BookSmarts Podcast (ep. 52): Bryan Heathman on How AI Is Shaping the Audiobook Industry
Bryan Heathman is the CEO of Made for Success Publishing, a book publishing company that specializes in selling audiobooks. .
He joins the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss how AI technology is transforming the audiobook industry, specifically regarding AI narration for audiobooks. We discuss the future of audiobooks and the benefits of using AI narration vs. traditional narrators, as well as common misconceptions and consumer hesitations regarding AI narration, and technological advancements with AI and audiobooks.
Bryan discussed this topic in detail at the 2024 Publishing Innovation Forum. To learn more and request a PDF of his presentation, visit madeforsuccess.com/contact.
Transcript
Joshua Tallent
In this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast, I’m talking with Bryan Heathman. Bryan is the CEO of Made for Success, founded in 2005 in the audiobook industry. Bryan works with legendary authors and CEOs, thought leaders, to produce exquisite books. Made for Success represents Zig Ziglar, sports stars and over 300 professional speakers. He comes from a marketing background, working for three Fortune 10 companies. Bryan was a .com advertising pioneer, and is the author of best selling marketing books himself. His motto is: You tell the story – We tell the world. Bryyan, welcome to the BookSmarts Podcast.
Bryan Heathman
Joshua, thanks for having me on the show.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, I appreciate you joining me. It’s really great. It’s kind of funny; we’re recording this from a distance, even though we actually just had coffee yesterday, met each other up in Seattle, and, you know, you’re a local guy to me. So it’s really great to have that local connection, but it’s also really great to have you on a podcast where we can talk about some of this stuff.
Bryan Heathman
Great. Yeah, it was actually really good talking in person. And this whole thing about, you know, audiobooks, the industry, where it’s been, where it’s going, the use of AI, you know, it’s a topic where we could go a mile deep,
Joshua Tallent
Yes, we can, yeah. And you actually spoke about this at the Publishing Innovation Forum in September. So you chatted about this with a lot of people. I wasn’t able to make it to that session, but I heard great things about it. The idea of mass producing audiobooks with AI. So I want to dive into that topic. I want to think about how do we use AI appropriately? And there’s obviously a lot of opinions about how AI could or should be used in publishing, but let’s start from the beginning. If a publisher is thinking, man, I’ve got this backlist. I’ve got these titles. I don’t know if I can afford to do a full, you know, audiobook narration, or I have other things that keep me from doing that. What advice would you give to publishers who are considering AI narration for their audiobooks?
Bryan Heathman
Yeah, well, you know, it’s a good question. I’d probably take the thought process up one notch. And what does it look like from a publishing perspective to consider producing audiobooks from a large backlist? That’s the question. And then once the decision is made, oh yeah, it might make sense for us to produce some audiobooks. Then the question is, do we get a narrator involved, or do we employ AI? So, you know, Made for Success. We’ve got a catalog of several 1000 titles, and the way I look at it from a catalog perspective, from a publishing perspective, is I just generally look at it using the 80-20 rule, where I’ll take a look at the 20% of my catalog that’s producing most of the sales. And I’ll start with that segment of the titles. So if we’ve got 20% of the titles that have now been determined, then we’ve got a second consideration, and for us internally at Made for Success, we’ll take a look at which of those titles have been converted to ebook. Okay, so why ebook? We’re talking about audiobooks; we’re not talking about ebooks, but for us, the production of audiobooks using AI technology starts with an ePub file or an ebook file. So that’s kind of a second layer of the consideration, and then once you’ve been able to kind of narrow down that list, then the decision starts to get a little bit easier. Now, in terms of publishers listening to this and they’re thinking about their frontlist titles, I know here at Made for Success, 100% of our frontlist titles will produce an audiobook today. So it’s no longer a question of if we’re going to produce an audiobook, it’s definitely we are and here’s the philosophy behind it. You know, if we’re putting a lot of marketing and promotion behind a frontlist title, I know that we’re going to reach audiobook listeners and I know that about 25% of the people that we reach will strongly prefer to listen to the audiobook derivative. So if I look at the efficacy of my marketing spend, I’ll know that 25% of it is wasted if I don’t have an audiobook on the market. So that’s kind of the way I think about it, from both the frontlist perspective and the backlist.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, yeah. And there’s a lot of publishers who have that backlist and need to decide, you know, where do I go with this? Is it worth it? You know, that 80 to 20 rule is a really interesting way to go about that, and kind of look at that backlist and assess based on that concept. So, if you’re looking at the backlist and you’re looking at, you know, trying to make that decision, what are some benefits of potentially going with AI narrators over traditional narration?
