you would have to check with Amazon's policies. So they have, we don't have a direct integration and, ⁓ I'm not sure the current status of whether they accept 11 labs voices. I think in the past they've, they've only accepted Amazon AI, voices. And so, ⁓ yeah, that one just have to check, check Amazon policies.

Teddy Smith (29:33)
Yeah, I need to fix that one. So that was the last one question I wanted to ask about was when you're creating the multicast and the duet style narrations, is it just a case of choosing two different voices and making sure that they're speaking in the right parts or is there a way of making that faster?

Madeline Shue (29:52)
I'm sorry, I don't think I understand the question.

Teddy Smith (29:54)
So when we're creating like multicast and like duet style like audio books, how do you select which parts are gonna be read by which author? it just straight through? So the last one I wanted to talk about was the multicast and the duet style books because they're obviously the most expensive ones to create if you're using real narrators.

Madeline Shue (30:04)
⁓ yeah, yeah. Okay, if you start over the question, I can answer it now. ⁓

Teddy Smith (30:17)
Is it just a case of choosing which parts you want to be spoken by which person?

Madeline Shue (30:22)
Yeah, so there's a couple different ways to do it. Actually, when you upload your manuscript, if you want it to be multicast, we have an option for you to toggle, like, identify different speakers and assign different voices to the different speakers. And so we'll like the system will do its best to understand who is which character and what, you know, who's speaking what lines. And then you can pick, like, say you have two different voices, there's two characters.

you can pick the voices that you want and it will kind of in one go try to do its best to apply the right voices on different characters. You'll probably have to go through and correct some stuff. So that's one option. Or if you want to do it yourself, what you do is you just highlight. When you highlight text, you can select different voices to be applied to the highlighted text. And then you can highlight like full swaths. So say you want to do it chapter by chapter.

you would select like this full chapter is gonna be read by this voice and then you would apply, you know, the voice that you want for that chapter to that, to the chapter. And you can do that on a chapter by chapter basis or by highlighting the text itself.

Teddy Smith (31:26)
Yeah, nice. Well, I think that's everything I wanted to cover today. The last thing was, just if you were to give like one piece of advice about creating these audiobooks to authors that are just starting out creating audiobooks, like what would be the best piece of advice you could give them?

Madeline Shue (31:41)
Yeah, I mean, think the biggest thing is like, just try it. It's super low stakes. It's really easy if you want to just upload it directly to 11 reader, just to sort of wade into the water of what's it like to have an audio book and to see how your audience resonates with audio books. That would be my first piece of advice. Just like give it a go. And then second piece is come back to the voices piece as you're, if you're thinking about creating an original audio book.

I really recommend you spend some time playing around with the voice library and seeing all of the different options on there as you start to think about what you want your audiobook to sound like. yeah, make sure you pick a really good voice that you're excited about so that you can, know, I messed that one up. Sorry. Can you ask them? I actually need to think about better advice. I don't even know. Do you have any good advice from doing it?

Teddy Smith (32:22)
you

Um, think just, just, yeah, just, just keep it simple and listen back was my main thing. Don't just try and one shot it because that is when your problems are going to, that I found the most problems. was like, I think what a lot of people do when they're AI writing is get really lazy and start leaning on the AI too much and they go, okay, well now I'm writing with AI. I've forgotten how to write.

Madeline Shue (32:44)
Yeah.

Teddy Smith (32:49)
So the last question is really, you got any advice for people who wanting to write their, to narrate their book, sorry, for the first time, for their first time authors, they want to get their book narrated using 11 labs. What's the one piece of advice you'd try and give them?

Madeline Shue (33:01)
Yeah, think probably the biggest thing is, I would say, if you want to do the original audio option, make sure you have an idea in your head of what you want it to sound like and spend time investing in looking through the voice library and picking a voice you're excited about. And I would really recommend going through and listening to the whole book if you're expecting that you're just going to one-shot it and get this MP3 that you're really

I'm really excited about that's probably not correct. So like really invest the time and the care to create something that that you feel really proud of. And if you spend a bit of time upfront, I think you'll be really happy with the results. So that's our one and then number two, I would say just try it. Like if you're not sure if you want to spend the time or you know, you're you're you're wondering if you should create an audiobook, I would recommend like log on, do the upload directly to 11 reader option.

It's free. It's super easy. You can have your books available in audio and you can get a sense of if it's something your audience even, you know, wants to hear an audio. And then, sorry, I don't, I feel like I'm doing a really bad job answering this question. Maybe we just.

