Following creation of an Author Account, you will be able to use the Sounded.com dedicated only dashboard to create an audiobook of your literary work. For Authors, this may include access to a dedicated online dashboard in your Author Account which will enable you to: (i) upload a literary Work(s) to your Sounded.com Author Account; (ii) convert the Work into an Audiobook using our Author Toolbelt features; (iii) listen to the Audiobook; (iv) edit the Audiobook; (v) set a price plan for the Audiobook for listing via our Book Store, (vi) decide if you want the Audiobook to be distributed for sale or free via the Sounded.com Book Store; (vii) (depending on the pricing model applied to your account), receive Royalty and/or Commission payment(s) from us on any sales of the Audiobook (subject to our terms and conditions).
Following creation of an Author Account, you will be able to use the Sounded.com dedicated only dashboard to create an audiobook of your literary work. For Authors, this may include access to a dedicated online dashboard in your Author Account which will enable you to: (i) upload a literary Work(s) to your Sounded.com Author Account; (ii) convert the Work into an Audiobook using our Author Toolbelt features; (iii) listen to the Audiobook; (iv) edit the Audiobook; (v) set a price plan for the Audiobook for listing via our Book Store, (vi) decide if you want the Audiobook to be distributed for sale or free via the Sounded.com Book Store; (vii) (depending on the pricing model applied to your account), receive Royalty and/or Commission payment(s) from us on any sales of the Audiobook (subject to our terms and conditions).
To upload your book to your Author Account you should: •Select ‘Start New Project’ from the menu on the left hand side of the dashboard •Select the ‘Book Type’ from the drop down menu displayed •If you have an ISBN number, enter this in the field provided, to populate the metadata for your book •Click Upload File. Remember to ensure the file you upload complys with the Sounded.com formatting guidelines. This means the file should be a .txt or .docx file format only.
To upload your book to your Author Account you should: •Select ‘Start New Project’ from the menu on the left hand side of the dashboard •Select the ‘Book Type’ from the drop down menu displayed •If you have an ISBN number, enter this in the field provided, to populate the metadata for your book •Click Upload File. Remember to ensure the file you upload complys with the Sounded.com formatting guidelines. This means the file should be a .txt or .docx file format only.
We have made every effort to make the import as simple as possible for our authors! If you already have a Microsoft Word (.docx) or plain text (.txt) format then you should be able to just upload it! If it uses another file format, we recommend you export your work as a plain text document (.txt) and upload that version. It most likely still work first time so long as it does not contain illustrations, footnotes, poetry or tabled content which require specific formatting hints to import at this stage.
Within your Author Account, we provide access to example files setting out our formatting guidelines. This guide contains all the formatting hints and tricks and even serves as an example of how to format your work to ensure instant import success! •Login to your Author Account. Select 'Start New Project' form the menu on the left hand side of the dashboard. •Our formatting guidelines appear displayed on the right hand side of the page.
Sure. We have a full list of hints for formatting your book to get the best results and uploading quickly. •Consistent Line Breaking Make sure all your lines are contiguous and you're not breaking lines before full stops or to maintain printed formatting. •Chapter Naming If you're chapters are named, you must include a Table of Contents to show how each chapter is formed. To do this, simply add CONTENTS between your forewords and the first chapter and include a line broken list of chapter names followed by a double spaced line at the end. Click here to see a correctly formatted example of a table of contents. •Simple Chapters Alternatively, you can simply add a prefix before each named chapter to ensure your chapters are maintained. Add CHAPTER before the name of each chapter to split the book correctly. This method does not need a table of contents. •Forewords Anything before the "Chapter 1" is classified as the opening forewords. It does not need a title, or to be called Chapter 0. •Speech Characters Please use standard double quote for spoken lines. Whilst this might not be the correct use in your country (we're' looking at you Brits and Aussies..), the Sounded.com parsing engine gets confused if you use single quotes at present. •Small Pauses You can save yourself some formatting time by including a double dash -- to highlight pauses. This is useful at the start and end of chapters, or between context switches within your book. •Emphasis Lines Any text in between underscores is emphasised by default e.g. _my emphasis line_. Not all voices support this feature but the system will automatically resolve this if it is a part of your text. •Remove Password Protection Before uploading your Word document, please ensure you have removed any password protection from the file as we cannot accept files in this format.
Here is a list of book types and their best use-cases: •Standard Written Book: Most books will fall into this category. All lines are contiguous and only break where they intend to form a new paragraph. This book contains no illustrations or footnotes. Empty lines will be stripped. •Poetry: Line endings are intentional and blank lines will be treated by default as a brief pause. •Academic Book: Footnotes will be automatically stripped and converted into a reference file. Each footnote can be individually controlled to be played in situ, at the end of a sentence or paragraph, or not at all. •Book featuring Illustrations: Illustration placeholders will be created and expected to be uploaded where no descriptive text present. Where present, the author can select an artstyle to automatically generate an accompanying illustrations file, and these images will be played in the Sounded.com Audio Player in realtime. •Childrens Book: As per the above, with more restrictive image production and different options to paginate the output. •Unformatted Line Endings Book: Books with raw line endings rather than predictable character formatting, such as those that have been generated to a fixed width book format for external readers. Note: Importing this format book may create Interesting results...
