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Tips For Self-Publishing In Translation: Adventures With AI and German

November 22, 2019 by Joanna Penn 6 Comments

https://media.blubrry.com/thecreativepenn/p/content.blubrry.com/thecreativepenn/Podcast_GermanTranslation1119.mp3

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Once you have a book in the world, translation is one of the ways that you can expand your readership, and potentially your income, through licensing foreign rights. 

Of course, as indie authors, we can reach a global audience through self-publishing our books and many indie authors are moving into publishing in different languages. Some are successful, others not so much.

In this episode, I explain my first experiences with translation in 2014, why I withdrew my books in 2017 and why I have now published 3 books in German in the hope it will help you make some decisions about your own creative work.

My first attempt at translation in 2014 … and why I pulled out of the market

As ever, I am often early with my independent author experiments!

Back in 2014, I got excited about the possibility of translations. I did two novels in German, Spanish, and Italian. I did royalty share deals with translators and did a digital-only deal with Ullstein-Midnight in Germany. I put the books out on Amazon in ebook and print with much excitement …

I did some Facebook ads and tried some email blasts with early services in those markets but … tumbleweed. Very few sales, even for the book with a traditional publisher.

One of my German novels published in 2014

Several things were wrong with this approach:

  • You really need at least 3 books in a niche or series to make investment worthwhile and so that you can make more money per customer. It's very hard to market anything without at least 3 books — which is what I would say to any author in English as well.
  • Readers in those language markets are still primarily physical bookstore based, and online sales had not taken off in 2014. They still aren't mainstream even now!
  • I spread myself too thin and was not able to market effectively in any language, plus there were no easy options for reaching readers in those markets.

In 2017, I gave up and pulled my books out of the market. I paid off the translators, so I lost money, plus I was disappointed and burned from spending too much time on a project that ultimately failed. After 3 years, I asked for my rights back from the German publisher as they also weren't selling enough to make it worthwhile.

Click here for interviews with my translators and thoughts on my original translation experiences.

Why I decided to try again with German translations in 2019

Every year, I do a report on my book sales and this year, I was surprised to find at 7% of my book sales income came from Germany — for non-fiction books in English!

So I decided there was clearly a market I could serve.

7% of my book sales income was from Germany May 2018 – April 2019, up from less than 1% in the year previously. These are mostly non-fiction book sales.

Self-publishing in Germany has started to really take off in the last couple of years, and readers have also begun to buy more books online. At Frankfurt Book Fair, I saw booths of empowered indie authors in the romance and fantasy niches talking to excited fans — and those genre writers are usually the forefront of things to come.

I looked at my top-selling non-fiction books in Germany and then picked the three shortest ones since that would give me marketing ability and cost the least in terms of translation. Basically, this is the lowest risk option for me at this time given my experience last time around.

This addresses the 3 main issues I had last time as this time around:

  • I published 3 books in a niche giving me more potential for cross-selling and more income per customer
  • Online sales have taken off in the country and I have proven sales in the English language for self-publishing authors
  • KDP Select + Amazon ads allow me to market even without knowing the language

Why and how I used AI translation tool, Deepl, to create the first draft

Back in July, I did a whole podcast episode on 9 Ways That Artificial Intelligence (AI) will Disrupt Authors and the Publishing Industry in the Next 10 Years. The advances in AI translation were one of those ways and as part of my research, I looked at a number of companies.

Some of the most advanced were only taking on big accounts, but Deepl came highly recommended from a German bi-lingual friend. It is only EUR7.99 (around US$9) a month with a free 30-day trial and importantly, the copyright for the translation belongs to the owner of the document.

This is super important for German, in particular, because in Germany, the translator can have the copyright to the translation. But if the first draft belongs to you, then any further translation is editing of an initial draft so the copyright remains with the author. Since control of intellectual property is a critical part of the author business, this was attractive!

I recommend at least trying Deepl.com with one of your books, just to see how it works, and particularly if you are bi-lingual in one of the languages they support.

