Hi there! I’m Mike Kraus, and you’re probably here because you’re wondering what, exactly, a “Professional Voice Clone” is. Here’s some information about that – and audiobooks in general – below.

Audiobooks cost a LOT of money to create. A 100,000 word book will be around 11 or 12 hours in length, and the minimum price you have to pay for a mediocre to decent narrator is around $250 per hour. If you want a narrator who’s got some experience and name-recognition it can cost three hundred, four hundred, five hundred – even upwards of a thousand dollars an hour. So for a single 100,000 word book, it costs the author or publisher a few thousand dollars MINIMUM and generally a lot more. Expand that out to a series and you’re talking about some serious cash.

To help make it affordable for me to keep releasing audiobooks, what I’ve done is interesting and slightly controversial in this day and age. I’m using some pretty advanced tech and I’ve had my voice virtually cloned, and am using that cloned voice to record the audio for some of my audiobooks. This lets me put out audiobooks that are a LOT cheaper to produce but don’t have an incredibly artifical or robotic feel to them like you might hear from an Instagram or TikTok video. It’s still not one hundred percent perfect – character voices won’t always be consistent, and some cadences and intonations will be off from time to time. Still, though, when I listen to the books produced in this way, it’s amazing how good they sound.

While the audio in the books sound remarkably like me, it’s all computer-generated, which can sometimes lead to some hiccups here or there. There might be a mispronounced word or a line said in an odd tone that goes beyond a slightly off cadence or intonation. Little things like that. If you notice any such issues, just send me an email and let me know which book it occurs in, what chapter the line was in, and a timestamp of where the error occurred – you can refer to the app you listen to this audiobook on for that information.

I’ll keep track of those errors and periodically fix them and update the files when I do so, so that you and future listeners will have a better, more error-free experience.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy your audiobook!