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This week on Brave New Bookshelf, hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite explore the world of AI-enabled audiobooks with Phil Marshall and Andrew Wallner from Spoken Press.
Meet Phil Marshall and Andrew Wallner of Spoken
Phil Marshall and Andrew Wallner are the co-founders of Spoken Press, a platform designed to empower storytellers by providing tools to create, publish, and monetize audiobooks. With a background in conversational AI, Phil and Andrew bring a wealth of experience to the table, having sold their previous AI company in 2021. Their journey into the world of audiobooks began with a personal need for a multicast audio solution, which led to the creation of Spoken.
The Birth of Spoken: A Solution for Storytellers
Spoken Press was born out of the need for a platform where authors could easily create and monetize high-quality audio content. Phil shared how his own experience with creating a multicast audio story highlighted the gaps in the market. Spoken aims to fill these gaps by offering a comprehensive solution that combines AI-driven narration with a network for streaming and monetizing audiobooks.
AI-Enabled Narration and Discovery
Spoken leverages AI in multiple facets of its platform, from narrating audiobooks to enhancing discoverability. The platform’s AI tools analyze manuscripts to provide metadata, summaries, and smart channel tags, ensuring that each audiobook finds its ideal audience. This AI-driven approach also allows for hyper-personalization, tailoring recommendations to listeners based on their preferences.
A Revolutionary Approach to Monetization
Spoken’s unique monetization model sets it apart from traditional platforms. By focusing on transparency and equitable revenue distribution, Spoken offers authors unprecedented control over their earnings. Unlike platforms like Kindle Unlimited, where only a small percentage of revenues are returned to authors, Spoken aims for a 50/50 split with its Affinity subscription model. This model ensures that authors are compensated based on the actual listening habits of their audience.
Building a Community of Listeners and Authors
Spoken is not just a tool for creating audiobooks; it’s a community where authors can connect with listeners. By encouraging authors to share their work and engage with their audience, Spoken is building a network that benefits all participants. As the platform grows, its recommendation engine will continue to refine and enhance the discoverability of content, creating a vibrant ecosystem for audiobook enthusiasts.
How Spoken Works: A Simple Four-Step Process
Creating an audiobook on Spoken is straightforward and designed to be enjoyable. Authors start by uploading their manuscript, which is then analyzed for character voices and narrative elements. Next, they select or create custom voices for their characters, ensuring a unique and engaging listening experience. After refining the narration with tools like lexicons and Speak It, authors can publish their work and share it with the Spoken community.
Embracing the Future: The First Mover Advantage
For authors eager to explore new opportunities, Spoken offers a chance to get in on the ground floor of a growing platform. By joining now, authors can take advantage of the free beta phase and establish their presence before monetization options roll out. This first mover advantage allows authors to build their audience and be ready for future growth.
Favorite Tools & Recommendations
When asked about their favorite AI tools, Phil and Andrew highlighted the integration of multiple voice and AI technologies within Spoken. They also mentioned the Deep Research feature in ChatGPT as an invaluable tool for quickly gaining expertise on specific topics.
Key Takeaways from This Episode
- Spoken Press offers a comprehensive solution for creating, distributing, and monetizing audiobooks.
- The platform’s AI-driven tools enhance both the creation and discovery of audiobooks.
- Spoken’s unique monetization model provides transparency and equitable revenue sharing.
- Authors can join Spoken now for free and gain a first mover advantage.
- Spoken is building a community where authors and listeners can connect and thrive.
Resources Mentioned
- Spoken
- Use promo code “Brave” for special access to Spoken’s features.
If you want to hear a Spoken produced short story, Steph is currently uploading her short story series. You can listen to Rice Cooker Revenge at https://ihave.spoken.press/p/vmahQ4sHN5p
Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry.
Steph Pajonas: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Brave New Bookshelf. I’m one of your co-hosts, Steph Pajonas, CTO of Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process. We’re just cruising through and doing all the good stuff. I’m always so excited when I start off these introductions.
I’m like, Eeeeee. Let’s do all the fun stuff. Let’s talk to all the cool people. So what you don’t see because maybe you’re listening on one of your podcast apps instead of on YouTube, is me, with a huge grin and excitement just pouring off of me about all the good stuff that’s happening in the world of AI.
There is, there’s just so much good stuff happening. Claude just had a [00:01:00] 3.7 update. 11 labs files are being taken by Findaway now. There’s just so much happening and I feel like every day is new news.
So I’m here with my lovely co-host, as always, Danica Favorite. I’m sure you’re loving all the good stuff too, aren’t you, Danica?
Danica Favorite: I am, I am. So yeah, I was just thinking as you were saying that by the time this episode goes live, what you’re talking about is the new news. I’m like, yeah, that’s gonna be old news.
Steph Pajonas: It’s gonna be old news.
Danica Favorite: New thing is gonna be, I sometimes wish that we could be like that guy, remember he was like doing his podcasting video thing, running through the airport with the latest AI news, and we were like, oh, yeah.
But we do not have that energy No. Or that amount of time. So AI is good, but not that good to give us enough time to handle all that. So it’s all good. But yeah.
As always, we’re excited.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Danica favorite. I am the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors on every stage of [00:02:00] their journey from formatting their manuscript to finding the perfect keywords, descriptions, book covers, distributing their books, and splitting the royalties when those are all out there selling.