Bryan Heathman
Yeah, well, that’s a good question. So you know, the year that this episode is being recorded is in 2024 and, in fact, it’s late 2024 and I would say as of this point in time, the benefits of using AI to create audiobooks is pretty clear cut. So when you look at the audiobook industry as a whole, late 2024, it’s about a $2 billion industry in the United States. In fact, I was reading an article just recently that was written by a guy named Seth Godin. And Seth Godin was also a .com internet pioneer. We both launched companies in the online promotion space back in the late 90s but Seth has gone on to become just an incredible thought leader, and one of the things that he said in a recent post was that his prediction is that by 2025, 90% of all front list titles will be recorded using AI narrated voices. Now I used to make those kind of bold predictions as well, back when ebooks were new in 2009 and my predictions were always wrong. So I always think it’s a little bold to put those type of statements out there. But I would say, you know, I respect Seth and his opinions, and he’s very educated about the audiobook business, that there’s probably some merit in there. But the biggest benefit, getting back to your question, Joshua, was what are the benefits of AI narration? Well, you know, the obvious benefit is that you can get an audiobook created at a fraction of the cost of having a human do it. In fact, at Made for Success, we’ve dove into the audiobook narration space pretty aggressively, and we’ve been able to reduce our cost of producing audio books by well over 90%. So from a publisher’s perspective, when you can see those type of cost savings, it does get everybody to sit up straight and take notice. It’s very difficult to ignore those kind of trends. Yeah. And I imagine the time involved as well, because you’re saving so much on cost, there’s also obviously a time and investment that’s not as much and and that could be important for especially, hey, I need to get this done quickly. Yeah, we finally got our e book done, and we have very little time to get the audiobook done. You might be in a bind if you’re not careful in that. Well, I’ve got a funny side story on that. So, you know, I’ve produced thousands of audiobook productions, in fact, here in the studio where I’m sitting right now. And best case scenario, we would, from start to finish, we would finish our audiobook production in about a three month timeline, and we’ve got 12 steps in our production process for producing audiobooks. The day I tested my first AI narrated audiobook was with a tool that Made for Success has a license to through Amazon. And the day that I tested this tool, I was able to record and publish an audiobook in three hours. A 10 hour audiobook. And I literally fell out of my chair, and I was laying on the floor in my office, stunned at what a leap this was. From somebody that does this for a living, I literally fell out of my chair and was stunned. That much of a, you know, kind of a revolution,
Joshua Tallent
That’s amazing. Wow. That leads to so many questions in my head about how that process works. But that’s very interesting. So there are a lot of misconceptions, though. Audiobook AI narration, it can be difficult to kind of get sold internally, and a lot of people just don’t even know a lot about AI in general, or they don’t know about audiobook narration specifically. So tell me about some of the biggest misconceptions that you’ve encountered that publishers have about this topic.
