How to prepare your manuscript for an audiobook
A checklist to clean your manuscript before narration: what to cut, how to handle numbers, names and footnotes, and which file format works best.
Short answer: export a clean EPUB or DOCX, remove anything that can't be spoken (tables, footnotes, page headers), spell out numbers and abbreviations that could be misread, and keep a list of unusual names to check after narration. Ten minutes of prep saves an hour of fixes.
Checklist
- Use a clean source file. EPUB or DOCX with real chapter headings gives the best chapter detection.
- Remove what a listener can't use: page numbers, running headers, "see figure 3", long URLs, the table of contents and the index.
- Handle footnotes. Move the essential ones into the text and cut the rest.
- Spell out ambiguous items. "St." (Saint or Street?), "1984" (a year or a number?), "$3.5M", "2/3", "IV".
- List invented words and names. Fantasy names, places and foreign terms are the likeliest to be mispronounced. After narration, find them and fix those sentences.
- Cut front and back matter you don't want read: the copyright page, long acknowledgments and ads for other books.
- Read one chapter aloud. Anywhere you stumble, a listener will too.
Which file format
| Source | Works well | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| EPUB | Chapters and clean text | DRM-locked files |
| DOCX | Heading styles become chapters | Comments and tracked changes |
| TXT | Simple and clean | No chapter structure unless you mark it |
| Headers, footers and page numbers are stripped | Scans and heavy tables |
See also the converter pages for EPUB, PDF and text or DOCX.
After narration
Listen to the whole book, ideally at a slightly faster speed, and fix every wrong word by editing the sentence and regenerating just that line. Unlike a recorded narration, you don't need a pickup session.
Know your length and cost first: word count to hours.
Common questions
Should I keep chapter titles?
Yes. Chapter headings become chapter markers, so listeners can jump between chapters in any audiobook player.
Can the narration read tables?
Not usefully. Describe the table's point in a sentence instead.
What file should I upload?
A clean EPUB or DOCX with real chapter headings gives the best chapter detection. Text-based PDFs work too, and Warblize strips repeating headers, footers and page numbers. Scanned PDFs need an OCR text layer first.
Want to hear your own book?Upload a manuscript to see its length and hear a narrated chapter before you pay for anything.
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