You read your books out loud for editing anyway, right?

Need another reason to create your audiobook?

How about: you already read it aloud.

Hit the record button.

Boom! You’re almost there.

Let’s see, add a second of silence to the beginning, four seconds to the end, upload and you have yourself an audiobook.

You think I’m joking.

I’m not.

People ask me how difficult it is to record and produce your audiobook. It can be this easy. Does that mean it’s always this easy and it’s this easy for everyone? Of course not. But my point is: it can be done.

Hearing your book read aloud gives you a different perspective.

When you re-read through your book for editing, you hear your own voice and it flows (hopefully!) along with your own style. But when you read it out loud (no, really, as in: someone could hear you sitting next to you, no whispering or mouthing the words!), you hear it, you experience it, you take it in differently.

You might see new twists, discover new ways to say something, hear that you’ve repeated the word “that” at least 87 times in the past 20 pages.

I know. You don’t really want to hear that you need to possibly re-publish your book. No one wants to hear that. But then there’s this question:

Do you want the best version of your book or just the last version that you just had to get off your desk?

In case that answer slipped your memory, let me remind you: you want the best version of your book.

So how to get there? Read it aloud.

Oh, it’s already published? You have a few options:

1. Improve: read it aloud, fix and improve where needed. Re-publish.
2. Cringe: read it aloud, close your ears for the parts that are cringe-worthy, and produce as is.
3. Blink: close your eyes, forget the audiobook was even an option and do all of this for your next book.

Now that you’re convinced that reading your book aloud is a good idea, why don’t you just get a microphone and … see what happens? What’s the worst that can happen? It sounds terrible, you sneeze and mumble and you check off the box that you were ever going to be a professional narrator. Best case scenario? You have yourself an audiobook.

Boom. Just. Like. That.

I’m not the only one who thinks so:

• The Value of Reading Your Book Aloud — You’re probably thinking “That will take forever.”  It will, and that’s the point. Writer’s Digest
• Edit By Reading Aloud . . . Forward and Backward — Reading aloud helps you find clumsy or ungrammatical passages. Any time the reader stumbles over a phrase or repeat ideas, you know something’s wrong. The Elements of Writing
• The (Secret) Way Bestselling Authors Edit Their Writing — Yeah, I know. It sounded insane to me at first too. My editor told me to do this on my first book, and I ignored him. I had looked at that stupid manuscript at least 25 times. I thought there was no way I could improve anything…until I recorded the audiobook. Tucker Max for Book in a Box

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