ElevenLabs AI Audiobooks: An Honest Review

Creating an audiobook used to mean either narrating it yourself (with all the technical challenges that entails) or paying thousands of dollars for a professional narrator. For many indie authors, especially those with extensive backlists, this made audiobooks an impossible dream.

Enter ElevenLabs — an AI-powered text-to-speech platform aiming to make audiobook creation accessible to everyone. Since its 2023 launch, it’s attracted authors across genres, from romance writer Leeanna Morgan, who’s produced over 20 audiobooks (saving around $85,000), to urban fantasy author Joseph Nassise, who’s released 16 titles (including two in Spanish).

But can AI narration really deliver a professional-quality audiobook? And is ElevenLabs worth the investment for indie authors? 

Here is the quick overview:

• 💸 Price: Plans start at $5, $22, and $99/month.
• 💻 Compatibility: Web-based via any browser.
• 👌 Best for: Indie authors on a budget, those with large backlists, and nonfiction writers expanding their reach.

📝 Verdict: ElevenLabs delivers impressively natural AI narration. You’ll spend quite some time fixing quirks and pacing, but you’ll get a professional-quality audiobook for a fraction of the usual cost.

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
Natural-sounding AI narration across 70+ languages Dramatically cheaper than professional narration ($99 vs $2,000-5,000) Voice cloning feature for personal touch Multi-narrator support for fiction Direct publishing to ElevenReader with 60% royalties	Requires significant editing time (10h-20h) Credits consumed quickly with revisions Some technical glitches consume credits "Use it or lose it" credit system ElevenReader still building its audience

Let’s get into the weeds.

Overview

ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation platform that converts text into natural-sounding speech. For authors, its main draw is the ability to easily and cheaply create audiobooks, podcasts, and other audio content.

The platform offers two main products: a Creative Suite for generating AI audio, and an Agents Platform for building AI voice assistants. I focused on the former — specifically, the audiobook creation tools.

When you first log in, you'll see a dashboard offering various voice-related products: text-to-speech conversion, voice cloning, and access to their library of AI voices. ElevenLabs' latest models support over 70 languages and a wide range of accents. 

The Studio (left panel) is where the magic happens — this is your workspace for creating audiobooks, podcasts, and video voiceovers.

Let's dive into the audiobook creation process.

Creating an AI audiobook

I tested ElevenLabs with chapters from two very different manuscripts: Ricardo Fayet's nonfiction How to Market a Book and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 

Creating an audiobook is pretty straightforward: upload your chapter, choose a narrator's voice, and let ElevenLabs do its thing.

Pro Tip: I recommend working chapter by chapter rather than uploading your entire manuscript at once. This makes editing more manageable and helps you learn the platform without burning through credits on a full book. 

Choosing the right voice

Before choosing the narrating voice, spend time browsing ElevenLabs' voice library. You can filter by age, gender, accent, and even tone (informative, friendly, dramatic, etc.).

Think of your audience. For How to Market a Book, targeting North American authors aged 25-50, I filtered for a young American male narrator with an informative, educational tone. After testing several options, I settled on "Matt" — a friendly voice that felt approachable without being overly casual.

The editing interface

Once ElevenLabs generates your audio, you'll land in the editing interface. This is where you'll spend most of your time fine-tuning the narration.

The output quality is impressive right out of the gate — ElevenLabs has clearly moved past the "uncanny valley" that plagued early AI voices. You can listen to it for hours, without getting too many icks. 

However, you'll still need to review your audiobook paragraph by paragraph to catch imperfections in pacing and pronunciation. For example, subheadings were often read too quickly, creating awkward transitions (which you can solve by adding 0.5-second pauses before and after them.) 

Or in one sentence reading "It's Amazon. And Barnes & Noble. And Apple," the AI narrator treated "Barnes & Noble" as two separate entities. So I had to change the text to "Barnes'nnoble" in the manuscript to make it sound correct. 

Here's a sample of the finished nonfiction chapter, narrated by AI Matt:

You'll be the judge.

Be mindful of edits

Keep in mind that every time you generate or regenerate a paragraph, it uses up credits — even for small edits. So it’s best to polish your text first before generating the voiceover. 

One frustrating drawback is that sometimes the AI produces paragraphs with technical glitches — like uneven audio volume or skipping a syllable or reading a word too fast. You’ll need to regenerate those sections, which means spending more credits.

Adjust the narration with actor mode

Here is a powerful feature: if you’re not happy with the AI narrator’s cadence or tone, you can tweak it using your own voice! Just click the small microphone icon on the right panel to enter Actor Mode. From there, you can record the paragraph yourself, and the AI will adapt to your delivery.

It’s a great way to gain creative control over your narration — however, it’s a little tricky: once you start using it, you will be tempted to use it on every single paragraph. But since every adjustment you make will cost you extra credit, using it often would turn out to be very expensive.

Fiction audiobooks: multiple narrators

For fiction, the process is exactly the same. However, ElevenLabs offers another impressive feature: automatic character detection and voice assignment. Upload your manuscript, and the AI will identify different characters and assign matching voices to each.

This is a game-changer for indie authors, since professional multi-narrator audiobooks typically cost a lot. But processing time is longer with this feature, so it's currently best suited for short stories or novellas rather than full-length novels.

Here's how our Alice in Wonderland sample sounds:

Adjust your manuscript for audio

As you listen above, you'll notice the voice switches work well during actual character dialogue, but can feel choppy during dialogue tags — those "he said, she said" moments between character lines. To create a smoother listening experience, consider editing your manuscript to remove unnecessary dialogue tags or restructure sentences before generating the audio.

