Ivan D. Wainewright's Blog

A day late, but on World Book Day, I reread Hans Steger's amazing childrens book, Travelling to Tripiti. A story about a discarded toy bear who finds his way to Tripiti with other toys he meets.

I adored it as a child & I feel very lucky I found a secondhand copy a few years ago. The beautiful pictures feel as evocative to me now as they did then.

I have just released an AI-narrated version of my short story, The Godfather of Soul, which I created using ElevenLabs. I thought it might be useful for some writers to hear my experience of using it. (NB In this post, I’ve not discussed the wider moral/ethical concerns some people have of using artificial intelligence rather than human readers – I might do that in another post, later).

Overall

I love ElevenLabs! It is the best, most realistic AI voice I’ve heard. Still not perfect (see below), but pretty bloody good. And from a cost point of view, far more cost-effective than hiring a good voice actor. Yes, it would take a fair bit of work to use for a full-length novel, but I would consider it.

If you’re wondering how good it is, one person I sent it to said she didn’t realise it was an AI voice at first. And when I pasted in the initial chapter of Caroline Tangent, which contains several French words, it pronounced them perfectly. To cut to the chase, click on the ‘Listen to Sample’ button to hear for yourself.

Listen to SampleHow it Works

Create an account, select a payment plan, select a voice (more on that below), paste in your text and click generate. It’s that simple. When the audio file has been generated, you download it as an MP3. (All the text you generate as audio is also saved in your account, so you can also download later).

The lowest payment plan is only $5 a month, so you can experiment with that before committing to a higher plan. The benefits of the different plans are primarily the same (with a few extra features in the higher plans) – the key difference being the amount of text you can generate into an audio file each month. The more you pay, the more you can generate.

You can also listen to all the core voices (see below) before you sign-up to anything.

The Voices

The core set are currently all American accents, male and female, and have an especially good cadence even with their default settings. But in addition, you can change the voice in different ways to make it more/less expressive and the level of clarity. However, you can also Add Voices, which have two sub-options:

i) Voice Design – which has ElevenLabs’ own British, African, Australian and Indian voices – male/female, and young/middle-aged/old.

ii) Voice Cloning – where you can upload a one-minute (or more) sample of your/someone elses’s voice and ElevenLabs creates a voice from that. (Obviously you need permission etc etc if you’re using someone else’s). I tried that and it is pretty impressive. Keeps the actor’s voice very well and with good, expressive vocals.

In the end, I used ElevenLabs’ own British voice and played with a lot of the settings in order to get one I liked and thought appropriate for my book. That did take some time, but once you have it, you can save it and use it whenever you want. It was especially harder to make it read slowly, compared to the core American voices provided.

You can actually add multiple voices, which could be useful if you want to have different narrators, genres, styles etc.

The Main Challenges (For Me)

The core issue for creating a full-length novel is that you can only generate 5,000 characters ‘at a time’ – i.e. in one MP3 file. Including spaces. My short story had about 30,000 characters so I only needed to generate six MP3 files, but for my 100,000 word novel, that has over 500,000 characters. That would mean I had to generate over one hundred separate MP3s. I could do it, but it would take time and you’d need to be careful not to miss any text, copy-and-paste in the wrong order, and ensure you numbered your output files correctly!

Not only is this time consuming and adds risk, but then you have to combine all the MP3s into one file – or multiple files if you’re creating chapters. There are various software packages and websites you can use to do this, but I found the simplest was to use Windows’ command line. Simply open Windows Command Prompt, change directory to wherever you’ve saved the MP3 files, and use the following format to combine the files: copy /b file1.mp3 + file2.mp3 + file3.mp3 newfile.mp3 (obviously replacing file1 etc with the names of your files). Keep the naming convention short to make it simple.

The other current issue for me is that the voice still has some issues with cadence and emphasis on some words. You can’t currently add pauses, special characters to add emphasis and so on. I reckon 95% of the time, that doesn’t matter, but every now and then it does jar a little.

The post My Experiment with Using ElevenLabs for AI Narration first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

Many readers have kindly asked if there is an audiobook version of The Other Times of Caroline Tangent – and unfortunately, as of today, the answer is still ‘No’ – sorry!

However, I have now produced a free, experimental audio version of my short story, The Godfather of Soul, set in the world of Caroline Tangent. It tells of a trip that Caroline and Jon take to see James Brown in Boston in April 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated…

The reason I have called it ‘experimental’ is because it is narrated by an AI voice, created using ElevenLabs. It’s still not quite as good as a real human voice – there’s the odd bit here or there where the emphasis or the cadence is slightly wrong – but it’s pretty impressive IMO.

