I got another story completed today. The editing process is decent, and the credits system - which I hated at first - has actually given me a good incentive to get the stories edited and ready for recording.
Here's a screen shot of Eleven Labs.
The way it's done with the different character voices is, action/ narration has to be a line, then dialogue has to be a separate line. That's essentially how you choose which parts are read by different characters.
Also, it's cool getting to the end of it and seeing how many voiced characters there are per story. Sometimes it doesn't feel like it's as many as it turns out to be, here for example, there were 11 characters in what I thought was maybe 5, or 6.
Anthology Series
Before all of this, I had the intention of releasing these shorts stories as Anthology collections, and publishing them. But, now that I'm editing them properly for release, I'm moving full steam ahead with that idea.
Gathering a following online will be good for that also, as at least there's more of a chance of having some people ready for when it's self-published - which is arguably one of the hardest things to have when it comes to new authors publishing their work.
Editing
The editing process is fairly streamlined and fast with the way I'm doing it currently.
I go on this site called Natural Reader, which is a no sign up, free to use text to speech site, there is a paid version with better voices, but the normal Microsoft Sam style voice is fine for what I need.
Using that, I'm able to listen to it and pause and edit whenever something doesn't flow right, or if I think of something a bit better. Once I run through that process I take the text into Eleven Labs and start separating it all.
3 stories down so far, and I'd say about 10-15 stories will be more than enough for 1 Anthology Collection. By time they release we'll be about 1-1.5 years into posting these and if by then I don't have a following of some capacity I'm screwed.