Similarly, for nonfiction authors, if your book contains many images, charts, or graphics, you'll need to create an audiobook-friendly version of your manuscript (most likely by removing them). 

These are standard practice for all audiobooks, not just AI-narrated ones.

Exporting and sharing

When you're happy with your audiobook, you can export files in MP3 or WAV format, share a link with collaborators for feedback, or publish directly to their self-publishing platform ElevenReader (more on this later), Spotify, or InAudio. The export process handles proper file formatting for each platform automatically.

Now, what about cloning your own voice?

Voice cloning 

One of ElevenLabs' more intriguing features is voice cloning — the ability to create a digital replica of a specific voice.

There are two options:

• Instant cloning: Generates a voice clone from just a few minutes of audio
• Professional cloning: Requires a 30-minute sample and human review, taking several days to process

I tested the instant option using a few minutes of clear, consistent speech from one of Ricardo's presentations. The results were genuinely impressive — the AI captured not just the voice itself, but subtle aspects of his cadence and natural rhythm. However, throughout entire chapters, the delivery is far from perfect, so if you use this feature, go for the professional cloning, which will likely generate better results. 

Here’s a sample you can compare directly with the original interview: 

Overall, the quality is good enough to use it for narrating your own audiobooks. You'll need to fix pacing, add appropriate pauses, and adjust pronunciations just as you would with any AI voice. But for authors who want their personal touch on an audiobook but lack the time or equipment for traditional recording, voice cloning offers an interesting middle ground.

ElevenLabs also offers other useful applications for authors.

Book trailers and other uses

While audiobook creation is the main appeal, the platform has other applications that you may want to explore. Namely:

• Book trailers: If you need to create compelling audio for book trailer videos.
• Podcasts: Especially as a nonfiction author, you could turn your blog posts or newsletter articles into podcast episodes to expand their reach. 
• Author website audio: You can also add audio versions of your blog posts or sample chapters to your website, making your content more accessible.
• Self-editing tool: Many writers use text-to-speech to catch errors and awkward phrasing. Hearing your work read aloud reveals issues you might miss when reading silently. 

So far, this tech might sound almost too good to be true (no pun intended). But how much does it actually cost?

Pricing

ElevenLabs offers three monthly subscription tiers: Starter, Creator, and Pro, each offering progressively more credits and features. 

Plan	Price	Credits/month	Estimated audiobook length
Starter	$5	30,000	~5,000 words
Creator	$22	100,000	~16,000 words
Pro	$99	500,000	~80,000 words

If you get the hang of it quickly and don’t require too many revisions, you should be able to produce an 80,000-word audiobook with around 500,000 credits — roughly what the $99 Pro plan includes. If you need more edits, the cost can rise sharply.

This is probably the platform’s biggest downside — it offers fantastic features and it’s genuinely fun to tweak your work to perfection, but your credits disappear fast.

On top of that, the pricing model has a major drawback: any unused credits vanish once you cancel your subscription. You can’t save them for future projects or get a refund. It’s a strict “use it or lose it” system that feels limiting compared to most other software subscriptions.

That said, even with these limitations, ElevenLabs remains dramatically cheaper than traditional audiobook production. Professional narration typically costs $2,000-5,000+ for an 80,000-word book. With ElevenLabs, you're paying $99 (or a bit more) for the same length — though you're also investing significant time in editing and quality control (around 10 to 20 hours).

Overall, ElevenLabs makes audiobook creation accessible to authors who couldn't otherwise afford it. And now, with ElevenReader, it even gives authors a platform to sell and distribute their audiobooks directly.

Distribution via ElevenReader

ElevenLabs created ElevenReader as a dedicated platform for authors to distribute their AI-narrated audiobooks. The pitch is compelling: distribute your audiobooks and earn an industry-leading 60% royalty per sale, with no exclusivity requirements. This is easily the most generous royalty rate on the market, though the platform is still new and doesn’t yet have the same reach as major audiobook distributors.

You can download the app both on iOS and Android, and you can both browse audiobooks as a listener and publish your own as an author. The platform supports audiobooks, audio newsletters, and even audio versions of online articles.

The reality check

While the royalty rate is attractive, ElevenReader is still in its early stages. The app currently hosts several thousand titles, but the user experience needs work. When browsing, it's difficult to distinguish professional indie authors from people churning out quick AI audiobooks for profit. 

Many listings lack proper book covers or have amateurish designs, and most titles have few or no reviews, making it hard to assess their quality.

If you're already creating an AI-narrated audiobook with ElevenLabs, there's little downside to listing it on ElevenReader — especially given the generous royalty rate and lack of exclusivity. However, don't expect it to be your primary distribution channel (yet). For maximum reach, you'll still want to distribute through established platforms like Kobo Writing Life, Google Play Books, or Voices by INaudio.

That said, ElevenLabs is growing rapidly, and ElevenReader could evolve into a significant platform for AI-narrated audiobooks. It's worth keeping on your radar.

Verdict: Is ElevenLabs worth it for authors?

ElevenLabs won’t replace professional human narration for every book, but it’s made audiobook creation accessible to authors who might not have been able to afford it before. The quality has improved dramatically, and in many cases, listeners won’t even realize they’re hearing AI narration.

It’s especially useful for authors with over 5 books in their backlists who want to create audio editions, or for nonfiction writers looking to reach a broader audience.

If you’ve been holding off on releasing an audiobook because production seemed too costly or complicated, ElevenLabs is definitely worth a look. Just keep your expectations realistic — it’s a hands-on tool, not a magic button that instantly delivers a perfect audiobook.

And if ElevenLabs isn’t quite the right fit, you can explore alternatives like Descript, Speechify, or Murf.ai, which also let you create audiobooks using AI narration.