Manuscript in, one narrated chapter out. The 5 stages of the studio, and why you narrate chapter one before you narrate anything else.
Lesson 1 · start · 5 min read
Open Audiobook StudioAudiobook Studio is built around one loop: narrate a little, listen, fix what you heard, narrate more. This lesson walks the loop once — from a manuscript file to a chapter you can play — and stops there on purpose.
The stepper across the top of a project is the whole tool. Production is the only optional one; the others are the shape of every audiobook you will make here.
The stepper, and what each stage is for.
Upload a file or paste your text. The studio detects chapters, then splits each chapter into paragraphs. Everything you do afterwards — a voice, an emotion, a re-narration, a review flag — happens on a paragraph, which is why this split matters more than it looks.
Tip
If you have a choice of file, choose .epub. The cleanest import. An ePub already carries chapter boundaries, so the split usually needs no correction at all.
The narrator. It reads every paragraph that has not been given a voice of its own, and you can change it at any point without losing narrated audio. Its range is 200+ voices, plus any voice you have cloned yourself, and the picker previews each one on YOUR text rather than a stock line — which is the only preview worth trusting, because a voice that sounds warm on a demo sentence can sound thin on your prose.
Note
Changing the narrator later does not destroy anything. Paragraphs you have already narrated keep their audio until you re-narrate them, so switching voices costs you only the lines you choose to redo.
Narrate chapter one first, listen to it, then run the rest. The studio quotes the credits for each batch before it spends them. The next-step button offers chapter one on its own before it offers the rest, and the number on it is the estimated credits for that batch.
Roughly the first few minutes of the finished book, for a fraction of its cost.
Not the first paragraph — the whole chapter. Names, numbers and unusual words are where a narration goes wrong, and they rarely appear in the opening lines.
The same button switches to the remaining paragraphs, again with its own estimate before you spend anything.
Estimated cost
6,000 credits to narrate 12,000 characters of text.
Roughly a 2,000-word chapter. Narration is billed per character of text, so a long book costs more than a short one and nothing else changes the figure. The studio quotes each batch before it starts, and the server is the authority.
Tip
The first re-narration of any paragraph is free — the studio marks it "free" on the row. That is deliberate: the first take of a line is a draft, and you should not pay twice to fix a mispronounced name.
One narrated chapter tells you three things: whether the voice suits the book, whether the chapter split was right, and which words the narrator gets wrong. The next lesson is about the second of those — the manuscript — because a clean import removes most of the work the other stages would otherwise cost you.
Questions