A Cautionary Reflection

A fool and his money are soon parted, the saying goes. This time, I was the fool. Here is what happened.

I recently self-published a novel—my fourth in 12 years. I won’t share the title because I’m not writing this to sell books. I’m writing it as a warning to my fellow indie writers.

My novel went on sale last November on both the Barnes & Noble and Amazon websites. It wasn’t long before I began to be deluged by would-be promoters and influencers offering to “help” me market it. Your novel isn’t getting visibility. It isn’t showing up in searches. I can fix that. I hadn’t experienced anything like this with my earlier books—at least not at this volume.

Many of these people told me they loved my book. The odd thing was that none of them seemed to have read it. There were no specifics about the characters or the plot—nothing that suggested an actual encounter with the pages.

Still, I did my due diligence and looked them up online. A few seemed plausibly legitimate, and I responded—just to see. Most wanted to “collaborate” or “partner” with me, for an upfront fee. Red flag No. 1. No, that’s not going to happen.

One posed as a blogger. When I visited the blog, I noticed that the blogger’s email address differed by a single character from the address the pitch came from. I alerted the real blogger that someone was impersonating her. She was aghast. At least I felt I’d done one good deed.

Others took a craftier approach, posing as fellow authors or as leaders of book clubs. They seemed more researched, offering details about my novel. But those details could be lifted from the cover copy or the sample pages on retail sites. Again, there was a money angle. Again, I investigated. At best, it all felt suspicious.

My undoing came when I decided to produce an audiobook through Audible’s ACX service (acx.com).

The book wasn’t taking off, and I was naturally frustrated. A few people suggested an audiobook. One of them was an old high school friend who narrates books as a side hustle. He told me he used ACX to find work and urged me to visit the site and listen to his samples.

One of the most compelling characters in my novel is a female AI avatar. After hearing my friend’s samples, I knew I wanted a woman’s voice to tell the story. I began browsing other talent on ACX and found a voice I liked.

The process began smoothly. The first few chapters arrived, and I was pleased. Hearing my story as spoken word was a thrill. About a third of the way in, though, small things started to nag at me: certain words were missing from the narration. When I checked the manuscript, I found the same words missing there, too—those dreaded typos. I assumed a human reader would instinctively supply the missing “a’s” and “the’s.” That was the moment it first occurred to me: maybe this wasn’t a person. Maybe it was software.

I have a blind friend who uses text-to-speech software to read his email. But it had been years since I’d heard it in action. This narrator’s voice seemed uncannily real, and it suited the story. I considered calling them on it. But by then we were halfway through the book, and I was enjoying the collaboration. The narrator and I were exchanging messages about pronunciations and inflections. Someone—at least someone on the other end of the account—was talking with me in detail about my work, and it scratched an old itch: the desire to be heard. I got caught up in it. And even if they were using software, I told myself, it fit the book’s theme. So, I let it go.

In the end, the novel was finished: 60 chapters and an epilogue, along with introductions, titles and credits. More than half the chapters required revisions, and there were 48 pages of back-and-forth between me and the narrator. Whether they used software didn’t seem to matter. A lot of work had gone into the project. And the book, after all, is about an AI avatar. Even if software had helped tell the story, I thought, it would only underscore it.

At this point in the ACX process, the narrator (or producer) gets paid. Once payment is verified, the book goes through quality assurance and then is distributed across platforms (Audible, Apple Books and others). In other words, the author has to pay before anything moves forward.

I paid the narrator. Two days later, ACX emailed to say the project had been pulled because the narrator used text-to-speech software to produce the audiobook. And you can guess the rest: the narrator vanished, and so did my money.

In that email, ACX pointed me to a page spelling out its policy on text-to-speech software. But throughout the process, I hadn’t realized such a prohibition existed. I went back to the site, and nowhere on the top-level “Getting Started” pages did it plainly state that text-to-speech narration was forbidden. Eventually I found the rule—tucked at the bottom of a page, easy to miss.

I wrote to ACX customer service and argued that the policy should appear in big, unmissable letters on the “Find Talent” page—where authors go to hire a narrator. I told them I was new to the process and that, as a paying customer, I didn’t feel protected. At the time of this writing, ACX has done nothing to address the problem.

So: live and learn. In a way, I was hoisted by my own petard. My novel is about a female AI avatar. And, in an ironic twist, a female AI voice was used to deceive me.

I called this a cautionary reflection. Here’s the reflection part.

In an essay in his book Fires, Raymond Carver writes about his first big break as a writer when, in his 30s, a short story of his was accepted by The New Yorker. The news arrived, he recalls, when his life was in the dumps. He was working a dead-end job, and he and his wife were struggling to raise two small children. The acceptance offered something he badly needed—validation.

That need for validation is, I think, what made me vulnerable—and what makes so many indie writers easy prey. Each of my novels took about three years to write. You spend long stretches alone in worlds you’ve created. When it’s done, you want to share it; you want someone to read your story. You want to talk with somebody about it, to hear what they liked and what they didn’t. The person behind that ACX account—real or not—gave me that experience. Validation.

From here on, I’ll try to be wiser. I hope some of you who read this will benefit from my mistake. As Ronald Reagan liked to say: trust, but verify.

A FOOTNOTE FOR MY BLOG READERS…

After much back-and-forth with ACX, which involved elevating matters to the executive level, I was finally able to obtain my audio source files. I have since managed to get the audiobook published on Apple Books. I’m hoping other vendors will follow. For those interested, the Apple Books link is on my home page.