Tell Me a Story from James W. Ziskin

 If you listen to audio versions of books, do you also read them? Why or why not? Or do you never listen and, if not, why not?

I love audiobooks. I listen to them every chance I get. There’s something of a group activity feel to it. Maybe audiobooks remind me of my mother reading to me when I was a child. Or maybe I’m just a slow, lazy reader. Whatever the reason, I like to be read to in the car or at home after a long day of work.

Often, when writer friends ask me to read their books for a possible blurb, I make use of MS Word’s Read Aloud function to listen. Or sometimes I use Speechify, an app that offers dozens of voices to read your content. Neither platform is perfect, but they both provide natural-sounding narrators. Sure, they mispronounce some words and occasionally mess up the stress or rhythm, but they’ve come a long way from the old days of robotic, monotone voices.

Word and Speechify are also great editing tools. I’ve often sung the praises of listening to your work while revising. It’s the best editing tool since spellcheck. You’ll catch hundreds of errors, I promise. In fact, I’ve been talking about the advantages of listening to your work in Word for a few years now. So much so that our own Gabriel Valjan has coined a verb to describe this practice: "to Ziskin," as in, “Oh, you’re editing your latest book? Have you Ziskin-ed it yet?”

Machine voices are good and getting better all the time, but I don’t believe they’ll ever reach a level that human performers can produce. Still, there’s a place for text-to-speech software. When no audiobook is available, I’m happy to use them. 

Since we’re discussing audiobooks this week, I thought it might be fun and instructive to share some samples. Here’s a clip (from Word) from my latest book, The Prank, currently out on submission. You’ll notice the narrator is pretty good, but she’s too perky, given the tone and subject matter of the story. 

I actually prefer the voices that come with a program called Speechify. Here’s the same clip (from Speechify). I like this one better. I find it’s more natural, even if the narrator occasionally missteps. Take a listen.

Here’s a clip from my short story, “The Twenty-Five-Year Engagement” (In League with Sherlock Holmes, King and Klinger, Pegasus 2020). I think you’ll agree that the masterful

performance of voice artist Stefan Rudnicki is far superior to anything software can produce. He’s a brilliant actor with a beautiful voice. He gave me yet another reason to feel proud of this story, which was a finalist for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards in 2021.

Here’s a clip from my 2020 novel, Bombay Monsoon, narrated by Keith Jedlicka. Clearly, human actors like Keith and Stefan make better audiobooks than any software can.

But, as stated above, not all books get the full human audiobook treatment, so here’s a Speechify clip of another short story of mine, “Prisoner of Love.”

Please share your thoughts on audiobooks and text-to-speech below. I’d love to hear a good, spirited debate.