How to Convert an Ebook to an Audiobook Cheaply (Step-by-Step)

• Free to try: new accounts get 5,000 characters, about 5–6 minutes of finished audio, and voice previews cost nothing.
• Economy One-Book Pass, $49 one time: one book up to 400,000 characters (about 74,000 words) with any narrator, plus 20,000 credits for pronunciation and line edits.
• One-time book packages: Short Book $59 (up to about 55,800 words), Standard Book $89 (about 93,000 words), Long Book $129 (about 139,500 words). Leftover credits never expire.
• Studio plans for several books a month: $49, $99 or $149 a month (about 2, 5 or 10 audiobooks), 17% less billed annually.
• Done for you: $299 one time, and the AuthorVoices team produces the audiobook for you (up to 550,000 characters, typically 7–10 business days).
• Distribution: no upfront fee to 50+ retailers (not Audible or Amazon); SelfPublishing.pro keeps 15% of net royalties.

A clean source file saves hours of cleanup later. Two things matter most:

• Use EPUB if you have it. EPUB carries chapter structure natively, so auto-chapter parsing works on the first try. DOCX works too, but you'll want clear Heading 1 styles on every chapter title — not just bold-and-bigger text.
• Strip front matter you don't want narrated. Copyright pages, dedications longer than a sentence, and the table of contents almost always sound worse than they read. Delete them from the source file before upload, or skip those sections in the project view after parsing.

If your book has heavy formatting — footnotes, sidebars, image captions, recipe steps — decide now how you want those handled. Footnotes generally read as inline parentheticals or get cut entirely; sidebars work best inserted at natural pause points in the surrounding chapter.

From the dashboard, open Projects and click New Project. Drag your EPUB or DOCX into the upload area, or paste text directly if you're working from a manuscript that hasn't been compiled yet.

The parser splits the file into sections — usually one per chapter — and shows you the resulting outline. Scan it. If a chapter is missing or two chapters got merged, the fix is almost always in the source file's heading styles, not in our app. Re-export and re-upload; it takes 30 seconds.

Open the Narrators page in a second tab and audition voices against a paragraph from your own book — not the demo script. A voice that sounds great reading marketing copy can fall apart on dialogue or technical jargon.

Filter by language and accent first. All 165 voices in the catalogue work for whole-book narration, on a one-time purchase or a Studio plan.

If none of the 165 voices fit, clone your own from a 30-second sample. Clear room, no echo, one continuous take.

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Step 3: Narrate chapter by chapter — or batch the whole book

Back in your project, you have two paths:

1. Section-by-section narration. Best for your first chapter or two — you'll catch pronunciation issues early before spending credits on the whole book.

1. Narrate Whole Book. One click narrates every section in the background, with no queue; most books finish in minutes. It shows the exact credit cost before it starts, and no subscription is needed: an Economy One-Book Pass or a one-time credit package covers it.

Start with section-by-section on Chapter 1. Listen to the full output. Note any names, places, or invented words the AI mispronounces — you'll fix those in the next step. Then either continue manually or click Narrate Whole Book.