My Broken Sci-Fi Book: What I Learned From Turning K.I.A. Into An Audiobook
- Mar 19
- 8 min read
[SPOILER ALERT: This article has details about my novella, K.I.A. You probably haven’t read it, and I kind of trash talk it in this article, so you’re probably fine reading this article anyway. But if you’re as much a spoilerphobe as I am, I’d appreciate it so much if would subscribe to my email list, get a free download of the novella, give it a quick read, and come back.]
tldr; While I still like the concept of my novella, this post outlines the flaws I discovered in my book and plans for changes to the next edition.
Last month, like Edison learned how not to make lightbulbs, I also learned a lot of ways not to write and publish a novella. I knew it was a flawed book on some level, but was kind of blind to how bad it was.
When Eleven Reader announced an audiobook contest, I thought it was serendipity. I knew how to use ElevenLabs.io’s platform from having created the audiobook version of two non-fiction books I’ve written and published. It seemed like:
A (a novella I’ve already written) plus B (a publishing contest with an imminent submission deadline) equaled: a golden opportunity!
It was a golden opportunity…for me to learn a lot.
This involved uploading my book to ElevenLabs and futzing around with the AI voice paragraph by paragraph, line by line, sometimes word by word until it sounded good...or as close to good as I could get.
During that process, I learned:
K.I.A. is a broken sci-fi book with many rough edges I have yet to knock off.
Even from a basic line-editing standpoint, it needed a lot of work. For example, I used the phrase ‘and then’ 22 times in the previously published draft. So clunky! That’s now down to 4 in the current release.
I also removed the first couple of paragraphs. When I wrote them, they felt folksy and painted a picture in my minds. Ultimately, I realized they did not move the story forward. My wife didn't like how it started, so I knew I was in trouble. Bye "Andersons."
The cover kinda sucks even though it looked cool at the time.
I told you I’d tell you when I used AI, and that art is one of those things I’m okay creating with AI. When I whipped up the K.I.A. cover, I thought it was pretty cool. It’s gritty with just a little eeriness, and looks kinda near-futuristic, which is what I was going for.
Looking at it with fresh eyes after studying more cover design, it doesn’t feel like a sci-fi cover really, and it shows none of the supernatural elements—or even the sci-fi elements, really—that would set it apart from some kind of military thriller action-novel.
I also learned a lot of people are very anti-AI when it comes to imagery and they make a lot of assumptions about the quality of the content if they see a cover design that feels auto-generated from ChatGPT and the like.
To me, the text treatment of K.I.A. is a dead giveaway of AI production—not because the text was derpy like last year’s AI made when it output text, but because it lacked the style and layout chops of a good human cover designer’s work. Yes, the text kinda glowed in a cool way, but in terms of placement, spacing, sizing, etc, the title especially is just kind of hanging out there.
So, that’s probably why it hasn’t grabbed attention as I’d hoped it would. The Live and Impersonated temporary cover is much better than K.I.A.’s cover. I’m going to improve that with the next edition.
AI narration has many limitations.
It’s not ready for primetime for a lot of novels. Voice talent is a human skill that will take a while for the tech to replace. I think you can get it there, but K.I.A.’s multi-character, dialogue-heavy narrative presented the AI narrator some major challenges. It just read through the parts with one voice and very little differentiation. The only way it worked was for me to add in a lot of dialogue attribution, and I don’t think that improves the story or listening experience.
I thought, “Well then, I’ll just use different voices for the different parts like a full-cast version of popular books!”
Then I realized I hate those audiobooks. My already-broken sci-fi book doesn't need multiple narrators on top of everything else.
The different voices popping in and out radio drama-style has always pulled me out of the listening experience. I didn’t want that for the listener who was reading K.I.A., so I decided to work the audio studio as best I could and add in dialogue attribution only when it was absolutely necessary. I made the deadline for the audiobook contest but didn’t win. I think I’m kind of glad.
It's fun having Burt Reynolds and other iconic voices read my own book to me but that wasn’t the goal of publishing it on Eleven Reader, and the Burt on Eleven Reader doesn’t do a great job at voicing women and non-white characters.
[note: ElevenLabs’s latest Eleven v3 model has a “+ add Speaker” feature that I haven’t played with.]
More research is needed. More editing is needed.
