This Week in BATL: Chapter 6, Finding Heaven audiobook, and First Monthly Meetup

Hello, hero! I’m not feeling so great today and I have lots to do, so I’m keeping this week’s summary short and sweet.

Here’s your weekly summary of what’s happening in the league:

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Work in Progress: Every Bell that Rings

Chapter 6 went up this week—a scene between Stephanie and Noel at the Christmas Craft Fair. Plus, my favourite character to write: little Julien. And we get to meet Ryker too.

Just a reminder that the first three chapters of this book are accessible to all league members, if you want to check it out.

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Audiobook in Progress: Finding Heaven

For the past several months, I’ve been creating one chapter of Finding Heaven a month using an excellent AI voice from ElevenLabs—the best I’ve heard. It’s the same voice I used for the bonus epilogue of Every Star that Shines, which you can listen to in the Reading Nook.

One chapter a month is all my time and money budgets could afford, but I’m hoping to step that up soon. However, yesterday, I finally got started on editing my existing audio files.

Why do I have to edit digitally narrated audio? Several reasons:

1. I can only generate 5,000 characters at a time, which is about, oh, a quarter of an average chapter in this book, or about four minutes of audio. So I need to stitch all the generated files together to make a complete chapter file.

2. As good as the AI is, she will often get mixed up about when a man or a woman is speaking unless you specifically add in dialogue tags to make it clear. This particular book was written with very few dialogue tags, so for every section of audio I generate, I have to go in and add the dialogue tags throughout before generating the audio. That means I have to go and remove them from the generated audio file after.

3. Sometimes, AI gets other things wrong, like stress or pronunciation. In that case, to save characters (since that’s what I’m billed by), I will only regenerate the short section she got wrong, and then I have to edit that into the longer section later. (In normal recording terms, this is called an insertion or punching in.)

So, even though it’s saving me a lot of money to create this audiobook this way, it’s not saving me any time. In fact, it’s probably taking me more time than if I hired a narrator. However, I’ve had so many requests for this book in audio, I wanted to create an option for folks without making them wait longer until I can save the many thousands of dollars I’ll need for a human-narrated version. And, as an audio-first reader myself, I’m thrilled that this company offers a voice that I would be happy to listen to as a consumer.

If you want to get a taste of what Bella, the AI voice I’m using for this book, sounds like, all league members can listen to the book description and front matter here:

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First Tea with Talena today!

I’m so excited to get to host a monthly meetup in the first few weeks after the league launched. As I type this, we start in an hour (at 2 p.m. MT), though it may well be over by the time you read this. No worries—I’ll be planning the next one further in advance. I’ll also vary the times and dates to allow people with different schedules to be involved.

Tea with Talena is a reward at the Luminary tier, so I’ll try to give you plenty of warning next time so you can decide if you want to jump to that level and join us—plus enjoy a few more perks that month. (This month was kind of last-minute.) It will usually be toward the end of the month, though, so keep it in mind.

If you want to join us today (and if there’s still time), you can find the video meeting link in the Luminary room.

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That’s it this week, friend! I think I’m finding a groove of creating one bonus item per week as well as my work in progress chapter and this summary, which is nice. I was a little worried when I started this that I may have taken on more than I can handle (something I frequently do), but so far, so good. Learning and improving all the time, right?

I hope your weekend is all booked. What are you reading this weekend?

Graphic that reads “Don’t be afraid of your fears. They’re not there to scare you. They’re there to let you know that something is worth it.” - C. JoyBell C.