Upload the book and within 1 minute — yes, 1 minute! — it is translated into German, or whatever language you choose. You can do 5 documents (books) per month for EUR7.99 (around US$9), so less than a coffee for a whole translated book.

Most people I asked about the various language translations said it was 70-80% reasonable, and certainly understandable.

[NOTE: This is non-fiction only! I have not tried it for fiction because there are many more ramifications of language in fiction.] 

If you are a translator, this tool could help with your workflow. It's like a first draft so it should save you time. I believe that AI translation will GROW work for translators, not replace it. Many more authors and publishers will do translations if it becomes cheaper and quicker to do so, but they will still need localization and editing to produce a finished manuscript.

Turning the first draft into a finished manuscript … in another language!

Of course, a first draft is not a finished work that you can publish and expect to get good reviews. I engaged several different editors who were also translators as well as a team of German-speaking beta readers from The Creative Penn community, and this stage took much longer than I expected.

The first hurdle was the use of ‘Sie' and ‘du.' In English, we have ‘you' but in German, and many other languages, there are different words for ‘you.' In this case, ‘Sie' is for a more formal occasion when you don't know someone, and ‘Du' is for informal friendship usage. The associated words in a sentence also change form based on the choice so it is not a find and replace job.

Deepl didn't translate every occurrence in the same way, so we had to make a decision. We did the first book with ‘Sie' but my beta readers said it just didn't sound like me, so we went with ‘du,' and I'm happy with the result because my beta readers are happy! Apparently ‘du' is more common in the self-help niche and used by bloggers.

In terms of the editor-translators, they still need experience with the non-fiction niche in order to translate specific words and also to ‘localize' the content.

For example, Erfolgreich als Self-Publisher (Successful Self-Publishing) has a whole load of resources that are different for the German market. I couldn't have done that without my wonderful German editor (whose info I am deliberately not sharing as she is on maternity leave. If she returns to work, I will update this article!)

Why I am starting out with KDP Select and Amazon exclusivity for German ebooks

I am a vocal supporter of wide publishing — when authors have at least 3 books in a series (fiction or non-fiction) and they have the time and knowledge to market more widely. It takes a few books before an author is ready to think about different kinds of publishing and book marketing, so it makes sense to start with Amazon. Plus, we also have the most extensive opportunities for English language books, and many of those opportunities are not available in other countries and languages.

My wide publishing for English language is based on the fact that I do global marketing for an English language audience. My podcast has been downloaded in 218 countries, and this site has a global reach, as well as social media being available everywhere. I want readers in all those countries to be able to buy my books, or borrow them from libraries, so wide publishing is best for what I want to achieve as an author and business-woman with a long-term mindset.

BUT/ I do not have a platform in German, I don't speak German, I don't actively market in German (other than on Amazon), and the opportunities for German language publishing and book marketing are not as extensive as in English.

So, I am starting out with Amazon KDP Select for ebooks in order to take advantage of some of the marketing opportunities that do not require language to use. I will also start with Audible exclusivity once I can get an audiobook done for Mindset. ACX is not available in Germany at the time of writing this, so the pool of narrators is much smaller. Hopefully, this will change in 2020.

I may revisit this over time, but the other ebook retailer, Tolino (which you can reach through the aggregators Draft2Digital and PublishDrive) does not have the type of promotional capability as Amazon. Some indies I met at Frankfurt said that it was harder for them to market on Tolino, which means it would be even more difficult for me!

Ingram does have print partnerships in Germany, so I will look at that next.

Book marketing in German — when you don't speak the language!

In October 2019, Amazon KDP added amazon.de to the KDP Dashboard so we can now use Amazon Advertising for books in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and anyone else who shops on the DE store. Go into the KDP Dashboard and click Promote and Advertise. Then choose the store you want to advertise to.

You can use auto-ads based on a budget, which is brilliant if you don't speak the language. You can also use Publisher Rocket which will soon be releasing a German version to pick keywords. (Thanks to Dave Chesson for delivering a much-needed service!)