I started my writer mentorship program with Story Grid this month. I’ve already learned some fundamental writing skills I didn’t know I was missing. I feel like I’m talented at stringing sentences together, but I think I have a lot to learn about storytelling. The good news is, I’m improving very quickly.
The bad news is that I’m embarrassed about K.I.A.
For a brief period last month, I thought about yanking K.I.A. off my website and Eleven Reader. Then I realized that this is part of being an author: your new work will almost always be better than your past work—at least when it comes to work you put effort into publishing.
K.I.A. needs more work. I need to build out Cowboy more as a character for one thing. What does he want in the beginning of the story, and how does that change after the inciting incident of the story? As it stands, I have to say that it doesn’t really. He doesn’t really change other than dying—just hangs in there as the story progresses around him most of the time. That needs to change.
I need to do more background research as well. My new writing mentor is a retired Army Ranger and he gave me some great guidance on how someone becomes a Ranger and what’s involved in joining the Delta Force versus Special Forces. I learned that Lt. Maria Rodriguez probably needs to be a Staff Sergeant instead of a lieutenant, and that means editing all of her character name references when the other members of the squad call her “L.t.” No biggie, but kind of embarrassing.
I did some research about Buddhism for the books when I moved the story to Mongolia (the first draft had it in the Middle East somewhere). Buddhism is very common in the area, so I decided to incorporate the spiritual ideas of that religion into the afterlife narrative of the story. I did some research…but could probably stand to do some more to make sure that the story is as palatable to a Buddhist as I can make it.
Speaking of culture, there’s another major piece I need to work through: how will people who aren’t white 40-something men like me react to the book? I purposely put in racist remarks from some of the characters. I think it’s interesting that racism is tolerated a lot in microcosms of American culture, and I find it fascinating how some racism is tolerated while other racist language is not.
I find the friction between these microcosms even more interesting than this apparent dissonance within them. In the scene with Dwayne in the truck where he uses a racial slur, he’s confronted by Doobie about the racism. Doobie asks if Dwayne’s going to start calling him a n***** next, then verbally approves the use of other slurs that he feels are acceptable when referring to enemy Chinese forces. He's one of the good guys, but he's bigoted.
This also makes me think of how popular culture seems to have gone back to fat-shaming and overall abuse of obese people in comedy. That wasn’t okay a while back…now it is, especially if you’re speaking to your microcosm of society about a person who is a member or leader of an “enemy” microcosm. I’m curious why we’re okay with that—not judging—I’m truly curious about why we ignore our social mores when there’s a conflict at hand.
Curiosity aside, I want to present these characters as honesty as I can while also acknowledging that I grew up in a slice of Minnesota that was not ethnically diverse in the slightest. I am sure I’m very naïve in some of these areas of cultural sensitivity, and I think I’d be a fool not to get the feedback from all relevance cultural POVs as I can.
Maybe I should I rewrite the entire thing.
I have to ask myself, should I rewrite the entire thing, ditching the pseudo-epistolary present tense from beyond schtick? Initially, I started writing K.I.A. as an experiment. I had never written anything in present tense before and just wanted to try it. I had this idea about an army unit getting stranded in a temple where dying there meant you were trapped and sort of enlisted in a supernatural war as well, so I wrote that as the story for the present tense experiment. It kinda worked…until Cowboy talks about turning into a ghost.
Then why is it present tense after that point? Well, after listening to my son tell story after story about his day verbally using present tense, I thought, “well, that’s kinda how some people talk, so maybe it works anyway?”—as long as the main character is talking to someone and telling the story.
That’s where the idea behind the opening and closing of the story came in. I saw the main character talking to his would-be girlfriend Patrick-Swayze-to-Demi-Moore-style. It kinda, almost works, kinda…but I wonder if it’ll be a lot stronger as a novella if I just lose the whole notion of present tense and epistolary narrative altogether. I think it will.
I need you to hang with me, please.
While I’m on this journey to become a better writer, I think I’ll have a ton more revelations about how bad some of my old writing was. I know that’s been the case before, so it should come as no surprise to me that it’s happening now. It’s just more public now because I’m asking for people to take time to read my work for their entertainment—even asking them to give me money for their trouble in the case of this new Eleven Reader version of K.I.A.
It’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly and it’s going to extend to the rest of my writing life. Thank you for your grace and support along the way. Having a willing reader is what make writing fiction exhilarating!
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