Cornelia Quick

I’ve got an interesting little experiment going on with a new audio book app called ElevenReader, an ElevenLabs project. The app lets authors upload their ebooks, and listeners can then choose from several computer-generated voices to have the stories read to them. I’ve added four of my books — Cassie Clears the Bases, Pitchers and Catchers Report, Designated Hitter, and Shagged in the Bookshop — just to try it out.

The ElevenReader app, and the stories available on it, are currently free for readers/listeners. You can follow the links above to get a QR code that you can use to add the app to your mobile device, and start listening right away.

A fun feature of the app is that you can choose your preferred voice for the story, and even switch voices as you go. For “Shagged,” I enjoy the somewhat posh pronunciations of Lily, one of the British voices; the Cassie stories sound pretty good with Jessica or Matilda, though using their synthetic “Judy Garland” voice is a hoot, at least for a little while.

One of the things that’s been interesting about this little experiment is that I’ve discovered I tend to write for the eye rather than for the ear. I’m a big fan of dependent clauses, elipses, and m-dashes; maybe it’s because I’m more of a Faulkner fan than Hemingway, but I like me some big and complex sentences, even in my smut. And those don’t always work well, especially with an artificial voice that isn’t as easy for the author to direct. I didn’t address all of the issues caused by my writing style in the Cassie stories (though I think those are more straightforward than a lot of my writing), but I tried to adjust some things in Shagged in the Bookshop. I rewrote some sentences to simplify them, breaking them apart so the voice had an easier time with them. And because the ElevenReader voices don’t adjust pitch or tone for different characters in dialogue, the way a human would, I’ve added a few more speaker attribution tags to make the conversations easier to follow aloud.

I also discovered, as I listened to Shagged in the Bookshop for the third or fourth time, that I have more of Penelope’s story to tell. Things are still in the tumbling-around-in-my-brain stage, but I think you’ll see a new Penelope adventure before the summer is over, probably involving Marjorie, Ronda, and the Lucky Fierce Vibes store. Oh, and Frank, of course, the tattooed bad boy who upends Penelope’s scene in the most delicious ways. If the ElevenReader experiment goes well, you might get to listen to that story as well!

I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about AI-generated voices for audio books. On the one hand, as a dedicated audio book listener, I appreciate the talents of audio book narrators: I will actively seek out certain narrators because I love their delivery, introducing me to authors and genres I might otherwise miss. I would much rather listen to a person read me a story than a computer any day.

But the economics don’t really work out for the kind of short erotica and romance that I write, to hire a high quality narrator record an audio book edition. For a full length audio book, running eight to ten hours, I’d happily pay the going rate. But for novellas and shorts that clock in under an hour, and probably won’t make the sorts of sales that would recoup the costs, audio books are prohibitively expensive. It’s a bit like bidding for work to be done on your home: if you’re remodeling your entire kitchen, there are plenty of contractors who’ll take the bid; but for a smaller job, you’re hard pressed to find a top notch contractor who’ll take the job.

ElevenReader isn’t taking any jobs away from human narrators for these four stories, because I would never hire a human narrator for them; it’s not worth the time and effort for them or for me. However, if this little experiment indicates that there’s a demand for my short work in audio format, I could imagine hiring out for something longer, like “Dorothy’s Domestic Bliss” or “The Betwixtmas Switch” (if I could get over the cringing embarrassment of listening to a real person reading those exceptionally dirty stories out loud …). So if you like audio books, and have a curiosity about how my stories might sound, check them out!

Also, you should check out the rest of the “Adult Romance” category on the ElevenReader app, particularly Rose Richards’ stories (she turned me on to the app, and I thoroughly enjoyed her short dirty age gap breeding stories!). Honestly, I don’t know what the future of this app will be — I imagine that it’s currently being subsidized by ElevenLabs’ other products, and they’ll switch to a subscription model at some point, so you should definitely listen to all it has to offer now while it’s still free!