So it’s pretty cool. I love working with Steph and the Future Fiction Academy because they’re helping you write the book. Between the two of us, we really are giving people the tools they need to get out there and succeed. It’s really thrilling for me to have all these really cool guests because all of these guests and all the different products and services they provide are things that can help authors succeed even more.
Today’s guest that we are super excited about are the guys from Spoken Phil Marshall and Andrew Walner.
Welcome, welcome. We met them back at Author Nation in Vegas in November. It’s funny because everyone kept saying, oh, you gotta talk to them. You gotta talk to them.
They’re doing really cool things and I know Steph actually had a lot of conversations with them. I only managed to say hi to them in passing and exchanging cards and saying, yes, let’s talk. Let’s talk. And here we are, really [00:03:00] excited to have them because they’re doing really interesting and cool things with audio books and AI audio. As we always are talking about giving authors multiple tools, multiple platforms for success and where audio used to not be something that was accessible to a lot of authors.
Suddenly now there’s all these great tools and great opportunities for authors. I’m really excited because I think Spoken is one more thing that authors can put in their tool belt to make providing audio to their readers and as part of their workflow, just making that even more accessible.
So with that, I am going to turn this over to our friends from Spoken and let them tell you about themselves, what they do, what Spoken is, what they do, all that fun stuff.
So guys, I’m gonna turn this back over to you.
Andrew Wallner: Thank you so much for having us. We’re thrilled to be here.
Phil Marshall: Yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot. It’s always a great opportunity to reconnect with friends we met at Author Nation and just within the author community. [00:04:00] And, and gosh, since November somebody asked me in November at Author Nation, what do you think AI is gonna look like in five years?
And I said let’s see, considering that in the, next two weeks I was planning to deploy the ability to generate custom voices designed around every character and the ability to do an entire audiobook in one sitting with a single upload. I don’t know what five years looks like, but the next two weeks is gonna be crazy.
And so here we are in March. We have in fact, delivered all of that, continued to improve and expand the product. We now have 3000 registered users. 400 authors over a thousand projects, New York Times bestselling authors, and authors of all sorts, short form, long form, fanfic, nonfic, you name it. And so the channels are growing.
The base of users is growing. The enthusiasm, the feedback, the complaints that this doesn’t work right, are growing, which we [00:05:00] love, which is awesome. What you have to worry about is when you don’t get that, so what happened, right? And so we don’t get everything right.
But I will say this. That our plan, our thesis that we had unveiled and debuted at Author Nation, in fact has just continued to deepen and the validation has only improved.
That a place that is by storytellers for storytellers where authors control their audio channel. Where we pair the create with the stream and monetize all in one place that that’s working and that is resonating.
And so we’re excited to share all the updates with you, our philosophies on life. And, and space. I’m a sci-fi writer. And so anything you wanna ask is all fair game. I’ll just make it up if I don’t know it.
And so a little background though and that is that that Spoken, the Spoken genesis, the origin story I think is interesting because. Andrew and I are, [00:06:00] and our technology co-founder Brent, we sold our conversational AI company in 2021. And then I went to go finish my sci-fi novel which I did. And then in that process created a story with six interesting characters, different accents, and I wanted to create a multicast audio of that, a 40 minute long piece. So a short story. and so. I’m like, yeah, ai, right? I was so, so enamored by AI and so used 11 Labs. I had to use Camtasia as the editing tool because, 11 labs workflow wasn’t there, and I still had to hire some voice actors because of accents. And so it was still thousands of dollars.
The workflow was painful, like really truly painful. And then in the end I had the work that I wanted. It was carefully, parsed with every character in multicast, speaking their own lives with the spacing, with the dialogue tags. And I had what I wanted and I realized I have nowhere to take this. And not only do I have nowhere to put it. I have certainly no way to monetize it.
And [00:07:00] so I came to Andrew and I said, I think I know what’s needed. Like I, I have a real true personal need and I think that the market needs a place where authors can go and both generate great audio stories as well as stream and monetize those. And so we have just focused on the storytelling. Aspect of this in a way that no other company does. We’re focused on this like no other company is, and we’ve grown.
So yeah, that’s that was a lot of words and thank you for allowing me that time.
Danica Favorite: We love it. Like we’re, we’re authors. We get that, we get the lot of words thing, and I think it’s really interesting to hear that story of how it came to be and understanding that you see this need in the market. Publish Drive came about because our CEO and co-founder wanted to publish her master’s thesis. And same thing. There was nowhere to do it.
And I know that Steph and Elizabeth did the same thing with FFA, where they said, Hey. We don’t have this resource for people to learn [00:08:00] how to write AI, and we’re gonna provide that for them.
So I think this is cool to have another innovator in the space who’s saying, look, here’s a need. Let’s fill it.
Steph Pajonas: Exactly. Mm-hmm.
Andrew Wallner: A vast amount of his coming to me was mostly to complain. Let the record show this was not, this was, this was less of a collaboration and more of a, I can’t do this thing.
So,
I equate.
It all worked out.
Phil Marshall: I equate the two. I equate I need the world to be different, and I’m complaining with, I’m going to make the world different by building this thing. So they’re very related. It’s synonymous even.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think it’s awesome. I think it’s great. So tell us a little bit about Spoken and what Spoken does and all of that as a product that people can take advantage of.
