Producing AI-Narrated Audiobooks Using ElevenLabs With Simon Patrick

Is the high cost of audiobook production holding you back? What if you could create a high-quality audiobook for a fraction of the traditional cost?

In this conversation, Simon Patrick explores the world of AI narration with ElevenLabs, discussing how you can gain complete creative control, and even license your own voice clone for a new stream of income.

This episode is supported by my patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Simon Patrick founded Ten Times Better Books to support his daughter, Abby Patrick, as one of ElevenLabs' first users and beta testers. He has produced several of their most popular AI voices. He now develops courses and AI audiobook solutions for independent authors at Novel Productions.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Costs vs benefits of human vs AI narration
• Features of ElevenLabs — realistic and expressive voices, creative control, ownership of final audio files for wide distribution to platforms like Spotify.
• Practical tips for AI narration
• ElevenLabs v3 and emotion tags
• Creating and monetizing a voice clone
• Publishing on ElevenReader

You can find Simon at Novel.Productions or 10xb.com.

Transcript of the interview

Joanna: Simon Patrick founded Ten Times Better Books to support his daughter, Abby Patrick, as one of ElevenLabs' first users and beta testers. He has produced several of their most popular AI voices. He now develops courses and AI audiobook solutions for independent authors at Novel Productions. Welcome to the show, Simon.

Simon: Thank you, Joanna. It's such a joy to be speaking with you. Your podcast and books were foundational to my daughter, Abby, becoming an author and me learning to be her publisher and all that's happened since.

I love your Patreon @thecreativepenn. It's the best money I spend every month, frankly. It's just a great community to be part of, so it's such a joy to be sharing some of what I've learned.

Joanna: Oh, thank you so much. Behind the scenes on the Patreon, Simon has done a video demo of ElevenLabs. Today, obviously, we're doing audio-only. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about your background and why you decided to get into AI-narrated audiobooks.

Simon: Okay. Well, I've got 25 years of experience in marketing and design. I still am halftime head of communications for an international charity, but we've always had our own businesses too.

My wife and I ran a small home education tuition publishing business. We've home-educated our three kids, which brings me to Abby, my daughter who brought me into your world of book publishing.

She was going to college, studying early years education, and was just bored out of her mind. She asked if she could drop out of college to be a writer instead. She'd been writing a book since she was 15. To the astonishment of her friends and some of ours too, we said yes.

Let me add, it was responsible parenting. We made her finish the term, stick it out, and do the work experience. By Christmas 2019, she'd left to pursue finishing her book based on the deal that —

If she learned to write, I would learn to publish for her.

Joanna: Wow!

Simon: So I attended the first Self Publishing Show in that crazy spring of 2020. I think you were there too, just a few days before the pandemic shut us all down. I've listened to hundreds of your podcasts, read your books, done some of the Self-Publishing Formula courses, and learned to be Abby's publisher.

Since then, I have used those skills and connected with a few other authors, so I probably publish a book or two a month, something like that.

Audio has always been the stumbling block. I love audiobooks. As a family, we must consume hundreds of hours a month of them. There are incredible narrators like Ray Porter and Daniel Rigby, who self-narrates his own Audible exclusives, and my absolute favourite, a guy called Jeff Hayes, who narrates incredibly.

They're amazing talents, and I don't think AI is going to touch them because they bring so much humanity to the performance.

But to ordinary authors and publishers, those narrators are inaccessible. I don't even want to think about what they cost.

For Abby, who is still just starting out, any professional narration would cost her three to four thousand dollars for her books. The math just doesn't work. While there are options like a royalty split with ACX, Audible's publishing platform, I struggle with that.

Firstly, you're tied in exclusively to Audible for seven years, and we're big fans of going wide.

Secondly, you're only getting 20% of the royalties when it's being split. I just don't think for us, they're ever going to make that money back. So all of that is what led me in early 2023 to be searching for AI audio options.

ChatGPT was going crazy, you were demoing all of that at the time, and I figured there must be some kind of AI audio option that would let me take control of the process and hopefully produce good audiobooks way more cheaply than current options. That's when I discovered ElevenLabs.

Joanna: There's lots to unpack there. First of all, as you mentioned, there are some incredible human narrators, and we want to acknowledge them. I'm also a human narrator myself.

For most authors, especially indie authors or new authors, it's not a choice between human or AI; it's AI or nothing because they can't afford the fees.

As you said, a lot of the time you don't know if you're going to make the money back. So I think that's really important to acknowledge.

There are lots of AI narration options now. It is hard for authors to decide which platform to use.

So what is ElevenLabs, and why do you think it's the best option for quality and also for publishing reach?

You mentioned ACX, and there's obviously AVV, the Audible Virtual Voice. Most people might think, “Well, maybe I should just do that.”

Give us an overview on why you made that decision to go with ElevenLabs.

Simon: Absolutely. ElevenLabs continues to be the most realistic AI platform out there. They kicked off about two and a half years ago. I was one of their first users, and even back then, they were so much better than everything else.

There were lots of programmers wanting to do clever things with APIs and websites, but I just wanted to make audiobooks with these things. They were actually listening, which is remarkable in the publishing industry sometimes.

About a year and a half ago, and for reference, we're in June 2025 right now, they launched ElevenLabs Studio. It can take a whole book, like the ePub that I've worked on for Abby or a Word document, you can drop it in and have it convert it chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph into a great-sounding audiobook.

The high quality and natural-sounding elements of it are why I was first attracted to them. The expressiveness is just another step above.

The comparison with Amazon's Virtual Voice is that it's so much more pleasant to listen to, but it doesn't just sound better —

What I love about it is the complete creative control it gives me. There are thousands of voices I can pick from, a whole library of voices.

They're real people, people like me, actually, who have recorded their voice and then licensed it to ElevenLabs and get paid a small amount. Then when it's used, there's actually compensation to those who've licensed their voices to it.

It’s not like the large language models like ChatGPT where the whole universe seems to have been scraped and compiled into this thing. They're being super diligent about making sure it's all kosher, that it's real people's voices and they're getting compensated.

Beyond that, the tools they're building give you control. They're incredibly open to listening to feedback, which has been brilliant. I'm talking to the programmers regularly. They've got a great Discord where they're asking for feedback.

With the tools, I can spend time perfecting the book. I can get the dialogue just the way I want it. I can create a duet audiobook with a male narrator for male POVs and a female for female POVs. I can even do multi-cast and assign different voices to each character in the book.

Probably most importantly, I can download the whole thing as WAV files or MP3s.

The big difference with something like Amazon Virtual Voice is that I own what I've created with ElevenLabs.

It's a commercial license, so I can put them into BookFunnel's audio delivery service, I can put them on my website, you can add them to a Kickstarter, stick them on YouTube, or just give them away for free if I wanted to.

In terms of publishing reach, they're doing a lot. We were kind of stuck with either self-publishing, YouTube, or Kobo, who are superstars and super open. But one of the game changers that's happened in th