You can download it for free (and optionally sign-up to my occasional newsletter), and listen to a sample below. And if you have any thoughts on the quality of the voice, I’d love to hear from you. You can listen to it in the BookFunnel app, or directly in your browser, or you can download an MP3 and play it in your listening app of choice.

One last thing to say: You can listen to it before you read the full novel if you like, but there are a few minor spoliers; better to read it afterwards if you can do! And there are a few concepts which the novel explains in more depth than this story.

Download HereListen to Sample

The post Experimental AI-Narrated Short Story first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

Had a great time last week discussing indie publishing and writing with Robert Enright and David B Lyons on their Two Indie Authors podcast. You can listen online or on your favourite podcast app.

A quick post to say many, many thanks to everyone who has rated or reviewed The Other Times of Caroline Tangent on Amazon! Seriously. Thank you. Very much appreciated .

The post Caroline Tangent Hits 500 Reviews on Amazon UK! first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

I recently made a 40-second video to show some highlights of what happened to my novel, The Other Times of Caroline Tangent, and me during 2022. (You can see it here on my blog if you’re interested).

Having made it, I’ve published it on multiple places across the internet, and I thought it might give a little bit of inspiration and ideas for some other writers if you also want to reuse and repuropse any videos you’ve made about your books.

This is where I’ve published my video:

Twitter – still a good place for my social media posts: https://twitter.com/ivanwainewright/status/1598655973584998401 My author Facebook page: https://fb.watch/h9UWSZiny-/Instagram (not great because my video format is rectangular which doesn’t work so well on Insta): https://www.instagram.com/reel/Clq85NiDQtb/Here on my blog (of course!)Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ivan-D-Wainewright/e/B08Y7SZKML/My YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsscSwWB-xQMy Goodreads profile (which just embeds the YouTube URL): https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21269606.Ivan_D_Wainewright

You’ll notice I haven’t included TikTok, simply because the video size/format is so different to what is normally published on that site. But I may yet do so!

If you’re also an author, then where else have you published similar videos? Let me know in the Comments below.

The post Reusing One Video Across The Internet first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

A 40 second video with highlights of what happened in 2022 with my novel, The Other Times of Caroline Tangent. (Spoiler: it’s been quite a good year! )

Thank you to everyone who has bought, read, recommended, reviewed, tweeted about or just said nice things about it!

The post What Happened in 2022 with The Other Times of Caroline Tangent – in 40 seconds first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

One of the marketing problems I’ve always had as an author is knowing if my Facebooks Ads (or other similar platforms) actually produced a sale. I know the metrics which Facebook gives me – reach, impressions, CTR etc – but not if someone actually bought a book as a result of clicking on one of my adverts. So, I’ve been delighted to have discovered Amazon Attribution.

What Amazon Attribution does is let me setup a “tag” through my Amazon Ad account (in the Measurement & Reporting section), which creates a unique URL which I can add to my Facebook ad instead of my Amazon ebook (landing) page. Now, when someone clicks on my Facebook ad, it still takes them to my Amazon ebook page, but it also gets recorded in my Amazon Ad account, so I can now get all the stats I’d normally get when I do ‘native’ Amazon Ads: click-throughs, units sold, estimated KENP royalties etc. Whoop!

Amazon have a good page and video to tell you all about this: Create an Amazon Attribution campaign.

I hope this helps my fellow authors.

The post Using Amazon Attribution to Manage the Success of Facebook Ads first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

The Other Times Of Caroline Tangent has been selected by Amazon as one of their UK 99p Kindle Monthly Deals for all of May. This means that my novel will be included on Amazon UK’s featured pages for their Monthly Deals and it should (hopefully) also be in some of their promotion emails.

What do I Expect From This?

I have no idea what impact this will have on sales but it will be interesting to see! I will write a follow-up post at the end of the month to publish the results. I also don’t know whether any such ‘sales spike’ will be continuous for the month, or whether extra sales will fade away after the first few days – I suspect the latter. I guess (and this may be stating the obvious!) it also depends how well one’s book sells at the start, because of course, Amazon’s algorithms keep you in the spotlight the more you sell.

(I do actually wonder whether the Amazon Daily Deal might be better for sales spikes (?) as such deals are only for one day and there is therefore more “urgency” for readers to buy a very limited deal. That is what happened when I was accepted for a BookBub Featured Deal.)

The deal is only for the Kindle version, and only in the UK. But it will be interesting to see if it has any impact on sales in the US/elsewhere (roughly half my Kindle sales come from Amazon.com), and/or any impact on my UK paperback sales.