Bryan Heathman
Well, yeah, yeah. There’s actually quite a few. So, you know, at Made for Success, we ask ourselves a series of questions before we, you know, jump into the audiobook part of the discussion. But we take a look at things like, well, are audiobooks mainstream enough to justify the expense? Okay, it’s a good question. Given that the industry is now $2 billion here in the US, that answer is a hard yes. They’re mainstream enough. And I know there’s a lot of people. My son, he had challenges. He’s now 30 but he had challenges reading in school and whatnot. And his reading consumption now is 100% audiobook, but he’s an avid audiobook consumer. Yeah, he’s walking around, you know, doing his chores with his earbuds in, listening to various things. So, you know, there’s readers out there that you just 100% miss if you don’t have an audiobook. The same thing, though, that we ask ourselves, are the titles that we’re evaluating, are they suitable for audiobook consumption? Some books are not. So, you know, you’d have to ask yourself, if you’re producing cookbooks, right? Is the cookbook suitable for audiobook consumption? If it’s a scientific journal or an academic book, is it suitable for audiobook consumption? So that’s a question that you’d have to ask yourself, and then you ask yourself, will audiobook consumers be okay with an AI voice versus a human narrator? Okay, that gets directly to your question. So when you stop and think about it, in the audiobook industry, there are some listeners who follow narrators. So in other words, when a narrator churns out a new audiobook, they’ll buy that audiobook because that narrator did the performance. Because they love the style, they love the voices, they love the acting, you know, they just love the overall vibe. So that’s one consideration. But hiring a celebrity audiobook narrator does come at a price. The second thing though to consider is some listeners, they will seek out a audiobook that’s actually narrated by the author. Okay, so you’ve got to ask yourself, does the author have the chops to go into studio, because not everybody can read a script. Or does the author have the patience to go in the studio, because to go into a studio for 20 hours sometimes is a difficult ask for some authors. So when we take a look at, you know, some of these type of questions, we’re going to do an estimate. And Joshua, we had a great conversation around this just recently as to whether or not a book will have expected sales of over 10,000 units right? Because there’s sort of a magic number that publishers kind of kick around that, you know, once a book crosses threshold of 10,000 unit sales, then it’s going to have a significant long tail for many years to come. Okay, so if a book does have that kind of potential, or if it’s a no brainer, if it’s a no brainer, going to sell 100,000 units, those are the type of projects where I’ll bring in a skilled narrator. In fact, I’ll probably even consider hiring a celebrity narrator for those type of titles, and it all depends on, of course, the budget of the publisher and how many listeners can you draw using a celebrity narrator? But let’s say you wanted to capture that segment of the market of author-narrated audiobooks. Well, there are ways to create a audiobook now in the author’s voice that does not require the author to be in the studio, right? And we’ll talk about that here in a couple minutes, as we talk about the different styles of, you know, AI audiobook generation.
Joshua Tallent
So as far as misconceptions, the biggest misconception seems to be that this is a difficult process, or that this is not good enough, that the quality of the narration isn’t as good, and therefore it’s going to degrade the value of my book. I think that’s a pretty common misconception, although maybe it’s not a misconception at all. What do you think about that?
Bryan Heathman
Yeah, I had an author call me this week, in fact. We produced a AI-generated audiobook from his book, and he said, would you kindly take that off the market? I want to have a human narrator do it. So it’s a valid question. You know, the AI voices, they’re going to be a little bit mechanical sounding. They’re not going to have a lot of dramatic voice inflections in their performance, right? You just can’t get that, or if you can get that, but it’s very expensive to produce that type of, you know, dramatic voice response from a machine. So there’s kind of a legitimate concern I think that many publishers have in, you know, is AI good enough for this particular title?
Joshua Tallent
Okay. So looking at AI narration, what do you think is exciting? What do you think the most kind of the biggest advancements, the recent advancements, the things that you’re looking at and saying, yeah, this is the next piece that we need to see people implementing, or the next step forward.