I have around 400 subscribers to my email list in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so I emailed them on launch and I made advanced review copies available. I will also be doing some Facebook Ads targeted to authors in those countries who have an interest in self-publishing.

I have a few interviews booked on German podcasts, but of course, I will be speaking English!

My thoughts on translation and rights licensing, AI and the future

So, was it worth doing?

I'll give these books a year in order to make a financial return. It was cheaper to get the initial translation done with Deepl, but it still cost for the editing, extra formatting help, marketing and mostly, my time in managing the whole process. It was more ‘expensive' than expected and took a lot more time than I had planned.

I was frustrated by the lack of control because I couldn't even fix a stray typo or get the formatting right on Vellum because I don't speak the language. I also can't do much in the way of marketing, so it's not like going indie in English anyway.

I think it's worth doing translation projects if you have evergreen books that you want to invest in for the long term — and if you can invest the time, and have a marketing angle. But it's best done if you are bi-lingual or can partner with other authors/self-publishers to help do the parts of the process that need language + niche knowledge.

I also think we are in a period of 5-10 years where rights licensing is going to continue as-is for foreign languages, but I do believe that in the 2030s, we will be using wearables that translate automatically.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an expanding area, with Google recently introducing a model with 103 languages trained on 25 billion examples [Synced Review] AI translation earbuds have been released by a number of companies [Today Online].

Many of us already use Google Lens to translate signs, menus and other written text while traveling [TechCrunch]. AI translation is developing at great speed and it's inevitable that disruption will come to the translation industry because of this.

In a similar way to AI audio and voice synth technology, I think translation will split into different segments for rights licensing. People will want to consume cheaper books and won't mind AI-translation for a more affordable product, but there will always be a market for artisanal, human-translated, artistic works.

Of course, that doesn't solve the marketing problem! As we all know, just because you have a book available, doesn't mean you can sell any copies. 

All of this makes me want to continue to pursue licensing deals for translation rather than doing it myself. I have non-fiction books in French, licensed through Club Positif, and also in Korean, and will pursue more of these deals through Curl Up Press.

If you are interested in licensing any of my books, please contact me here.

Other resources for translation and rights licensing

If you're interested in translation for your books, check out the resources below:

  • 12 Book Translation Tips for Authors
  • Translators Base – a site for finding freelance translators and posting jobs you have available
  • Book translation services and helpful hints: Kindlepreneur.com/book-translation/
  • The Alliance of Independent Authors is running a Translation Rights Program and sharing their lessons learned on a series of videos so you can follow along with the experiment. You can find more info at selfpublishingadvice.org/indierights
  • My experiences of translation, interviews with my translators and more
  • My discussion with Orna Ross about translation into German on the Ask ALLi Podcast – Nov 2019
  • Interview with me on the Vienna Authors Podcast with Klaudia Zotsmann-Koch
  • Interview with me on Selfpublisher Podcast with Henri Apell

Bücher in Deutscher Sprache

Mindset für Autoren Joanna Penn Geld verdienen mit Schreiben Joanna Penn Erfolgreich als Self-Publisher Joanna Penn

Do you have experience in translation as an independent author?
Are you a translator with thoughts on what we could improve or what could work for indies?
Please join the conversation by leaving a comment below.

Writing For Audio First With Jules Horne

October 7, 2019 by Joanna Penn 2 Comments

https://media.blubrry.com/thecreativepenn/p/content.blubrry.com/thecreativepenn/Podcast_JulesHorne1019.mp3

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:07:31 — 54.9MB)

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Audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment in publishing, but how do you make sure your books sound good in audio? How can you improve your writing so listeners come back for more of your books? In this interview, Jules Horne gives some tips for audio-first writing.

writing for audio first

In the intro, I mention Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane as a great example of a beautiful audiobook, plus my home audio studio setup for any tech recommendations if you want to self-narrate.

Amazon Ads are now available for the UK and German stores through the KDP Dashboard. Plus, William Blake at the Tate – you can always find my photos on Instagram @jfpennauthor. The Camino de Santiago on Books and Travel this week, plus Productivity for Authors is available.