Phil Marshall: Yeah, absolutely. So as we say at Spoken, we help storytellers tell stories and so it’s for authors who really want to create self-publish and then stream and monetize great [00:09:00] audio unprecedented audio of their works, and for readers who love to listen. So it is those two things. It is both studio for creating and self-publishing which we can go into further because there’s a lot of magic there.
But then when you pair that with the discovery by readers it’s really only possible to do what we’re doing if you really integrally pair that analysis of the work, the metadata that comes from that, how you then handle all of that analysis and pair it with the listener’s habits and palate.
And so that create side, and the stream and monetize, the listening side on the network is such a powerful combination. It’s unprecedented. We’re the only ones to bring those two things together exclusively for authors, for storytelling.
And so where we are in our journey as a company, we’re still in free beta. So go forth and conquer, narrate your works today for absolutely no cost.
When you do that, what you’ll see. [00:10:00] Is that there’s a lot of powerful capabilities that we’re bringing to the table. It’s the analysis of your work. It’s the parsing and timing and spacing and volumes of the characters. It’s identifying which passages are spoken by which characters, and allowing to assign that voice once and cascading it across your entire work.
An entire novel, parsed by chapter automatically if that’s what you have. But if you have short works, short works are really kind of the mainstay of Spoken right now. ’cause that’s where we started. Now about a third of the projects are multi installment or multi chapter novels, but still about two thirds are short form.
So yeah, so it’s absolutely free right now to be able to generate that work. You will have the ability to generate custom voices for every character designed around how you described your character. And all of that happens automatically. You can tweak it, you can edit it, you can update it. But we do all that automatically.
if you wanna draw from the library of voices, they are voice actors, about 300 voice [00:11:00] actors who get paid for every use. So we definitely support the voice actor community in that way as well. A lot of powerful capabilities for authors to create great audio work.
And then as soon as you click, it’s made public, all of a sudden it’s on the network. That project has its URL. You as the author have your Instagram like profile that you can drive your listeners to and start driving traffic.
Somewhere in the middle of the year is when we anticipate turning on the monetization pipes. What does that mean? That means that we’re going to charge you for your narration, but it’ll still be really inexpensive. We anticipate that a full a hundred thousand word novel might be 30 or 40 bucks with the highest quality voices.
And so that’s obviously, groundbreaking right? And kind of earth shattering. And then when you then place your work on the network, you’ll have several options. Do you just wanna put it out for free? You want people to discover you, or maybe it’s a teaser chapter or maybe a teaser short story. It’s set in the same universe. And [00:12:00] so that can then lead into a direct sale work that we would then facilitate that direct sale on the network.
Lots of different options there. We also have something we call the Affinity subscription. So for short works for people who just endlessly stream short works in particular. We think just having a nice subscription model is a great way to go there.
And actually this guy came up with the subscription model to turn what Spotify does on its head because if you try to tease apart how you got those 38 cents for your $9 99 cents. Audiobook from streaming Spotify, their pool service. Good luck. You will never be able to tease that apart no matter how hard you try.
And the reason is how Spotify is designed with their pro rata. All this guy came up with the Affinity subscription.
Andrew Wallner: So, for those who are listening right now if you were able to learn a little bit about spoken back in the Author Nation Days, our original approach to monetization on this [00:13:00] network, which was very fundamentally changed after that event where we spent some time talking with everyone and fielding, the thesis. The original idea was only this concept of the Affinity subscription and what that was in the world of Spotify and music streaming.
There’s what’s called a pro rata model. So basically what that means is all of the subscription revenue from listeners comes into a giant pool, and then it is redistributed based on listening activity from listeners. Regardless of who you listen to as a listener whose music you stream the money goes proportionately to the highest and most engaging artists on the platform. Which means if you listen to your garage band down the street that you’re best friend’s in and you only listen to them, it doesn’t matter. Taylor Swift is still walking with the big bag of cash. Most of your revenue’s going to Tswift.
So we looked at that and said, Hmm, this doesn’t feel like the right way, especially if a lot of this new media, content that will come into a sort of streaming network [00:14:00] is gonna be like shorter form or books or novellas or multi serialized, multi installments. We should really look at what a listener listens to and then distribute their dollars accordingly.
And when we started to think about that, we teased it apart and went well, if we went from a listener up perspective, you could basically just create a model that it is based entirely on the affinity the listener has with a specific author. So if I Andrew stream Steph Pajonas’s work for about 50% of my listening for the entire month, half of the revenue is gonna go straight to Steph.
And then it’s gonna be distributed evenly to all the other folks that I listen to. It’s a direct support model. And that was what we went into Author Nation with. And it’s actually a really interesting evolution because this is pretty unprecedented in the audio book streaming space, even in music streaming. We floated that around and it was very hard for folks to wrap their head around. A lot of, especially when you’re going wide or you’re a self-published author, [00:15:00] there’s a lot of direct sale involved. There’s a lot of distribution across a number of different revenue streams.
And as an authorpreneur you’re managing your entire domain. So things get a little hairy, but you set the price and then you take, whatever royalty split is standard. And we didn’t have a way to accommodate that.
