AI voice synth is pretty solid, and I think that there are good uses for it — e.g. filling in for an aging actor/actress who can’t do a voice any more, video game mods, procedurally-generated speech, etc — but audiobooks don’t really play to those strengths. I’m a little skeptical that in 2025, it’s at the point where it’s a good drop-in replacement for audio books. What I’ve heard still doesn’t have emphasis on par with a human.

I don’t know what it costs to have a human read an audiobook, but I can’t imagine that it’s that expensive; I doubt that there’s all that much editing involved.

kagis

reddit.com/…/whats_the_average_narrator_cost/

So I produced my own audiobooks for my Nova Roma series so I know the exact numbers for you:

$250 per finished hour for the narrator. Books ranged from about 200k words-270k words, which came out to 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours.

So books 1-3 cost me $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250. I’m contracted for two more books with my narrator, so I expect to spend another 5k-6k for each of those.

So for a five book series, each one 200k+ words, the total cost out of pocket for me will be about $27,000 give or take to make the series into audiobooks.

That’s actually lower than I expected, but point stands. Like, if a book sells at any kind of volume, it can’t be that hard to make that back.