Findaway Voices

Today's podcast sponsor is Findaway Voices, which gives you access to the world's largest network of audiobook sellers and everything you need to create and sell professional audiobooks. Take back your freedom. Choose your price, choose how you sell, choose how you distribute audio. Check it out at FindawayVoices.com.

Jules Horne is a Scottish playwright, radio dramatist, and fiction writer, as well as writing non-fiction books for authors. Today we're talking about Writing for Audiobooks: Audio-first for Flow and Impact.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

  • How our reading and learning behavior is changing because of audio
  • The implications that audio have for our writing
  • Adapting fiction for audio
  • Writing ‘ticks’ to avoid that make hearing the writing monotonous
  • Dealing with breath and commas while writing for audio
  • The books that don’t work in audio
  • On the different sonorous quality of certain words and sounds
  • Dealing with an accent if you’re narrating your own work

You can find Jules Horne at Method-Writing.com and on Twitter @method_writing

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Navigating Changes In The Publishing Industry With Mike Shatzkin

August 26, 2019 by Joanna Penn 11 Comments

https://media.blubrry.com/thecreativepenn/p/content.blubrry.com/thecreativepenn/Podcast_MikeShatzkin0819.mp3

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:03:19 — 51.5MB)

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Will Barnes and Noble survive the takeover by a hedge fund company? Will Amazon Publishing continue to take market share? Will audio-first become more dominant for readers? How will AI impact the publishing industry? I discuss these things and more with Mike Shatzkin on today's episode.

In the intro, Open AI releases an updated version of GPT-2, the AI natural language text generator [The Next Web], try it out at TalkToTransformer.com. Chinese search engine Sogou is creating AI-lookalikes to read popular novels in the author's voice [BBC], and the article also mentions the development of human-level text-to-speech through DeepZen.io and Lyrebird.ai. Plus, indie superstar Hugh Howey talks about how he manages his publishing contracts —including retention of ebook rights, limited-term English print deals, and more in this interview on The Knowledge Project (in the last 30 mins).

Plus, I'm a finalist for the Digital Book World 2019 Publishing Commentator of the Year and Best Use of Podcasting in Publishing 🙂

Findaway VoicesToday's podcast sponsor is Findaway Voices, which gives you access to the world's largest network of audiobook sellers and everything you need to create and sell professional audiobooks. Take back your freedom. Choose your price, choose how you sell, choose how you distribute audio. Check it out at FindawayVoices.com.

Mike ShatzkinMike Shatzkin is the founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Company and an author, professional speaker, and thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry. His most recent book is The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

  • On unforeseen changes in the publishing industry.  Mike also talks more about this in his blog post, A lot has changed in the industry in the last 10 years The Book Business
  • The growing trend of audiobooks and the potential of audio-first markets
  • How the purchase of Barnes & Noble by Elliott Management, a hedge fund, under the management of James Daunt, will affect their retail stores [The Bookseller]
  • What’s the future of Amazon Publishing?
  • Some of the practices that traditional publishing uses like returns, pulping and promoting debuts. Are traditional publishers changing the way they do business?
  • On the future of translation with AI, referencing my article on 9 ways that AI will disrupt publishing

You can find Mike Shatzkin at Idealog.com and on Twitter @MikeShatzkin

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Storyteller: Audiobook Narration Tips With Lorelei King

June 24, 2019 by Joanna Penn 2 Comments

https://media.blubrry.com/thecreativepenn/p/content.blubrry.com/thecreativepenn/Podcast_LoreleiKing0619.mp3

Podcast: Download (Duration: 42:13 — 34.6MB)

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Audiobooks are the fastest growing segment in publishing and voice-first technologies like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, and others mean that voice content will become even more popular.

storyteller audiobookBut audiobook production is still expensive, so should you try narrating your own audiobooks? If you fancy expanding your creative into the realm of voice, as I am,  you'll find today's interview with Lorelei King super useful.