So everything that Phil just walked through, the whole free content as a brand building tool for you, the author, the direct sale support, whether it’s on the Spoken network or off.
And in addition to this unlimited sort of all, you can eat more premium tier of content all in one network determined by the author is what we came up with. And that is what we are presenting now as the sort of light at the end of this beta tunnel. So that was a long the same as Phil we’re, we are on the same coffee today.
A long-winded answer to address.
Phil Marshall: Maybe what I’ll do is just summarize that by saying what we wanna offer authors and their listeners are just unprecedented economics and flexibility. Being able to optimize the listenership, being [00:16:00] able to optimize your revenue and being able to work these different modalities for a given work we believe can do that.
Steph Pajonas: I think that one of the advantages here is that you can get a quality product. As an author, it’s like you upload your book, you go through the motions to get something quality that represents your work really well, and then it can be put into your marketplace, right?
It feels like it’s a another place to be, especially if you’re a wide author and you’re not exclusive anywhere. It’s a great place to be, to find more audience and I feel like that is where a lot of authors really wanna focus. They’re trying to find more audience. They’re trying to find more people who are interested in their work.
And this is one of the things that I really love about your spoken model, is the fact that you’re creating a community of listeners who come and understand your business model and then get a chance to really check out all these cool authors that they haven’t had a chance to [00:17:00] experience before.
This was one of the things that really spoke to me about your business when we talked in November. And I remember walking out with Andrew and being like, I think this is great. I don’t really understand your, your economics on this situation. And Andrew said, yeah, I understand, and we’re working on it.
And, we shook hands and we went off and now you guys are back with something even better. So I’m really excited about the fact that you are listening and hearing what authors want and we can really do some cool stuff from here. I love that.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think that’s great. And actually the economics makes total sense to me. Like as soon as you started explaining it, I was like, wait, this is exactly how authors in KU get paid. There’s one big pot and it’s divided in the pot, but it’s according to the big names and the little names get, whatever. As opposed to, okay, like where are the listeners going?
What pots are going where? And dividing it more equitably. Among who’s being listened to in what way? And I think that’s really smart, and that gives some of [00:18:00] the we’ll call ’em smaller players. I don’t think they’re really smaller players, but I don’t know what else to say. But it, it’s giving something more equitable for them.
So I like that a lot.
Phil Marshall: It’s interesting actually that you brought up ku. So KU is an interesting analogy here. And so what percentage of KU revenues get paid back to authors? Any guesses?
Steph Pajonas: I was in Kindle Unlimited for a long time, and I still have no idea.
Phil Marshall: And it’s because they don’t advertise it and they don’t say it.
They don’t, they do, don’t say they do from time to time. Say what their pool total is. But then you actually have to dig through the Amazon financial reports in order to then discern what the percentage is. I’ve done that work, and so my conclusion is that 33%. KU revenues get paid back to authors.
With our subscription model, the Affinity subscription model, it’s 50 50 and you’ll be able to see what listeners [00:19:00] listened for, what percentage of their months listening, and therefore that percentage of their money you get, period.
Right there. Transparency in our world is king.
Danica Favorite: I think like this is the truth bomb right here, like 33% of your KU boom. Like that’s how authors are getting. And
Phil Marshall: it was hard for me to come to that. Result, by the way, that was not an easy analysis to do.
Danica Favorite: Yeah.
Yeah. And I think that’s great. I know that’s something that is important, like to us at Publish Drive is that transparency and being transparent in all of that with what revenues and what people are paying and all of that kind of stuff. I feel like that synchronicity because that was part of why the FFA came about was giving authors that transparency and that control of their prompts and what’s going on in the backend.
I think that’s really important for authors as business people to understand what is happening in the backend and why, and having those [00:20:00] transparent numbers to understand where those numbers are coming from because I would much rather that bigger piece of pie.
And if you don’t know what size pie you’re working with, then that’s a problem.
Phil Marshall: Exactly.
Steph Pajonas: I think authors would love to hear a little bit about your marketplace and your community that you’re building in Spoken with the listeners that you bring in, because I feel like that is probably the thing that they really wanna know about because finding new audiences is really tough.
And I’m sure many of them would be like, my books are on Spoken. They would say it to their newsletter, they would say it to their audience, come check it out. But then sometimes it’s just not enough, to bring in new people. So I was wondering about your community and how you’re building it.
Andrew Wallner: So this is a, total look behind the scenes, right? We are a startup and we are growing daily. One of our initial tactics here is, this is very much a network, right? So there’s the create side. This is the sort of purpose built storytelling tool to get your book into audio.
But on the other side is the network and [00:21:00] if you think about famous social networks or networks out there of any kind. You think back to the like, like the YouTube era in the early mid two thousands where you just started getting emails from your uncle that were like a video of a cat, seeing a cucumber and jumping 10 feet in the air. And then you forwarded it to six people.
So part of this initial build of this company, build of the network is really reliant on authors who are excited about the fact that they can get their work in audio format to share this with their communities. By doing that, they’ll be playing a direct role in building the community on the Spoken network that sort of supports all the other authors in the community as well.
So the more, listeners, the more readers who love to listen that join the spoken network, it’s a, it’s very much a rising tide raises all ships idea.
