I hadn't planned on narrating my own books.
A friend of mine inspired the idea. She admitted that she couldn't read books. She'd tried many times to force herself, but it always ended the same way — falling asleep the moment she started.
I figured that wouldn't happen with my book! But... she didn't admit the truth right away. First she wrote glowing reviews everywhere she could — on every platform, in a private message to me, a post on her own page. She loved the book. Only afterward did she confess that she'd never actually managed to read the ebook.
You know what she did? She fed the book to an AI chapter by chapter, and it read it to her in a flat, tinny, tedious voice. And even after that, she was completely delighted with what she'd listened to.
I felt ashamed, and decided to narrate it myself. Who else, really? I hadn't just written a book — I'd written about my own life. My degree from the Institute of Culture definitely made the process easier.
There was no point resisting or being coy about whether I liked my own voice or not. If my friend had gone to all that trouble just to support me, then this wasn't such a big deal for me.
My husband bought a microphone. I sat down in front of the computer. And started reading my own work out loud. I cried and laughed wherever it was sad or funny. I liked it myself.
I did have to wait out the sharp noises drifting in from outside, though. It turned out the neighbor's rooster was the one deciding when I got to take a break. When I finished the narration, there was one more important stage — editing. My husband and I came up with a little chime before each chapter, and he spent an entire week cleaning up the sound of claps (I clapped my hands so that during editing it would be clear where a fix was needed).
The first person I sent the audio version to was my friend. And she listened to it again! All 8.5 hours.
When I sat down to narrate the second book, I realized that reading aloud is a fantastic way to edit a book. Wherever I stumbled, or didn't understand myself why a paragraph was even there, I'd go back and revise it — the narration turned into another round of editing. But the text came out even better for it, cleaner, simpler. That's when Stephen King's book Write and Cut finally clicked for me. I ended up having to edit the first manuscript too, and re-record some chapters entirely.
When the audiobook came out, the first reviews were about the voice. Not about it being professional — no. About the fact that "you can tell it's a real person." That "it's like the author is sitting next to you, telling you the story." That "you can put it on before bed, and it's like someone close to you is talking to you."
If you're writing and wondering whether you need an audio version — I don't know what the right answer is for your book. But for mine, the right answer turned out to be one thing: my own voice. Imperfections and all.
Because those imperfections are exactly what make it real.