Teddy Smith (34:09)
That sounds,

what you said sounds good. think, I think that was a really, I think that was a good answer. mean, I, to be honest, I agree with everything you're saying. I think, you know, if you do try and one shot it, like I would never call my listeners lazy, but a lot of people who ask me about AI writing, they sort of end up seeing it as a bit of a crutch to lean on. But I think you're still, you've still got to remember that you're the author, you've created this work and you want to, you want to it out there in the best possible way. So I think, you your advice. Yeah.

Madeline Shue (34:32)
Yeah.

Okay, can we do one more time and I'll say that?

You've got a better answer than me. Okay, thanks.

Teddy Smith (34:40)
So for people, just for the last question, so for people who are maybe it's their first time doing an audiobook and they want to use 11 Labs to do the narration, what's the one piece of advice you would try and give them?

Madeline Shue (34:50)
Yeah, I think so. you're if you're looking to like fully direct the performance of your audiobook using the original audio option, I would just make sure that you spend time, you know, picking the right voice and making sure you listen through to the whole thing so that you're really, you know, proud and pleased of the outcome. You're the author, you want to bring this story into the world. And so just spending a bit of time upfront to ensure you produce something really great, I think is the best.

piece of advice that I can give. But yeah, really excited. Hopefully a lot of you try it out. We're excited to hear what you create and what you publish. And please do reach out to me or to Teddy to share with us the audiobooks that you've created using 11 Labs. And if you've published them with 11 Reader, we'd love to see them there. yeah, so best of luck.

Teddy Smith (35:31)
definitely.

Yeah, I think that's exactly the advice I would give when I first use it for the first time. The output that came out straight away was really incredible. But until you like listen through at the breaks, make sure that it's like, as you want it, it kind of would miss maybe the exact output that you'd want to get from it. I think you have to remember you're the author, you're using AI as a tool, not as someone to just completely replace you. I think that would be the main advice I'd give with using it. But yeah, it's really clever. It's really quick and it works.

pretty much straight out of the box.

Madeline Shue (36:05)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And

I totally, that resonates with me a lot. Like we see this and I totally see this as like a tool that can amplify your work and help you reach new audiences, help more people engage with what you've spent so much time writing and producing and what you're really proud of. And so just spending the time to like make sure you're really using it as a tool is.

And investing in that process, think, is going to be the thing that gets you the best results.

Teddy Smith (36:34)
Yeah, definitely. What just just the last question, what are the typical book prices for producing an audio book? What's the range we're looking at?

Madeline Shue (36:42)
Yeah, so if you want to just upload it to 11 reader and stream it with with audio with dynamic narration, that's totally free. So free, you'll upload it and then you will earn any time it's listened or purchased. If you want to create your own kind of original audio production that ranges typically from 100 to 200 dollars for a full length book. It's based on how many 11 labs credits that you use.

which is based on how long the book is. So longer books will cost slightly more, shorter books will cost less. And so you can make an 11Labs account. You'll have to get a subscription to start off, but then you'll be charged based on the overall amount of credits that you use.

Teddy Smith (37:08)
Yep.

Yeah. It's a lot cheaper than doing it like just with a narrator or something.

Madeline Shue (37:28)
Yeah, $100 to

$200 for a full book is what like $10 per finished hour, something like that. So $10 to $20 per finished hour for a 10 hour book. So it's much cheaper than than anything else that that you could do.

Teddy Smith (37:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, amazing. Well, thanks so much, Madeline. It's been so good having you on. If people want to get in touch with you or with 11 Labs generally, where's the best place for them to do that?

Madeline Shue (37:50)
Yeah, feel free to reach out. can find us on, if you want to talk to the 11 Reader team specifically, you can email us at reader at 11labs.io. That's probably the best place to get in touch about anything specific to authors and audiobooks. And yeah, we're really looking forward, most importantly, to seeing what everyone creates. And please do share with us via email or also on Twitter.

or on Facebook, we have a Facebook group called Authors of Eleven Labs that I'll send you so you can link in the show notes. But please do join that and that's a great place also to share your work ⁓ with others in the community.

Teddy Smith (38:24)
Yeah.

And if any of you do create an audio book after listening to this, share it with me and ⁓ I'll definitely repost it for you.

Madeline Shue (38:31)
Yeah, yeah,

please do. Yeah, there's a great community of authors. So please do join and share with us what you create.

Teddy Smith (38:40)
Thanks, Madeline. It's been great chatting, and you'll speak in soon.

Madeline Shue (38:41)
⁓

yeah, thanks, Teddy. This is great.