On the other side, once this network is starting to go. Right now, we’re surpassing 3000 users. There’s 400 [00:22:00] authors. As this network continues to grow the way, discoverability and listener narrative palate profiling. Basically what they like to listen to will meritoriously present projects to them based directly on their taste.
So it could, it could be duration. We’re doing some really exciting things around narrative analysis that could underscore, like plot devices or character types or tropes.
All sorts of interesting things that will then factor into what the Spoken algorithm and recommendation, engine decides to bring to you the listener based on your taste. So think about neighborhoods of niche, micro genres. Think about different durations of content for specific needs based on your listening history.
Maybe it’s a bedtime story or maybe it’s the 10 book saga and how you get involved in that. Basically once the listeners are there. We can support the infrastructure on getting them channeled [00:23:00] exactly into the place they want to be.
Phil Marshall: So because this is all about how does AI help the writer, I wanna go deeper on what he said. What we discovered which ironically has to do with discovery of works, okay. Is that AI actually enables the next level of personalization. It’s what we call hyper-personalization. And so we haven’t released all of these changes yet.
I’ll just summarize it by saying that you can analyze a story in various dimensions of how that comes out with those listeners and only with the new tools from AI, are you able to then performantly be able to then tee up the next great listen. And maybe it’s the trailer for the next listens, right?
That people are thumbing through and quickly being able to, hear and see what should be next for them. But AI enables a [00:24:00] personalization that is unprecedented.
Danica Favorite: That is one of the things that I love about AI and that personalization ability, because I think that’s where we saw the development of AI was with those algorithms and being able to personalize other things. And so it makes sense for me to take this, that next step. And so that would be a great lead into what is typically our first question.
And how are you approaching AI and publishing? Like when you got this idea and you said, okay, this is a great tool, what was your approach with that? Because I know obviously you’re like, Hey, this brings you down to the next level of discoverability. what else were you thinking there?
Phil Marshall: Yeah, so we actually use the phrase AI enabled because across the board, whether it’s on the author creator side or it’s on the network consumption and monetization side, it is all basically superpowered turbo charged by by ai. Having said that, the irony is that unspoken, if you have your audio work, if you’ve paid [00:25:00] for studio recordings, which you know, really are still the gold standard on this.
Although our single narrator in particular does really well as well, and our multicast is pretty unprecedented, but still. Studio recordings of voice actors, the gold standards still. If you’ve invested in that, you can upload that audio to Spoken in order to leverage the rest of our capabilities.
Yeah, we have to do a bit of fancy analysis on what that audio comes out to say and mean. But it’s ironic that at Spoken, even though we are AI enabled, you can bring your work in. And not use AI to narrate it at all and still leverage the rest of the network.
So for us, AI enablement of both of those sides but let’s not forget that network and streaming side as well.
It’s critical for both of those pieces.
Andrew Wallner: I’ll add just a smidge of color there too, is, in the analysis step when an author brings their words and we queue up [00:26:00] the work to be narrated there’s a ton of other kinds of analysis that we can do on a narrative work. Mind you, this is not training any LLM and the output is not training any LLM. It’s very safe.
But we’re also analyzing work for safety. So there are implications in moderation of content. We’re creating short little summaries of a work that an author can use to streamline that back cover effect that they’re gonna need. All of their metadata. Helping to actually, place channel tags, which is like a mix between a social hashtag and a niche micro genre, so that the book will actually be placed on the bookshelf where it’s most likely to be picked up, so to speak.
All of these things are an extension of our AI enabled analysis process. And then you have the narration, which is pretty bleeding edge, and then you actually have the discovery around that as well.
So there’s a ton of different ways that we’re using AI to really empower [00:27:00] authors in ways that storytellers in ways that really hasn’t been possible before.
Danica Favorite: What I really appreciate about this that I want to go back to is earlier where you were saying is that you’ve paid voice actors. I think the fear with AI and everything is that, oh no, we’re putting all these voice actors outta work. No, you’ve already shown your commitment to, Hey, we’re paying voice actors to do all of this.
And if you have something that is human narrated, you can also bring that. I think it’s really important for people to understand that, that this is an augmentation of what’s out there and what you can do and using the pieces that work for you.
I wanted to just shout that out and appreciate that because I know that’s something that some of our listeners are really concerned about.
So thank you for that.
Phil Marshall: Yeah. I’m gonna go one more, and so, I mentioned earlier briefly, that we analyze each of your characters and we’ll help you to have for your exclusive use, a [00:28:00] voice never before heard. So it’s what we call custom voice designed on the fly around the character description and a prompt created from that character description that we automate.
You can tweak it. And you can do a sample after sample until you find exactly the right voice. That’s our custom voice capability. That’s been out for several weeks now.
But we’re about ready to release personal voice. So personal voice is you actually cloning your voice on the platform and then you being able to use it for your works. Now what does that mean? Especially for the memoir writer, the nonfiction writer, the how to, the expert work. You will be able to narrate your own works. And that is a very powerful thing. You can also insert yourself as the villain that can be your voice. Just think about that, that character can be your voice.
Steph Pajonas: I’m loving this idea. I’m over here laughing. I muted myself so that I wouldn’t laugh over that. I love custom voices. [00:29:00] I know a few people who have cloned their voice, to do memoirs or nonfiction or these things that they feel they have the voice of authority on the subject, right?