 

Findaway VoicesToday's podcast sponsor is Findaway Voices, which gives you access to the world's largest network of audiobook sellers and everything you need to create and sell professional audiobooks. Take back your freedom. Choose your price, choose how you sell, choose how you distribute audio. Check it out at FindawayVoices.com.

Lorelei KingLorelei King is an actress multi-award-winning audiobook narrator, writer, script editor, and creative entrepreneur. She is the co-author and narrator of Storyteller: How to be an Audio Book Narrator, along with Ali Muirden, and is one of the first inductees into the Audible narrator Hall of Fame.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

  • Changes in the audiobook industry since Lorelei started
  • Tips for narrating your own work, including breath tips
  • To use accents or not when narrating?
  • storyteller how to be an audiobook narratorWhy being in the moment matters for good narration
  • Learning the lingo and techniques of narrating and recording
  • The challenges of narrating non-fiction
  • On the stamina and energy required to narrate
  • Foods to eat, and ones to avoid, when you’re narrating
  • On the future of voice and narration with the rise of AI

You can find Lorelei King at LoreleiKing.com and on Twitter @LoreleiKing

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Book Marketing: How To Turn Your Book Into A Podcast

May 17, 2019 by Creative Guest 12 Comments

We are on the cusp of an explosion in audio content — but human narration takes investment and AI voices are improving all the time. If having your book narrated and turned into an audiobook is not within your current budget, why not try turning it into a podcast using speech to text technology? Makoto Tokudome walks us through how to do this using free and inexpensive tools. 

book into podcastAre you a self-published author? Are you looking to get your book into other mediums such as audio?

Do you wish someone would narrate your book? Wouldn't it be great to be able to turn your book chapters into podcast episodes?

Well, by using some free online tools, now you can!

I've put together this comprehensive tutorial to walk you through the process I used to turn the chapters of my book into a podcast. You can check out my example here.

Thoughtful Language Learner podcast

In a nutshell, I used Amazon's Polly text-to-speech (TTS) service to create MP3's of my book chapters. And then used Anchor FM to create and publish the audio as podcast episodes.

The idea of creating podcast episodes out of a book was inspired by Mark Coker and his podcast episodes of his Book Marketing Guide book.

*Caveat – Although text-to-speech (TTS) technology is quite impressive, my understanding is that Audible/ACX and other vendors still require audiobooks to be narrated by a human.

So What Can We Do With Our Text-to-Speech Audio Files?

1. You can create a podcast

2. You can use the audio files of your book to be a lead magnet. Give your audio files as a free audiobook download in exchange for email signups.

What is Amazon Polly?

Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service that can convert text into audio speech. Text-to-speech technology has been around for some time. You may have even used it on your Mac or Apple device.

But up until recently the technology has usually produced halted, robotic voices. But Amazon Polly is able to create more lifelike speech that is quite impressive.

Amazon Polly currently offers this service in 26 different languages (e.g., English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, etc.).

I chose the male voice “Brian” with British English to narrate my book chapters. (Listen to a sample.) You can sign up for an account here.

Take a look at the pricing. My understanding is that you can request up to 5 million characters (i.e. not words) a month for free, and then $4.00 for each additional million characters:

Using Amazon Polly

After you sign up for an Amazon Polly account (i.e. Amazon AWS), you will first need to create a S3 bucket. (Out of this entire tutorial, this is probably the most difficult/technical part.)

This S3 bucket is basically an online drive or cloud storage in which Amazon Polly will save your MP3 files that you converted into speech.

Follow this guide to create an S3 bucket.

Select a unique name for your bucket (e.g. mtokudome)

Make sure you make a note of the region in which you create your bucket (e.g. US West Oregon).

Amazon Polly lets you convert up to 3,000 characters to speech on-the-fly. You can play around with the different languages and voices.

Amazon polly

Anything beyond 3,000 characters needs to be a task request that gets processed by Amazon servers. This is why you first needed to create an S3 bucket.

At the very top of the page, make sure you select the same region in which you created your S3 bucket.

