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Planned Audiobooks for 2025


Rather than an author, I consider myself a story-teller, and a story can be told in many ways.

My plan since the inception of Undelund Tales is to make the stories available in the most optimal formats; one of those being via audiobooks or in a streaming format to be listened to on websites like YouTube or services like Spotify.

Professional Voice Actor Narration:

In an ideal world this would be always my first choice. Nothing beats having other people read a manuscript, add their own twist to a character, and spice things up as they go along. In the future, I'd like all the stories be be narrated and voiced this way; at the moment though it's too cost-prohibitive.

Fully-automated services:

Narration service provide an easy method of making stories available as audiobooks; however, the downside from my perspective is that (at the time of writing), there is no means for story-tellers to 'proof-listen' to the story before it's made available to ensure it's up to scratch.

Being unable to 'proof-listen' runs the risk of place names and characters being mispronounced or there being a lack of emphasis or inflection when required.

Manual Optimisation and Conversion with AI Tools:

There are now numerous ways of having a story narrated and my preferred method is to optimise the manuscript and manually process it using ElevenLabs. After creating the audio and exporting it, I make additional adjustments to ensure the narration and dialog flow smoothly.

The optimisations keep the core of the story, but the tweaks are there to add clarity when required or remove excess wording when not required. Additionally, some stories will have subtle sound effects added for extra spice.

Additionally, this service allows for the pronunciation of place names and characters to be corrected manually prior to optimisation.

The first story under going this conversion is Meet Chompy which is due to be released in the summer in ebook and audio versions to begin with and then added to the print-only 'Beasties - Collection 1' in the autumn.

As a taster of what the 'manually optimised' stories will sound like, here are two excerpts from Meet Chompy: one is from Grandma Jeeky, and the other from Cousin Flanagan.

Grandma Jeeky mentions her 'peculiar appearance' to houseguest Kozmo:


Cousin Flanagan reveals a traumatic incident from her past:


During the summer, I plan on having the following three stories released using the 'manually optimised' method, these are:

By the end of 2025, I'm planning to have at least three more stories converted, and at the time of writing these are shortlisted to be:

As always, the Undelund Tales website provides the latest details on what is available, in what format, and where. Further updates will also be provided on this blog.



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