So they might as well do the audio book, but then, trying to do an audiobook in your home, especially if you’re an independent author. I know people who will like, go into their closet and they, they shut the door and they do their audio books in their closet. It’s not exactly easy if you’ve got dogs and children in a very noisy house.
So I love this idea of having, the cloned voices, a custom voice for you. And you might as well bank on that because I think that that is going to be part of the future when it comes to authors and their books.
Phil Marshall: Yep. We’re excited about it. And I’ve got that exact closet. I’ve got a big piece of sound baffling that I put up against a cabinet and my Yeti, my blue Yeti mic and my quiet mouse. And and so, yeah, I get it. The setup, the, the struggle is real.
Steph Pajonas: The struggle is real. Same here I am in my room, my [00:30:00] bedroom, and this is the only place in the house to do this.
I love the fact that you guys are using a lot of AI in all different parts of your process. So you’re using it in the discoverability, in the metadata. Parts of the process to make sure that you get the right descriptions, the right tags, the right audience to those books.
And then it’s also the ability to use AI voices as well for the narration. So it’s great. I love to see when people are using AI for as many parts of the process as possible to get like the richest experience possible. There’s only so much we can do as a company of like two or 10 or like 30.
Even so, you still have to bank on these tools in order to get to the next level. So I’m excited to hear that you guys are doing that as well.
Andrew Wallner: The opportunity that AI sort of brings into this equation and enables authors at a cost, speed and quality point that hasn’t [00:31:00] existed before is pretty mind-boggling. When we started to really dig into our thesis for Spoken and what kind of makes it go and why does it matter and what does it mean?
I started to think about like back in the mid 2010s back into the network era here. You think about Instagram and how, there’s people walking around with a camera roll full of pictures of a latte and they didn’t put ’em anywhere. And then Instagram came along and you were able to throw a little filter on there and suddenly it was this cherished piece of artwork that belonged in a museum.
But the closest thing you had was Instagram and you would just throw it on there and then you’d get like your three likes for your cute little latte. And then you started to see the better pictures of the lattes got more and more likes on them. So suddenly people became a bit more savvy. They became more literate in what good looked like.
And because audio is now in a place where it’s accessible and to democratize. And now there are places to put it for [00:32:00] authors. The barriers are so much lower now, such that authors can put their work out more quickly and more easily in this audio domain and monetize it and benefit from getting more work out there that previously just didn’t have a place to exist.
I’m no Nostradamus, but I envision a world where the visual literacy exploded with Instagram. I envision a world where narrative literacy really starts to explode, right? You can imagine a, a world where the little Reddit, short horror fiction writer who never really cared or realized that.
Their work was any good, puts their work together on a network, made just for their kind of work and finds massive success because they found an audience that liked exactly what they were making. And that’s something that we’re very excited about.
Danica Favorite: We’re excited about that too because I know that Steph and I talk about this a lot on the podcast where this is really about the democratization of [00:33:00] publishing and storytelling and people who listen to this much later down the road won’t have that same opportunity. But I hope people are really picking up on the start for free piece. You can get this amazing sounding audio book for free and get on this network for free.
Where there’s gonna be all this discoverability so people can access your work. And for a lot of people who are like, yeah, I’d love to do audio books, I’d love to have audio, but it’s so expensive, here is this great democratization of storytelling and getting stories out there.
One of the things for me, most of my books are traditionally published, and that has always been the big debate within the traditional publishing world is how expensive for them the audio books are, and not being able to get that whole series on audio, not being able to get all of your author’s favorite books on audio.
You guys are providing this really amazing opportunity for authors and I [00:34:00] love that. And I love that you guys are part of that.
Andrew Wallner: Democratized access to audio is huge in publishing and that’s what we’re, in a sentence, that’s what we’re all about here. For folks that are holding out for monetization and stuff like that. We’ve designed this so that, when we do launch monetization, hopefully in the summertime your work will remain. We’re not gonna scrub the platform and like, start over, if you want to narrate for free now and have the work there and then when we flip the switch and configure all of the dials, whether you wanted subscription or free or direct sale, like that’s all, that’s all okay.
Also, this is the beginning of a network. Remember MySpace? Remember how Tom is everyone’s friend? There are 400 authors right now. You have the opportunity to get the username. Tom, I don’t think anyone has it. Three letter usernames are allowed.
Phil Marshall: We, we will now.
Andrew Wallner: And, and you can go snag up Tom and be everyone’s Tom.
Phil Marshall: Although I do reject MySpace as the analogy here for obvious reasons that they didn’t [00:35:00] exactly, make…
Steph Pajonas: They didn’t last. Unfortunately.
Danica Favorite: They didn’t. But, like how cool would it be? If you start now when it’s free and you don’t have to do anything. If you start now when monetization opens, theoretically you’ve already got this big network built, right?
You don’t have to wait until monetization to build the network. And so that’s what I think is really a very cool and interesting opportunity for authors because yeah, monetization’s not here yet, but when it is, boom, you could go from zero to a significant amount of income just like that.
Steph Pajonas: We were just talking about this the other day. One of the reasons why people actually listen to us on this podcast is because we’re future casting, right? We’re looking into the future. We’re trying to find these opportunities for authors that have to do with AI and guys, this is “first mover advantage.”
