Voice & audiobook production
Penworth produces your audiobook. You just pick a voice.
No API keys. No vendor accounts. No production chores. You finish your book, choose one of three narrator voices, and we do the rest — the cost is already built into the 45% audiobook royalty.
How it works
Finish your book
Publish the ebook on the Store. Audiobook production becomes available once the manuscript is locked.
Pick a provider
See a live price estimate before you commit. Preview up to three voices on the first chapter of your book. Change your mind before you approve.
Penworth produces
We render, master, chapter-split, and ship it to the Store under your listing. You review and approve before it goes live.
Your three choices
Penworth has narrowed the field to three providers we’ve tested at book-length. Any of them will produce a Store-grade audiobook.
Cartesia Sonic
The default we recommend. Fastest, most natural, lowest latency.
- Industry-best naturalness on long-form narration
- Sub-second time-to-first-audio — we can render previews live
- Strong on 14 languages including English, Spanish, German, Arabic, Hindi
- Handles dialogue and character voicing without manual prompting
Low per-minute cost — included in your 45% royalty split
Almost every author. If you don’t have a strong opinion, pick this one.
OpenAI TTS
Warm, consistent voices. Great for non-fiction and memoir.
- Six polished narrator voices (Alloy, Echo, Fable, Onyx, Nova, Shimmer)
- Very consistent tone across long books
- Strongest on English, solid on 10+ additional languages
Mid per-minute cost — included in your 45% royalty split
Non-fiction, memoir, instructional — where consistency beats drama.
Azure Neural
Widest language coverage. Regional accents handled properly.
- 140+ languages and regional variants
- Excellent for non-English primary audiences
- Enterprise-grade reliability and SLA
Low per-minute cost — included in your 45% royalty split
Books in languages other than English, or targeting a specific regional market.
Preview voices on your own first chapter before committing. The price estimate you see in the picker is what Penworth pays the provider — it’s already funded by your 45% audiobook royalty, so there’s no second invoice.
Livebook uses a different voice — and that’s deliberate.
Your audiobook gets the narrator voice you picked above. Your Livebook — the cinematic companion experience — is cast separately by Penworth with a voice chosen to fit the genre and scene. We handle casting, direction, sound design, and motion. You don’t pick the Livebook voice and you don’t pay for it.
The two formats serve two different modes of attention. Mixing them would muddy both. An audiobook is for listening while you drive; a Livebook is for watching while you focus. Different jobs, different instruments.
Ready to turn your book into an audiobook?
The voice picker is in your author dashboard, under the book you’ve published.