On the one hand, I want to make money.
On the other hand, I understand that making everything available for free would be much more aligned with the Project Gutenberg philosophy.
I left my job, living on the savings, and in the last year listenly made only $400 ~= $35 MRR.
Although I was not doing much marketing.
I'm dreaming of it making $1k, $3k, $5k MRR.
Right now, I set the price to be 50% of the API cost, so I would make a profit starting from the 3rd same book purchase.
But maybe I should make it fully social project, get some donations, and treat it as "lead magnet" to monetize something else.
I'm open to your suggestions!
I do AI consulting and I did some audio related projects where I basically resold ElevenLabs + quality control. EL is much better than OpenAI imho.
Monetizing is good but there is no value proposition in the product.
The chances I'll get something I'd like to listen are low because:
- AI errors
- AI lack of emotion
- You picked a voice I've heard in thousands of automatically generated youtube videos and that I came to hate.
There is no chance I'd buy this, I'd rather buy an audiobook made by a human.
Now, people may not understand that - but then they'll be disappointed, bother you for a refund (chargebacks are 15$ a pop if you don't) or just speak badly about the project. Repeating sales potential is pretty bad imho.
I hope I don't come across as rude.
If you are really set on this idea I'd recommend to generate 1 book, make it perfect until it reads like it should and then sell it on as many platforms as you can (Amazon mainly I guess). Maybe use a custom cloned voice so it will sound unique and constistent across all books.
You don't need a website but you have one so you might as well use it for marketing and maybe to gauge interest for the next book to process.