Bryan Heathman
Yeah, from a publishing standpoint, there’s a number of things that excite me greatly about AI-generated audiobooks. One, it’s that 90% reduction in cost. Nobody can ignore that. That’s a very, very compelling way to look at this. Second thing is, there are at least three companies that I’m aware of, and if I’m aware of three companies, there’s probably ten, that can take a celebrity voice, sample it, and produce an audiobook out of the celebrity voice. A couple companies that are doing that are like speechify, which is a Ukrainian company. Had a very interesting conversation with their CEO a few weeks ago. There’s a company here in Seattle called Well Said Labs that can sample voices. And then I just had a conversation this morning with a company called Camb AI that will sample a voice in 90 seconds, and then produce the entire audiobook off a 90 second voice sample. So each of these companies are very, very exciting. They’ll take a voice sample, and, you know, if you’re getting a celebrity voice, they do need to have permissions. Like, if I need to get James Earl Jones to perform a sci fi fantasy novel, I would have to reach out to Mrs. Jones and get permission from the estate to use the James Earl Jones voice.
Joshua Tallent
And just recently, sorry to interrupt, but that was, who was it? Lawrence Olivier. Somebody just licensed Lawrence Olivier’s voice for this purpose. And I think Carrie Fisher’s voice as well is another one that was recently done that way.
Bryan Heathman
Yeah. And, you know, I’ve done a lot of licensing deals in my career, and I think if you were to go and talk to, you know, the foundations, like for Carrie Fisher, and offer them a 15% royalty off of the earnings, they would probably be open to those type of things. If you’re a great negotiator, you could probably get it done for 5% or if you’re working with some, super celebrity, you may pay as much as 50% but this type of licensing deals are fairly normative. And somebody who’s,got experience working with talent agencies and those type of things, I would expect a nice 15% licensing fee would be right in there.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So what do you think consumers think about the idea of AI narration? Where do you think they are thinking? Do you think they’re receptive to it? Or do you feel like consumers are kind of split on that issue?
Bryan Heathman
Well, it’s a nuanced question. So, you know, if you look at a catalog like audibles catalog, which has about 300,000 titles in it, and that’s an estimate, and you look at the total number of books up on Amazon, which may be 48 million, that’s an estimate as well. But these numbers probably aren’t too far off. There’s a lot of books out there that just haven’t, you know, the publishers just haven’t gotten around or can’t afford to or, you know, are no longer actively working that catalog. So there’s a ton of books out there that just haven’t been narrated. So if I’m a consumer and my favorite series of books now can get narrated, that’s a pretty big benefit, so you’re now producing more content in a format that I strongly prefer to things that normally weren’t available to me. So there’s that. I think some consumers are going to feel like aI voices are a little mechanical, and that’s a valid concern. And so there’s a balancing act between what consumers feel about audiobooks and what the reality is. So are they okay with a kind of mechanical voice if they can take their favorite series of novels and produce them, I don’t know. I don’t know about these catalogs because I haven’t looked it up. But, you know, when I was a kid, I used to work on a farm and when I was working on the farm, I had long periods of time where I was sitting idle, and I’d read books, and the books that I were reading were written by an author named Louis L’Amour, and there were Western novels. So I’m working on a ranch, and I’m reading Western novels. And so it was kind of fun. But you know, if those catalogs have not been converted to audio, that’s a big opportunity for people who are like me driving a truck, or, you know, they’re driving a truck today, and they would love to have that same type of experience. That would be quite additive, I think. Joshua Tallent Yeah, well, and I think the lack of audio content, if you consider the smaller number of audiobooks compared to the massive number of print books, or even ebooks that are produced every year, a million traditional books or so, 800 to a thousand to a million traditional published books every year, plus another three million self published titles. Not having audio for that actually is leaving a lot of people kind of looking for good content. It totally makes sense. I kind of wonder if audiobooks, AI-narrated audiobooks will become the dime store novel of the of the publishing world in a sense, right? If we sell them for a little bit less money, because we know that the narration is not necessarily as good as a real person, but you have the content. It’s available. You can listen to it. It’s more accessible for people who can’t read a physical book, or even an ebook. There’s things like that that just make it a little bit more, you know, appealing. Mayb that’s the way the industry will go with these books.
Joshua Tallent
The dime store novelty item.
