Six Steps to Set up an audiobook for (nearly) free

This is the first step on my six steps to relaunch a book.
Because this is an experiment I’m using AI voices from Amazon.

This is the quickest, and cheapest way to convert an existing book to an audio format. Fiction and business books do really well as audiobooks, travel books not so well — after all, if you are travelling wouldn’t you like to see the information?

Before you start you need your book content available to cut and paste — Generate the latest version of the book as an .rtf file. I would have preferred a text file, but that isn’t possible from the application I use to format my books.

Six Steps to Set up an audiobook for (nearly) free

1. Set up an AWS account with Amazon, with an S3 tier. Set up a bucket for your audio files.
2. Select Amazon Polly the AI audio application from Amazon.
   Select the voice you prefer, in a variety of languages — in English alone there are US, British, Australian and Indian. I recorded all four and asked my launch team which one they preferred.
3. Start recording by cutting…