Text to speech region

You also need to specify your S3 bucket name. Click on “Change S3 task settings” and input your S3 bucket you just created.

S3 synthesis task settings

Now you should be all set up to start turning your book chapters into MP3s.

(If you have problems, email me or leave me a comment below and I'll try to help.)

The first step you need to do is prep your book chapters. Open up your book document (i.e. Word document). You need to remove any page numbers, footnotes/endnotes, hyperlinks, etc. Otherwise, all of these will be read out loud.

In my own book, I had a few foreign words and some acronyms that needed to be tweaked. In theory, you could copy and paste your entire manuscript, but I found it better to work in batches, chapter by chapter. I also did this because I use these separate MP3 files as different podcast episodes.

Once you have cleaned up the text, copy and paste it into the Amazon Polly window. Then select the language and voice you want to use. Double-check your S3 task settings to make sure that your S3 bucket is set correctly.

Once you're ready, click on “Synthesize to S3”. The task will be processed and completed in a few minutes.

Now go over to your S3 bucket where you will find your newly created MP3 file. Click on the MP3 file to download.

S3 MP3 file examples

After you have created the audio file, you will most likely want to listen to the file. You may still end up finding words or pronunciation issues that need to be fixed in your chapter text.

If you're happy with the results, you can continue to convert the rest of the chapters of your book into audio.

What is Anchor FM?

Anchor FM is a free podcasting tool / platform that allows virtually anyone with a smartphone or computer to start creating their very own podcast. And it's 100% free.

Anchor FM removes the complexities of things like podcast hosting and distribution. Your episodes are hosted for free and distributed to all the major podcast networks (e.g. iTunes, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.)

You can sign up for an account here.

Using Anchor FM

There are plenty of ways to get fancy with podcasting, but the goal of this tutorial is to keep it as simple as possible. The goal here is to add cover art, some basic description, and create a basic intro and outro for each podcast episode. I include some basic audio editing suggestions below, but they are not necessary.

Editing Your Podcast Details and Episode Details
At the top of the page, click on “Settings” This is the settings page of your podcast. Give your podcast a name and description. Fill out the other details.

You can also upload cover art for your podcast. If you have the graphics for your book cover design, you may simply choose to upload this file. If you have some photo editing abilities, you may want to modify your cover design to fit more of a square aspect ratio.

If you don't have editing abilities, you may choose to use a free tool like Canva to create a simply design. Check out their templates for album covers.

Anchor podcast setup

Adding Your Audio File

At the top of the page, click on the “New Episode” link. At this page, you can drag-and-drop the audio file of the chapters you just created. For example, drag-and-drop chapter 1 of your book to create your first podcast episode.

Creating an Intro and Outro

The next step is to create an intro and outro. The simplest way is to click on the “Record” button and record yourself. If you have a microphone or headset, it can improve the quality of the audio. Once you create the intro and outro, you can drag them around in the correct sequence.

Anchor create an episode

What to say in the Intro and Outro?

You may be wondering what to actually say in your intro and outro. You can google for some tips and ideas. But at the minimum, you probably want to introduce yourself and give an overview of who this podcast might be for. Here's my intro as an example:

Hello and welcome to The Thoughtful Language Learner Podcast. My name is Makoto and I’m also the author of the book The Thoughtful Language Learner.

Are you a struggling language learner? Do you feel like you lack the confidence and skills to learn a foreign language?

I believe that cultivating self-awareness and understanding who you are as a learner is the key to success.

Through this podcast, I’m bringing you the contents of my book. Each episode will cover a new chapter. Sort of a like an audiobook. And what’s cool is that I’m bringing you each chapter through some text-to-speech technology. I hope you like it.

Since the goal of your podcast is to get people to know about your book, you probably want to mention that somewhere in your intro or outro. The outro might also be a good place to have a call-to-action or a lead magnet for people to sign up for your email list. Here is my outro example:

I hope you enjoyed this chapter of my book. If you found it helpful, send me a message and let me know.