Absolutely. A hundred percent Get in there, be one of the first people on the platform. so that you can stake your claim, just like he was saying, get your username, stake your claim, get in there, put your books [00:36:00] on, and be ready for the revolution. Now, there are plenty of people who have done the first mover and they’ve banked on something and it has failed, but in this case, you don’t have a whole lot to lose.
They’re letting you on for free. You may, spend a few hours here and there getting your books up there, but I believe that that is totally worth it. It is totally worth it to be on there first and to get moving before everybody else swamps it, and then you can have your spot.
So first mover advantage, everybody, I’m just gonna say it again. First mover advantage. Go in there and get in. You can.
Andrew Wallner: This is so nice. Thank you for shilling us. I really appreciate it.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, like wasn’t that a great commercial. Go Steph. Hey,
Andrew Wallner: thank you. Something about revolutions and get in while it’s cheap and all of that stuff.
Buy, buy low, sell high.
Steph Pajonas: I was one of those first people that had the iPhone. I was always the first person to pick up new technology, and that has never steered me wrong. It really hasn’t. Even if things that I bought have [00:37:00] failed, I learned something in the process about either myself or the things that I was working on or selling. And so when I see something like this, I see you guys are passionate about your product, that you’re excited about the future, and that you also listen to the people who come to you with, ideas or concerns that I feel like this is where we will succeed by jumping on the wagon while it’s rolling down the street.
Danica Favorite: Yep. I totally agree. I totally agree. So one of the things that I want to ask about, because you’ve talked some about this, what does the workflow with Spoken… what does that workflow look like for someone? Like let’s just pretend ’cause I actually don’t have anything on Spoken yet, but I’m telling you, after this, I’m gonna find some time and, and at least get my stuff up there. I have nothing to lose.
So okay. Talk to Danica, who doesn’t have anything on Spoken. What are my steps? What’s that workflow look?
Phil Marshall: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, my own challenges, and I’m a product person, I’ve led product [00:38:00] for a lot of companies and have designed a lot of products and invented things, patents, blah, blah, blah.
So when I came to this, I had a pretty clear notion about what the information architecture of this, what the steps need to be in order to make sure that your foundational elements are there before then you build those next elements before you build the next elements.
And we even had a designer that said let’s create the personas and let’s create the, I’m like, Nope. I know exactly what I want. This is what I want. And we did tweak it a little bit over time, but really it’s, it’s stayed tried and true.
And that is a four step process and that is that you bring your words. Okay, so authors bring their words. We’re not gonna help you to bring your words, so bring your words. You can upload your document or put it in as free text. If it’s a multi chapter work we’ll identify the installments and separate them into their chapters.
But what happens next is really important as part of that project manager. And that is that we do the in-depth analysis, an unprecedented analysis every [00:39:00] chapter or just your short form or rolling up the multiple chapter derivations of summary, of smart channel tags, which are in of themselves and invention.
The safety analysis, the comparables, what are the major categories, language and genre and style. So that’s all project manager.
And then once you’re ready to go and we’ve identified what characters are speaking, or maybe you’ve got a single narrator work, or maybe you’re a romance writer, and we split it into dual narration, so now you can actually do dual narration as well, which we support. Once we know how many speaking parts there are, then those are listed. And you just have to now identify just the right voice for that. So that’s under Voices and you can choose Custom Voice designed around that character just for you. Exclusive to you. You can use the Library voices. You’ll soon be able to use personal voice. And so lots of options there in finding just the perfect voice.
Then the third step is the passages. Being able to see how all of your [00:40:00] words now align with the different speaking characters, how the spacing is handled, how the volumes are handled, and if there’s anything that then you narrate that doesn’t come out just right, you’ve got great options.
We have a lexicon for being able to globally change this word that you speculative fiction writers know is, no AI narration is ever gonna be able to understand or pronounce. You simply put in its phonetic replacement in the lexicon and we’ll replace it across the board.
You can use Speak It to actually speak aloud any passage and we’ll loop it through the character voice and it will come through in that character voice exactly as you spoke it for perfect delivery.
If you have something that needs to be done in a certain way, you’ve got a certain twang and this one, like she’s making fun of, so, you can, you can deliver in a very particular way.
So that’s on Passages and that’s just really how you’ve just proof it. And our goal is for that to just. Go away. Okay.
And that means that any need for proofing, any need for tweaking, any need for any of [00:41:00] that just disappears because it is automagic from the outset. Right now, lexicon speak it. Separation with volume and padding changes between passages that all right now is under your control.
We do automate every bit of it we can, but sometimes it’s not perfect, but you can tweak it. So now you just, you’ve narrated your work. It’s there. You can listen to the whole thing if you want.
Then you just go to publish. And publish is where you upload your cover art. You check the tags, you check the summary, you check the comparables.
You can choose mastering to normalize the background noise and volumes to your liking, which will add then to the entire work as a cohesive stitched audio.
You can also choose whether or not to allow your listeners to sponsor it in their own language of their choice and do the translation or sponsor it in a different voice if they want to hear it in a different voice because they like this voice.
And so, that’s all on publish.