One other thing I am bracing myself for is that if many copies are downloaded, then, ironically, it is entirely possible that my average review rating could potentially go down. This theory is based on feedback I’ve read from other authors, and I think is quite possible because people buy 99p deals without thinking so much about doing so (“99p? Great, click – buy!”) but when they come to read it, it might well be something they wouldn’t normally like and so there is the potential for lower ratings. OTOH I also tell myself: have faith! Believe that (enough) readers will like it! So far, my Amazon and Goodreads ratings show they have.

Being Selected by Amazon

I’ve been trying to work out how many books are selected every month for Amazon’s Kindle Monthly Deal. One blog I read said 600-800 books, which as far as I can tell seems about right. When I look at the current UK Monthly Deals, there are five pages of sci-fi novels, so that’s about 50 books just for that category.

What is interesting about Amazon’s Kindle Monthly Deals is that you have to be selected by Amazon for inclusion – i.e. you can’t pay/automatically be in such deals. You can nominate your book in the KDP Marketing resources, but that “doesn’t guarantee enrollment.” So (at least to me!) it is quite flattering to be asked if I wanted to include my book in the deal – but I may well be overembellishing this!

But in case it helps other authors consider if their books could be selected by Amazon, what I can tell you is this:

I had, a few months earlier, reached number one on Amazon’s Time Travel charts in the UK, Canada and Australia as the result of a BookBub Featured Deal. And while I presume Amazon didn’t know the specifics, they/their algorithm might have noticed that, and the fact that it happened when the book was reduced to 99p;My book has sold steadily since publication eleven months ago, and although it has only climbed the charts significantly during the BookBub deal, it has remained constantly in the top ten to twenty thousand UK Kindle books (sometimes going higher, and sometimes lower).At the time Amazon first emailed me to ask if I wanted to be considered for the deal, I had just been shortlisted for the . I suspect this is a coincedence, assuming Amazon’s selection is based on an algorithm?The Results

We shall see what happens over the coming days/weeks (and months in terms of reviews), and I will report back in a separate post.

In the meantime, if you’re interested, then please do avail yourself of this great deal and buy a copy for yourself!

The post Caroline Tangent Added as Kindle Monthly Deal first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

Last week, I won the adult fiction category of the *. I have just about stopped grinning gormlessly by now. But I am still in shock.

I thought I would share how I found the experience, so if you’re fortunate enough to be involved with an award ceremony in future, then you will hopefully be better prepared than I was!

The winners were going to be announced at the London Book Fair at Olympia. I arrived about 45 minutes early, already nervous. That was only exacerbated when I met several other shortlisted entrants for my category and suddenly realised who I was up against: authors who had written multiple books over many years; authors who had sold many thousands of copies of their nominated entry; several authors who had been short-listed previously; and some who had done super-interesting & innovative marketing. All wonderful, lovely people to talk to. And so much experience.

Consequently, as I sat down with everyone else and waited for the announcements to start, it was suddenly clear to me that there was, therefore, no way I was going to win. Which rather relaxed me. So, when all the shortlisted authors were encouraged to bring their books to the front of the room, so that the winners could hold up their book when announced, I didn’t bother! I only had one copy with me that day, and I had left it on the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) stand, across the exhibition hall.

Which meant that when my name was announced as the winner by David Roche, BookBrunch’s chair, not only was I absolutely gobsmacked, but when I walked bow-legged to the front of the room, I then had to run across the hall, and back, to get my only copy from the ALLi stand!

I can’t remember anything which David said after that (although I recall I texted my brother saying, I fucking won!)

No sooner did the announcements finish, then we had to have photos taken and then ALLi’s CEO, Orna Ross wanted to interview me. I think I garbled my answers from about ten feet above the ground, with no idea of what I was actually saying. I’m not particularly looking forward to seeing how I come across when the video is released…

I was fortunate to meet two of the judges for my category after the announcements had finished, and they were kind enough to tell me what they thought of my book, which was wonderful to hear.

So, to anyone who enters such awards in future – and if you’re an indie author, I encourage you to get involved with The Selfies, as it’s a great experience if you do get shortlisted – do make sure you’re better prepared than me! Keep a copy of your book to-hand, maybe think about at least a couple of things you might say if you are lucky enough to win, don’t knock back two glasses of wine in five minutes before being interviewed, and don’t waffle when answering questions.

And do enjoy it – I did at least do that .

* The Selfies awards were created to recognise excellence in independent publishing, and are judged not just on the quality of the writing, but also on the success of the author’s PR and marketing campaign, sales success and overall production values, including cover design.

The post How Not to Behave if You Win a Book Award first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.