How to make a full-cast audiobook with AI voices

Making an audiobook from scratch has always been a two-step problem. You need to decide how a book should sound and then do the mechanical work of making it sound that way. For the majority of authors, the second step is where project dreams fizzle out into inaction. 

This guide shows you how to make a full-cast audiobook from a finished manuscript in five easy steps. Every creative decision is made upfront, before you hit generate, and without the need for a recording studio, per-hour narration fee, or line-by-line cleanup. Whether it’s your first or 100th audiobook production, this is the guide for you.

Summary

• You make an audiobook in five quick steps: upload the manuscript, cast your characters, set pronunciations, set the pacing, and generate.
• ElevenCreative Audiobooks detects characters in your novel and proposes a voice for each.
• Each paragraph is assigned to a character, with each character having their unique voice.
• Populate a pre-constructed pronunciation dictionary for novel-specific proper nouns.
• Produce a full-cast audiobook in a fraction of the time.

What you need before you make a full-cast audiobook

Before you make an audiobook, you’ll need to have three things to work with. Everything else happens inside the creation flow.

Here’s what you need to make an audiobook:

• A finished manuscript: Any mistakes in your manuscript will carry over into your audiobook audio, meaning proofreading the entire book before processing is important. 
• A sense of character: An understanding of which characters form your main cast. If you don’t have a clear outline of characters, ElevenCreative Audiobooks automatically detects them from the text and proposes a cast for you.
• Character voice notes: While optional, having clear notes about what a character should sound like will help expedite the process. We’ll circle back to this in step 2.

Unlike the traditional process of making an audiobook, you don’t need editing skills or production experience to create a high-quality final audiobook. The ElevenLabs Audiobook flow will walk you through every choice you need to make in order, showing you how to iteratively build a compelling audio representation of your novel.

Here’s the step-by-step process you can use to make an audiobook with ElevenCreative.

Step 1: Upload your manuscript and select chapters

The first step to creating an audiobook is to upload your manuscript to ElevenCreative. We automatically parse the structure of your book, dividing it into sections and chapters based on what you upload. Having clear structural divides helps keep things organized both for you during the audiobook creation process and for your readers once the book is published.

After uploading, it’s time to select the chapters you want to work on. You could choose the entire book or start with a subsection, such as the first couple of chapters, to see how your characters feel in action.

At this stage, character detection and generation begins. ElevenCreative Audiobooks will read the text and identify which characters speak throughout, in preparation for the steps that follow.

Step 2: Cast your characters

This is where the new ElevenLabs flow departs from every audiobook process that came before it. Audiobooks infers the characters in your manuscript and finds the perfect voice for each one. With the Character Casting feature, casting for your audiobook transforms from a long, manual process into a single decision per character.

The pre-generated voice options provided for you are already filtered based on the character’s details in the text. Traits like their age, gender, tone, and narrative purpose will all help filter the voice library to match how the character reads on the page. We provide a shortlist of options that already fit the character.

Casting happens on your own novel’s text, allowing you to hear how each of the examples sounds when speaking lines of dialogue from your book. Recast a character once, and every paragraph they speak automatically updates.

Step 3: Set pronunciations once

ElevenCreative Audiobooks scans your manuscript for unusual names, places, and terms, and pre-fills a pronunciation dictionary with what it finds. You can assign a pronunciation once and watch as it’s applied across your entire audiobook. 

Consider a fantasy town in your novel called “Halynwn.” Without a dictionary entry, a narrator would only be guessing at how it’s properly pronounced. Once you’ve added it to the dictionary with a guide, it’ll be correct across the board.

Step 4: Direct the delivery

Pacing shapes how your audiobook feels, creating consistent rules across every generation. A literary fiction novel may take longer, more deliberate pauses between paragraphs or sections. A fast-paced thriller might land on the more rapid end of the spectrum. 

By making these decisions upfront, you bring a level of consistency to every single page, rather than repeating your editing configurations at the start of each chapter.

Step 5: Generate, review, and publish

With the cast of characters set and your voices ready to go, it’s time to generate your audiobook. For best results, review the output of each chapter. If you want to work on any line that doesn't sound right, you can regenerate that section by itself while keeping the rest of the book the same.

This step is only meant to be a quick editing pass, as the internal rules you laid out with pronunciation and pacing will have set the bar for consistency already.

When you’re completely happy with how your audiobook sounds, you can export it for distribution. Indie authors can also publish to the ElevenReader publishing page, where you can publish your audiobook and potentially earn as a publisher on the platform. Earnings depend on factors including use by paid subscribers. See our Terms for details.

What is a full-cast audiobook, and can you make one yourself?

A full-cast audiobook is where each character has a defined voice, instead of having a single narrator that performs every role. Dialogue plays out between different voices, while the narration itself has a distinct voice.

Traditionally, full-cast audiobooks were the most expensive to produce, only reserved for high-budget productions or specific audiobook editions. It meant you’d have to hire multiple actors, rent studio time for each of them, coach each one of them, and then coordinate with an audio designer to produce a final draft.

Character Casting by ElevenLabs changes the formula, allowing Audiobook flows to assign every paragraph to a character and every character to a voice. In just a few clicks, you’ll have a full-cast audiobook ready.

ElevenCreative is especially useful for any smaller publishing studios or authors who want to self-publish audiobooks. 

How much does it cost to make an audiobook?

If you go down the traditional route, professional narration is typically billed per finished hour (PFH). A full-length novel could potentially cost thousands of dollars once you add in studio time and professional editing. Costs scale directly with the length of a book, with full-cast productions being even more expensive.

AI audiobook production with ElevenCreative can reduce the cost of making an audiobook. You’ll also be able to produce an audiobook in significantly less time than traditional methods require. 

Audiobook production is available on every ElevenCreative tier. That said, generating an average-length book typically requires more than 100,000 credits, so the Creator plan ($22/month) is the most practical starting point for most self-publishers. Longer books or multiple titles per month may call for a higher tier.

An important note here is that there will always be a place for human narration in some productions. Some authors may want a performer’s specific interpretation of a character or may want the experience of working with a wider audiobook production team.

For everyone else, the barrier between a finalized manuscript and a finished audiobook is now only an ElevenCreative subscription.

Create your full-cast audiobook with ElevenCreative Audiobooks

Creating an audiobook, especially if you’re a first-time or small publisher, shouldn’t take a village. Instead of needing an entire cast of voice actors and an audiobook technician, you can create an audiobook in a fraction of the time with ElevenCreative.

Explore Audiobooks with ElevenCreative or sign up and start your first production today.

Creating a full-cast Audiobook FAQ