The despair of creating an audiobook

Back in 2019, I wrote a book on Digital Marketing that was the summation of everything I knew on the topic at the time.

I always thought it would be cool to have an audiobook version, but actually creating an audiobook seemed like a daunting task. It’s true that Audible has a feature where you can pay to have someone else read your book for you, but that would require giving up a portion of each sale, and since I completely self-published the book, I thought it would only make sense to self publish the audiobook as well! Little did I know that things weren’t that simple…

How to create an audiobook

It seemed simple enough. I already had my book Timeless Digital Marketing (which I self-published), ready to go. All I have to do is read it and hit publish!

I did some calculations, and with my 50,000+ word book, I would need to record more than 4 hours of audio.

Seems simple enough! I immediately began to research what was needed to record an audiobook and I realized that I would need to do the following:

1) Record the thing. I had a basic laptop mic that did the trick and the right software (I used Descript).

2) Edit it (I learned to use Descript, which makes editing audio fast because it transcripts everything as you record it and lets you edit just by looking at the transcribed words).

3) Upload each chapter onto ACX (Amazon’s service that lets you upload your book onto Audible)

Challenges with creating an audiobook

I immediately ran into a few challenges:

1) I had to record in a quiet place away from people. I couldn’t do it in a coworking space or cafe, and during the day I had work anyway. What ended up happening was I had to record late at night when the kids were asleep. This wasn’t ideal, but I could record about 20 to minutes a day this way. After a few weeks, I got to about 60% done.

2) When I read the book out loud, I noticed a lot of grammatical mistakes or things that could be phrased differently, so a lot of my time was actually rewriting parts of the book.

3) When I listened to the recording of myself and started to edit, I wasn’t always satisfied with the audio. Sometimes I felt I didn’t have the same energy every day (remember I was usually recording late at night), I noticed a few mistakes when editing that I would need to re-record and a couple of times I would have hours of audio that had weird background noises or static that I couldn’t remove (I’m not an audio engineer).

4) When I tried to upload a chapter to test out using ACX, it wouldn’t let me upload it! ACX has very strict audio guidelines, so I had to use 3 different programs to make it work (Descript to Camtasia then Camtasia to Garageband) to get it in the right audio band and frequency. There probably is an easier way, but again I’m no audio engineer so I couldn’t figure it out.

Losing motivation

Late in 2021, after months of recording on and off, I finally had most of my book recorded. Now I had to edit it and start uploading it onto the Audiobook platform (Amazon’s ACX).

My book had 10 chapters, and when I got to the editing of Chapter 4 (one of the longest chapters), a couple of things happened.

1) I realized that over an hour and a half of the audio was unusable! For some reason, the mic I used didn’t connect properly (I blame the Macbook dongle), so the audio had a weird hissing noise that no amount of cleanup could fix.

2) I got completely obsessed with web3 (more on that in a future newsletter)! It was all I was spending my time on. In fact, I got so obsessed I changed jobs and started working full-time in web3 at General Magic and Giveth. Because of that, recording an audiobook on something I no longer had a huge passion for (digital marketing), didn’t seem like a good use of my time.

However, since I’m someone who loves to finish what I start, it always bothered me that I didn’t finish my audiobook. That’s why when I discovered I could finish my audiobook in record time with AI, I knew I had to do it.

Stay tuned for next week’s newsletter, where I’ll show you exactly how I used AI to launch my audiobook

✌️ Until the next one,
Ahmad