About Mac
Mac' Chandler is supposedly retired. At the end of 2022 I moved from Rochester MI to the milder climate of North Carolina and a condo without steps much more suited to my age. (75 as I write this)
Writing is still fun and I intend to continue as long as my mind stays fresh. I'm not a expert on English or a skilled grammarian but I love t tell a story. I thank all the people who take a moment to tell me they enjoyed my work.
I am excited for this! I have a bit of a commute to work and listen to books quite a lot.
Can’t wait. I started reading your books because i found the FL audio books after i started reading Laurence Dahners. I found him because i liked a narrator for some of my audiobooks and she did one of his books.
Whatever the choice just make sure somebody carefully listens for consistency. For someone like me who listened somewhere around 5 times (more like 10 times for the first few) to the complete family law series, there are some rather obvious errors there:
Ceres Dollars are in the most recent two books pronounced without the second e (cers). That might be plausible but not if it is pronounced like i would currently expect. Would have made a cool little fact about evolution of language.
The french colonies (and pretty much every non-english name) like Jan which definitly is not close to Chen, are quite butchered.
And Delta-V is totally not pronounced Delta five.
Just to name a few.
It is also rather annoying if the narrator is switched between books. The long break between FL4 and FL5 audio books and the corresponding inconsistencies are noticable, but not as bad as switching narrator without a reason within the content. Some audiobook series are hard to listen to if you listen back to back and then the narrator changes. It gets worse when the narrator has his/her own ideas about how to pronounce names or act in character.
I also checked over the whole timeline issues i mentioned a few month ago. Those are messy even just within the FL series:
The elves are apparantly the reason for explorers carrying weapons but that was only 70 years prior ot FL4 which is the same time the derf have been discovered. Might have been a mistake by Jeff since characters are allowed to make mistakes but obvously a mistake.
Bill King of the Interstellar Intelligence Agents on Derfhome mentions the “girl with a pocketphone” report as if he was a contemporary but also appreciates eventual life extension of Derfhome.
Might not be an issue but Fargone will be discovered within the decade of the current April timeline.
If you need a beta reader or listener just let me know. Gonna buy it anyway but would not mind helping find errors and improving the reader/listener experience of others.
Also: Do you know if the narrator is doing the recording live on discord? Some do and it great to join some of those sessions. In some cases i could help with pronounciation of german names.
So far Tantor hasn’t been inclined to buy rights to more of my books. I’ve offered them. I have no idea if they were happy with sales or not. They have earned out the advance. These new books will be ‘read’ by Amazon. They give you a choice of voices and I allowed my nephew to pick a young woman’s voice using American English. They can be edited after publishing so if you find errors do please tell me about them. Since I’m deaf my nephew is going through the edit/correction process. I’ll attach an image of what the working screen looks like.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/sogvatwcpj65w5xwcgtdo/audioedit.jpg?rlkey=z25bqbn9b2p3uwox24n59szxp&dl=0
From what i can find i am not happy about that service. It seems to be a simple text to speech in a single voice. No character voices.
I am not sure if i would actually buy that in its current state. It could be ok but i don’t have much experience with a reader instead of a voice actor.
I will see if there are already examples available to buy and see if the quality is anywhere near acceptable. If that is the case i might check out the experience.
At least from my perspective it should be relatively simple to do multiple voices and do text analysis to match that to characters. Some AI voices can also do emotion pretty decently.
This seems like minimum effort and something i would have soon expected to be available for kindle to do in real time not up to 72 hours wait time before publishing.
As you seem to retain rights to do your own audiobook with narrator later you could try it but while i expect the voice to be decent, without character voices i expect the experience to be poor. It might also hurt future chances to sell the rights to the audiobook. Another author i follow offered AI narration for one of his works and decided to take his self created audio version down. The publisher of his previous audiobooks declined buying the rights because of the other available audio version.
As i did not find a lot if info myself i asked ChatGPT(paid version with bing searches). Great for an overview but not fully trustworthy:
https://chat.openai.com/share/8ce21878-3ce7-4a18-87ee-4623f776f010
The alternatives i asked for need a lot more work to get a full audiobook. I only know ElevenLabs and the voices are great but for my private use it is too expensive. There you would still need somebody to edit and the author i mentioned earlier said something about 2 hours per chapter of average 15 Minutes but we are actually talking about narration with character voices, not just reading. The free Mimic3 wasn’t in the list but i should have asked for open source/free. Quality was a lot worse than ElevenLabs.
I didn’t know anyone did multiple voices. The books I sold Tantor had one reader. Unless you are talking about someone who can change voice at will. I’ll never know being deaf.
they have one voice actor. that is a huge difference to a reader. they have a good range of voices so playing different male/ female characters. they also do accents that fit the characters as well as emotions and whispering / screaming and so on in a way that the listener understands it.
Just think the same actor playing different characters in different movies. How that is done is important for the experience as the words spoken.
one voice and narrator/reader works in nonfiction but for fiction with multiple characters, a voices actor is better
some books have a voices actor each for the female/male characters and there is full cast audio with a lot more voices actors. usually not for every role but the main characters. there is a lot more editing/coordination involved so it is probably more expensive.
I don’t buy audiobooks, but I’ve heard some good ones – the Aubrey/Maturin series used Patrick Tull, a marvelous narrator. You could tell which character he was voicing very easily, and he gave each one a personality by voice quality and accent alone. There are a lot of subtleties in narration.
I have no idea what an AI narration would sound like, but I would think it would be fairly flat in terms of being able to tell the characters apart by voice quality. Someone just reading the words doesn’t sound very appealing. I’ll have to see if I can find one and see.