Tag: Amazon

So this happened. I submitted Hemo Sapiens: Awakening as an audiobook, and it was rejected. The site says that they’ll let me know why in a couple days. My question is: if you rejected it, don’t you immediately know why?

I think I know why, but I can’t ‘fix’ the problem if I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to act on an assumption.

I believe they’ll inform me that I can’t use AI-generated narration. This would be odd because they have a programme in Beta where they provide the service of automatically converting the text of a book to audio. To be honest, it doesn’t sound amazing. It appears that they are using their own Amazon Polly, which I like, but you need to babysit it hard. It is very unlikely to sound good without heavy hand-holding. As it is, I hand-held my ElevenLabs AI to make the outcome sound like a professional human.

Audible offers some voiceover actors, but I didn’t like any of them, and they couldn’t compete with my ElevenLabs voice. I can understand that they don’t want to sell audiobooks that sound like Stephen Hawking, but theirs sound closer to him than mine.

On another note, I had to render and upload square cover art. There was a stated restriction disallowing padding a rectangular cover image with space or colour to make it square. I followed this rule, but this is exactly what they do. They take the cover of the book you’re selling through Amazon, and they pad the left and right margins with filler colour. I may append the rationale they provide once I’ve received it. Until them, my audiobook is on hold.