BLOGS FOR 2026
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6TH JANUARY 2026
Editing your Kindle Document for “Virtual Voice” Audiobooks on Amazon KDP and Audible
Happy new year everyone! Continuing the theme of my extremely few and far between blog posts, here is my first for 2026. I only blog when I have something to talk about. Recently, Amazon KDP gave me the chance to be a Beta tester for their new “Virtual Voice” audiobook creator, to make your Kindle books into audiobooks on Audible. As I’m writing they’re only available on Amazon.com (USA), but I’m hoping they’ll push them out to other countries in the future, so my UK, Canada and Australian readers can purchase the audiobooks.
I’m assuming that you’re familiar with publishing Kindles already, so know the terminology that I’ll be using.
As usual, I threw myself into creating the first audiobook for the Space Navy series, book one, “Josiah Trenchard and the Might of Fortitude”… and I made LOTS of mistakes. Since then, I’ve developed a process, which I’ll explain below. The Virtual Voice AI isn’t as good as getting an actor to read your books, but with a little care, they can sound pretty good. It’s allowing me to offer audiobooks without the expense of hiring an actor and spending hours in a recording studio. That said, the AI pronunciation is limited, so you’ll have to work to make it sound right.
1) Choose a voice.
There are lots of accents available. I went for “British English 8” because it’s a deep, male, English voice that sounds a little like how I imagine my character Josiah Trenchard to sound. You can always change this later, so don’t worry if you don’t like the first one you choose.
2) Listen through your whole document first!
When you start the process of creating an audiobook from your Kindle document, you’ll get a page with options for the voice, pricing, and KDP Select enrolment. This stuff is all fairly straightforward if you’ve already published Kindles before. Once you’ve chosen those, scroll to the bottom and click on “Open Virtual Voice Studio”. It will take a moment the first time as it converts your file. Once you’re in, do not, I repeat DO NOT start messing about with pronunciations, adding a pause, reading speed or anything just yet. Here’s why…
When I first started to hear my book back, I found loads of mistakes. Hearing the book read out loud gives you a different perspective than simply reading a document. Misspelled words, wrong grammar, missing punctuation etcetera leap out at you. So, bite the bullet, open your manuscript in Word, and as you listen to your book, correct any mistakes in your original document. This will take ages AND you’ll have to listen to the book all through again later, but trust me. This is the best thing to do. I wasted all of my pronunciation changes to the audiobook the first time because I had to correct so much and republish the Kindle.
3) Republish your Kindle document.
Once you have eliminated all the typos and spelling mistakes, check your contents page is correct or the Virtual Voice Studio (VVS) might get your chapters wrong. Now republish your Kindle book, taking care to check your product description, as when I did mine, KDP lost all my carriage returns and all my text ran into itself as one big block. Once republished, open VVS again and it will re-import your document. Now you’re ready for the fun bit!
4) Editing your audiobook.
In VVS you have control of three things, pauses, pronunciation and voice speed.
PAUSES: I find I need to add a medium pause after “Chapter 1” and before “The Story Begins”. You can add pauses anywhere, but I fund it works best after a full stop or a line break. If you put a pause after a comma, it tends to glitch the sentence.
VOICE SPEED: You can alter the speed of a word or a line or a whole paragraph. I find single words don’t work very well and if you go 50% slower or faster it can sound weird. This can be good if you want a robotic sounding voice though.
PRONUNCIATION: You’ll use this feature mainly with names. For example, I have a character called “Mabius”. The AI emphasises the “a” so it sounds like “Maahbeeuss”. Highlight the word you want to change and then you can experiment with phonetic pronunciation. So, to get Mabius to sound right, I use “Maybeeus”. You just have to try different things and sometimes, you just can’t get it to sound right and have to live with it. You can apply this change to one word, or every occurrence of that word in the book.
Sometimes the AI simply can’t cope and gets lost. For instance, it pronounces “Conn.” (the bit you command a ship from) as “Connecticut”, so I have to change the pronunciation to “Con”.
The AI sometimes doesn’t emphasise the right word in a sentence. I’ve discovered that putting the word in CAPS in your original document will sometimes fix this. For example, “He yelled STOP at the running man.” But this doesn’t always work and you might not want the capitalisation in your book.
5) Publish your audiobook.
When you’re as happy as you can be with your audiobook (you won’t be able to get everything right, so you’ll just have to live with it), hit publish. The audiobook will appear as a buying option next to your Kindle within seventy two hours on Amazon USA. Incidentally, they will also appear as alternate editions of your book on Goodreads.
That’s it. If you do nothing else, take note of step 2). It will save you a lot of heartache. Happy audiobook creating.
Honour, strength and unity!
Jon 😉
To hear a sample of my book as a Virtual Voice audiobook, click on the link below...
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