We eventually are going to offer a whole bunch of new options on publishing. I won’t get into that, but whether you’re serializing or whether you’re doing it on one fell swoop, then you just click publish and then [00:42:00] it’s lot, literally goes right to the project page for your project.
You could reorder your projects on your page so users see which one’s first you want them to see. And and then that project page, it’s just live. Then you can share it. We have great social card sharing, on all the different networks. And so it looks great when you put it on Twitter, you put it on Instagram, you put it on Facebook, you put it on, whatever.
We just kept hearing that it’s not only easy and cheap, but also fun. And so now we started to weave that word in because creating audio narration historically so painful that it feels like a knife in your back sometimes.
This is actually fun, like having a voice that’s all yours and completely custom to your character designed on the fly. Or choosing that voice actor who’s just so awesome for the delivery of that character. And you’ve been looking forward to doing that for, for years. It’s it’s fun.
Steph Pajonas: I like fun, so I’m in count me in too.
Phil Marshall: Alright, good.
Steph Pajonas: We’re all in, aren’t we Danica?
Danica Favorite: We are, we are. Steph and I have talked a lot about just how busy we are and how much is on our [00:43:00] plates and. I really haven’t done much with audio because I’m like, oh my gosh, that just sounds like so much work.
And I am not here for work right now, but fun. I can handle fun. I’m here for fun. So I really love that I definitely enjoy that. Usually we close things up by asking what your favorite AI tool is, but I,
Phil Marshall: oh, pick me. Pick me. Yeah. Let’s go ahead.
Danica Favorite: Let’s pick you, pick you. What, what do you got for us?
Phil Marshall: So, we’re, we’re a little biased on this point.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I figured, I figured we would get the biased answer and that’s totally okay. We always say when we’ve got someone here who’s got a really cool product. It is completely fair to say hey.
Phil Marshall: There’s a lot of things happening that are on the, which, through Future Fiction Academy there are a lot of things happening to help authors to create those words.
So we really do focus exclusively on, you’ve got your words right, and you bring your words. And so for us, if there’s anything that comes after that in the world of audio, we’re gonna roll it in. We have a marketplace of voices. We have Open [00:44:00] AI, we have Google, we have Microsoft, we have Amazon, we have a lot of 11 labs which does fantastic work on voices.
But then we’ve got the underlying trained LLMs. We’re picking the best of the best, to make sure that we’re always rolling in that there. So when it comes to AI tools that we love, we’re rolling ’em in. And we’re making them all into Spoken. So
Andrew Wallner: anything that supports that global sort of statement of helping storytellers to tell stories.
It’s always storyteller and story first, and that’ll always be this sort of like guiding lens on our product and roadmap. On the way that we engage with folks at events or at our discord or subreddit or how we decide what features or like what partner organization will we, work with.
It’s all driven by what we think people will want or what they tell us directly that they want. So, and if you want a real answer on an AI tool, I’ll tell you.
Steph Pajonas: Go for it.
Andrew Wallner: Have you, have you heard of Deep Research?
Steph Pajonas: Yes.
Andrew Wallner: In ChatGPT, I use it every day. [00:45:00] It is one of the best features I’ve ever seen. The fact that I can prompt it on a very specific thing I want to become super literate in, and it will go out and collect cited sources and compile it into a report to basically make me.
Super educated on a very specific thing really fast is amazing.
Phil Marshall: The fact that an AI says, let me go back and look at this and I’ll get back to you when my report’s ready. It’s like, that’s cool. Alright.
Andrew Wallner: Have that report on my office on Friday. Like,
Phil Marshall: Hey guys, so, so we do have one special little thing for you guys and your listeners.
So if your listeners go into Spoken and they register and they can put in a promo code and automatically be upgraded to writer status, they have full access to the studio tools as well, and so that promo code is Brave.
Steph Pajonas: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Thank you so much. You awesome. Yeah,
Phil Marshall: yeah,
Steph Pajonas: All right guys, so I feel like we could [00:46:00] probably talk for hours on this, but we’re running out time, so I wanna make sure that everybody can come find you guys because it is not a usual URL for your,
Phil Marshall: Yeah, it’s Spoken press. So just spoken dot press.
Steph Pajonas: Excellent. So everybody come on by to spoken dot press. So that you can come check out their tools, all of the things that they have to offer, and then use the promo code Brave. How can you forget that, right?
Andrew Wallner: Yes. Uber easy.
Steph Pajonas: Uber easy.
All right, so before we go though, I’m sure that Danica has something that she wants to say, don’t you? Mm-hmm.
Danica Favorite: I do. I do. As always just remind you to please follow us, like us on YouTube and Facebook. Get the word out, share our podcasts and information because that’s how we get the word out.
This is really a passion project for us, and so, the more you guys help spread the word, the better.
Steph Pajonas: Come over to brave new bookshelf.com. Read the show notes about this particular episode. You [00:47:00] can learn more about Spoken Press this way. And then you can check out the full transcript. If we said anything that sparked your fancy, you’re interested in, you can always just search the page and search for whatever we talked about in the full transcript. We’ll have the everything up on the website when this episode goes live.
So, once again, thanks guys for showing up and talking to our audience about this. This was really fantastic. And we will talk to you guys and talk to all of our listeners again really soon.
So thanks for listening in. We’ll talk to you guys later. Bye. Thank you.
Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us at bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.