Also I have a free PDF that introduces some of the assessment tools mentioned in my book. If you are interested, just go to rebrand.ly/freepdf

Thanks for listening.

Editing Your Episode Details

You're almost ready to publish! After you click “Save episode”, you will want to fill out details about the episode. Give it an episode name and description. Again, use the episode description to be a place where listeners can learn more about you or about your book.

anchor publish your episode

Once everything looks good, click “Publish this episode”.

Congratulations! You've just created a new podcast and put out your first episode.

The episode will be immediately available to listen to (and over the next day or two will become available on the other networks such as iTunes, Google, etc.).

Improving the Audio

Although this is not a necessary step, there are a few simple things that you can do to improve the quality and production value of your podcast.

You can use any audio editing software you like, but I'm using a free software called Audacity.

If you listen to podcasts, you probably notice that many intros include some sort of background music. There are some places such as Youtube's Audio Library that provide royalty free music that you can use for projects. (Note that some of them are free to use but require attribution.)

Find some music you like and download it.

Using Anchor to record your intro and outro is okay, but you can use Audacity to also improve the audio quality.

Finally, I noticed that the audio file created by Amazon Polly was a little too quiet. I used the “Amplify” effect in Audacity and increased the amplification by 3 dB.

Conclusion

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. I know that utilizing text-to-speech may not be for everyone. I personally find Amazon Polly's speech quality acceptable, but some may disagree.

As a self-published author, this was something new I wanted to experiment with. I'll honestly be happy if the podcast leads to a few more people finding out about my book.

Have you thought of turning your book into a podcast? What do you think about using speech-to-text? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Makoto TokudomeMakoto Tokudome is a husband and father of two. He is a language teacher and language coach who loves to help learners get motivated and gain confidence. With an engineering background, he is constantly looking for new and innovative ways to improve learning.

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  • Author Entrepreneur
  • Creativity
  • Ebooks and Technology
  • Intellectual Property Rights
  • Marketing and Promotion
  • Publishing Options
  • Writing

Recent Posts

  • Writing Tips: 5 Ways to Quiet Your Inner Editor
  • Productivity For Authors: Find Time to Write, Organize your Author Life, and Decide what Really Matters. Out Now!
  • The Key To Long Term Success As A Writer With Kevin J Anderson
  • Writing Tips: What Writers Can Learn From Bodybuilders
  • How To Effectively Work From Home With Amanda Brown, The Homepreneur
  • Writing Tips: Common Mistakes In Police Procedurals
  • Writing With A Family. Productivity Tips With Andrea Pearson
  • Tips For Self-Publishing In Translation: Adventures With AI and German
  • Writing Tips: Using Beats To Keep Readers Emotionally Engaged
  • How To Sell More Books With Reader Funnels With Mark Dawson
  • How To Outline A Non-Fiction Book So Readers Can’t Put It Down
  • How To Write Your Darkness With David Wright
  • Book Marketing: Engineer Your Book Launch Success With A DIY Strategy
  • From Bestselling Book To Netflix Series With Vikram Chandra, Author Of Sacred Games
  • 5 Tips To Help You Write A Novel In A Month #NaNoWriMo

Archives

Thanks for visiting The Creative Penn!

Most of the information on this site is free for you to read, watch or listen to, but The Creative Penn is also a business and my livelihood. So please expect hyperlinks to be affiliate links in many cases, when I receive a small percentage of sales if you wish to purchase. I only recommend tools, books and services that I either use or people I know personally. Integrity and authenticity continue to be of the highest importance to me. Read the privacy policy here. I hope you find the site useful! Thanks - Joanna

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Thanks for visiting The Creative Penn

Most of the information on this site is free for you to read, watch or listen to, but The Creative Penn is also a business and my livelihood. So please expect hyperlinks to be affiliate links in many cases, when I receive a small percentage of sales if you wish to purchase. I only recommend tools, books and services that I either use or people I know personally. Integrity and authenticity continue to be of the highest importance to me. Read the privacy policy here. Read the Cookie policy here. I hope you find the site useful! Thanks - Joanna

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