Bryan Heathman
Well, the dime store novel, right? Back in the day, the kind of cheaper printed, you know, mass market paperback, it’s AI-narrated, but it’s available. That’s the most important thing, right? That kind of leads into a great conversation around the economics of this. I think if a publisher is listening to this, and they’re generally interested in AI and audiobooks, but, you know, they want some specific numbers. I’d love to share some numbers that I’ve researched because I think it might be relevant for people. If you are that publisher out there that’s sitting on that Louis Lamar catalog with 200 books that haven’t been produced into audiobooks yet, you know, these are the type of things to think about. So when I look at audiobooks generated by AI, they kind of fall into three types of buckets. One bucket would be to go to a company like DeepZen. They were one of the innovators, originally, but way back in, what was it, 2018, when this thing started coming mainstream, about six and a half years ago. But DeepZen, you know, they’ve got hundreds of voices to choose from. The cost per finished hour for a 10 hour audiobook will run you about $1,290 using their service. Whereas, if you were to go out and hire just a non celebrity narrator, that production cost would be anywhere from $3,500 maybe up to $5,000, if you’re doing a one off. If you’ve got an audiobook recording studio like myself, and you’ve got narrators coming out of the woodwork, you can get it done for less than $3,500 but anyway, that just kind of gives you a comparison. $3,500 for a narrator, about $1,300 using a service like DeepZen. There’s a company out there called AuthorVoices.ai, and they’re offering a service for a 10 hour audiobook that you can get out the door for about $690, which is pretty good. But Made for Success, we were an early adopter way back in 2005 in the audiobook space, and we’re a little bit of a early adopter in a lot of these things, and we’ve built our workflow where we can now get our production cost for an audiobook down as low as to about $120 a title.
Joshua Tallent
What? Oh, my goodness.
Bryan Heathman
Ridiculously low amount. Now, that assumes that we have an ePub file, so it assumes that somebody’s produced an ebook. Joshua, we talked about this yesterday, and that the whole ebook conversion is kind of a commoditized service now. So it’s $700 to produce an ebook file, but assuming that you’ve got an ePub file. Made for Success, we’re commercializing audiobooks right now for about $120 a title with a shared revenue model, so taking kind of this early adopter approach and making this available to people who are doing volumes of catalogs at a rate that’s difficult to pass up and I see this as a short term thing. Joshua, you were talking about jumping into the EPUB conversion space years ago, back when it was early, got commoditized, and then it was no longer viable. I’m seeing that day today for AI audiobook narration. There’s a very short term window to do this. Pretty soon it will be commoditized, but we’re very eager to work with publishers now to do mass catalog conversion. If the timing is right.
Joshua Tallent
Well, that’s awesome. There’s lots of resources available, I’m assuming, to publishers who are looking at this. Any specific resources you feel like need to be called out that you haven’t talked about so far?
Bryan Heathman
Well, you know, I did this talk at the Publishers Innovation Forum. If anybody is interested in getting a copy of the research that I did, I would encourage you to just come to madeforsuccess.com/contact. Leave a note at our general contact form, and I can send you a copy of the PDF for the presentation. That would be interesting so you can get some of this research on the cost per finish hours. That’s one piece. And then a list of about a dozen or so companies that are active in the AI space. Also, if there’s folks out there that do have catalog conversion on their mind and they want to have a conversation, I would love to invite that conversation. Madeforsuccess.com/contact is best way to get a hold of me to set up a call.
Joshua Tallent
Cool. Yeah, we’ll put a link in the show notes. I really appreciate you joining me today, Bryan, it’s been great talking to you. This is a really interesting stuff, so thanks for coming on the show.
Bryan Heathman
Yeah, yeah. You bet this is a pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation as well.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, and I encourage everyone to reach out to Bryan. Get some thoughts and ideas going in. AI narration, man, it’s not going away. So just taking advantage of the new tools is always very important. That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating in Apple Podcast or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast, and also please share it with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at Joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.