Laws of Life: My Voice in Your Head, Just Like You Wanted
People asked for an audio version of Laws of Life from the moment the book went live. I figured it would happen eventually, but the process for self-publishing audiobooks hasn’t exactly been quick or smooth well, until now.
Two days ago, I got an email from Amazon. They’ve launched a new feature that lets authors create an instant audiobook using AI narration. You choose the voice, review the preview then if you’re happy, you publish. So to deliver what you asked me for, that’s exactly what I did.
Now, Laws of Life is available in audio.
Same content. Same straight talk. Just delivered in a way that lets you take it in while driving, working, or doing whatever you do when you’re not reading. It’s not voiced by me, but the narration is solid and it sounds normal. You can preview it before buying, and sure, maybe one or two words won’t land quite the way a human would say them with slightly off pronunciation. Sorry to John Pugliano for how it says your name bro.
But if you’ve been waiting for an audio version, it’s here. Also with audio books remember no matter the narrator you can always speed up or slow down the voice a bit to fit your needs. I honestly listen to almost all audio books at 1.1X.
What matters is that it exists now because people asked for it. And it only took 48 hours from email to live product. That’s the kind of speed I like. And this has me even more motivated to get my next book Laws of Life Two ready to go.
If you’re one of the folks who said, “I want to listen to this while I work out”, or “I only do books on audio”, your time has come. Click the link below and check it out.
I wrote this book to be read, re-read, marked up, and put to use. Now you can listen to it the same way, however and whenever it fits your life.
Bro, you gotta do the narrating if you want the audio to take off… jus’ sayin’
Bro take it or leave it, and be less annoying if you don’t want to get shot with an airsoft gun next time I see you. Jus’ sayin’
I’ll take it! I downloaded it through my audible membership just as soon as I saw this.
When I first got into prepping, a guy in the forums used to post his mini PAW fiction prepper writings. I have dyslexia pretty good so when he made them available in audiobook through his author page: Jerry D. Young he used the virtual voice narration, and it’s lousy, but it’s what he uses for now and I support him.
Jake isn’t wrong, this would take off more if you got Bronson Pinchot or better, Kevin Pierce because people actually search for books they’ve narrated, but you’ve explained why you didn’t do the reading of your own book and that’s good enough for me. Those who support you and prefer audio over text will still buy the audio version. It just makes it harder to share. But for a first book, we get it!
-Ray
One thing people don’t seem to realize is how little money authors make on audio books.
All those audible credits and such were you get it for 0, don’t think for one minute the author still gets paid. It is hard to put any real work or money into the the audio side knowing yo won’t make minimum wage for the work done or money spent.
Example in June I sold about 150 copies of the audio book, my royalties for that, 138 Dollars.
Then consider, every audio you sell is potentially a print or kindle you do not sell. I make about 6 bucks on the kindle and soft covers and under a dollar on average on the audios. So doing an audio anyway other than “click here and let AI do it” is very expensive and/or time consuming for almost no ROI.
I guess it works out for the people who sell hundreds of thousands of copies with big publishers but for the guy who can sell a few thousand a month, it makes no real sense or dollars.