The import decides how much work everything after it is. What to strip out, how to mark chapters so they are detected, and how to fix a split that came out wrong.
Lesson 2 · core · 8 min read
Open Audiobook StudioEverything downstream of the import inherits it. A clean manuscript produces a chapter list you can narrate straight through; a messy one produces a book where the copyright page is chapter one and every third paragraph ends mid-sentence. This is the cheapest hour you will spend on the project.
Every format the studio accepts, and how each one imports.
Careful
A .pdf exported from a print layout is the hardest import there is. Headers, page numbers and hyphenated line breaks are all text as far as any parser is concerned, and every one of them will be narrated unless you remove it.
Chapter headings
Chapter titles in plain text
Scene breaks
Paragraphs
Dialogue
Paragraph shape matters more here than in a printed book. The studio narrates a paragraph as one unit, so a paragraph broken by hard line breaks becomes several disconnected fragments, and a two-page paragraph becomes a single long take you cannot re-narrate a piece of.
Right number of chapters, right order, right titles. Front matter detected as a chapter is the most common miss.
Rename a chapter, move it, delete it, or add one by pasting its text or uploading a single file. None of it costs credits — only narration does.
Open a chapter and look at the rows. Fragments and enormous single paragraphs both point at line-break problems in the source file.
A text edit after a paragraph is narrated leaves the audio saying the old words until you re-narrate that row.
Note
Re-importing a manuscript over a book you have already narrated replaces the paragraphs, and the narrated audio belongs to those paragraphs. The studio refuses that until you confirm — it is not being cautious for its own sake.
Invented names, place names, initialisms and numbers are where a narration disagrees with the author. You do not need to fix them in the manuscript: the studio keeps a project-wide pronunciation list — a word and how it should be said, such as respelling a name phonetically — and it applies on the next render of every paragraph that contains it. Set one once, and the whole book says it your way.
Tip
Collect these while you listen to chapter one instead of hunting for them up front. The list of words a narration gets wrong is always shorter than the list you would have guessed, and it is a different list.
Questions