How K.E. Filmmaker produces full-cast audiobooks of novels he cannot read aloud

The Next Minute: A Dead Writer's Guide to Saving the Universe is a satirical sci-fi comedy. Frank is a sarcastic writer whose ordinary life ends in a Starbucks. An AI woman named Penny injects him and sends him into a bizarre afterlife, where he's picked for a mission to break an ancient system that traps beings in endless cycles of life, death, and memory wipes. Along the way, he starts to question what freedom really means.

It's for adult readers and listeners who like their science fiction funny, a little irreverent, and willing to ask big questions about life and existence. If you enjoy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy kind of humor, this one is for you.

Something most people don't know about me: I can't read. I have a condition called pure alexia. I write my books, but reading them aloud myself isn't an option, and hiring a human narrator for every book adds up fast. Narration Box changed that.

For The Next Minute, I didn't want one voice reading the whole thing. I wanted it to feel like a show. So I gave the narrator and each main character their own voice, which ended up being a cast of five. I'd listen through each chapter, fix any words that came out wrong, adjust the pacing where a joke needed a beat, and move on. What would have taken months and a lot of money with a studio took a fraction of the time, and I had complete control over how every line sounded.

Once the audio was finished, I uploaded it, using a service called INaudio, which distributes it to a wide range of audiobook stores and libraries, so listeners can find it pretty much wherever they get their audiobooks.

My second narrated novel was Karen: A Detective, the President, and an Alien. It's a comedy about a detective with no verbal filter whose brother happens to be the President of the United States. When an alien ship parks over the Washington Monument and the President makes every wrong decision, they call Karen.

The second time around, everything went faster. I already knew how I liked to set up the voices, which settings worked for comedy timing, and what to listen for when checking each chapter. The first book was me learning the tool. The second book was me just making the audiobook.

It went so well that I kept going. I've since narrated two more novels with Narration Box, Dead Trial and Pages: The Bookstore That Already Knows Your Next Page. Now when I finish a novel, the audiobook isn't a someday project. It's simply the next step.

It's been great. The voices sound natural, the tools are easy to use, and I can produce audiobooks I'm proud of without a big budget or a recording booth.

And your team's help and support has been fantastic. Whenever I've had a question, I got a quick, friendly answer that actually solved the problem. That makes a huge difference when you're an independent author doing everything yourself.

For an author like me, who can't read his own books out loud, Narration Box hasn't just been convenient. It's opened a door that was closed.