If you have made multiple attempts to upload your book, and it complies with our formatting guidelines, please reach out to our customer support who will be able to assist you. Contact customer support via email at: support@sounded.com
If you've hit 'Upload Book', a pop up field will display. Follow the instructions on the Pop Up, by either dragging and dropping your book file or click the 'Add' button to select from a file on your device.
If the file you attempted to upload is not in the format we require, you may receive an error message on screen. For example, this may show "File Upload Errors. This book contains more than 50% of its lines without definitive line ending characters. This is likely an unformatted file or poetry. Please select the Unformatted Line Endings or Poetry book type to try processing this kind of book." You should check the formatting of the book you tried to upload and follow the instructions by attempting to upload your book again.
Once your book is successfully uploaded, you will be directed to the Book Review page of the Author Portal, where you can see things like the number of Chapters in the Book, the total number of words in the Book, the total number of Characters in the Book. Note: Exact word and character count may differ from applications like Microsoft Word due to our autoconversion of special characters, roman numerals and other conversion helpers.
The Chapters Overview sets out a list of all of the chapters we have been able to identify in the book you uploaded, provided you have followed our formatting guidelines. You can use this to verify all chapters are present and that the word and character count of each chapter looks correct. Please verify that all your chapters are present. If not, please discard this project and verify you have correctly followed the formatting guideline for how to correctly break chapters, or include a Table of Contents to use named chapter titles at this stage. You can provide additional feedback in the Discard Project option to let us know of any problems that have been encountered. Note: Exact word and character count may differ from applications like Microsoft Word due to our autoconversion of special characters, roman numerals and other conversion helpers.
Yes. You can discard your new audiobook project at any time in the Book Review stage. This includes if the chapters overview is incorrect, or the word count is drastically different to your expected results. If you are experiencing persistant problems importing your book and have followed the formatting guidelines provided, you should click Flag for Review and a member of our team will review your uploaded works ASAP and contact you directly with recommended actions.
Yes. You can discard your new audiobook project at any time in the Book Review stage. This includes if the chapters overview is incorrect, or the word count is drastically different to your expected results. If you are experiencing persistant problems importing your book and have followed the formatting guidelines provided, you should click Flag for Review and a member of our team will review your uploaded works ASAP and contact you directly with recommended actions.
If you do not have an ISBN number associated with your book, then you are required to provide the Book Name / Title for your Book and also a brief description or summary about the book. Once you have provided this information, you should hit the "Continue with my Book button".
You agree to provide accurate and complete information (for example: metadata, ISBN numbers, Audiobook Cover imagery and references) (“Book Information”) for any Works you upload using of our Services. We reserve the right in our sole discretion to amend or modify any Book Information or description to satisfy our requirements. Where Book Information does not meet our requirements, we may ask you for additional Book Information (for example a new Audiobook Cover image or ask you to generate an image using our Services). If you are a self-published Author and do not have Book Information, you agree to provide accurate information and descriptions regarding your Work where we ask you to do so in your Author Account
We reserve the right to may make enquires regarding the Book Information supplied by you with third parties. Any Book Information found to be deliberately false or misleading may result in an account suspension and/or termination.
We reserve the right to may make enquires regarding the Book Information supplied by you with third parties. Any Book Information found to be deliberately false or misleading may result in an account suspension and/or termination.
We reserve the right to may make enquires regarding the Book Information supplied by you with third parties. Any Book Information found to be deliberately false or misleading may result in an account suspension and/or termination.
To choose one of over 450 narrator voices, simply find the voice you want to use, click 'hear preview' button and listen to see if it a voice you want to use to narrate your book. If you're happy with your choice, click the 'select' button to lock in your preferred narrator.
There are over 450 professional narrators to choose from on Sounded.com.
There are over 450 professional narrators to choose from on Sounded.com.
Sounded.com has narrators available in over 50 languages
Through listening to the narrator previews you can find the best voice to bring your Book to life.
Yes. We continually strive to add more narrators and features to our service. The top picks for favourite narrators are displayed in a tab within the narrator selection page.
If you don’t like the narrator you have chosen, don’t worry. After you have listened to the first chapter of your book, depending on your price tier, you will have the option of choosing one or more narrators, to ensure you are happy with your choice.
Some narators have advanced neural features, which help with narrating the type of book you have. These may include features, such as angry, cheerful, sad, happy, empathetic, hopeful, whispering, shouting, newcaster style as well as other tonality and vocal features.
Through listening to the narrator previews you can find the best voice to bring your Book to life.
Once you have chosen your narrator, you are one step closer to your first audiobook and will be directed through to our payment page.
We accept payments by credit and/or debit card, Paypal or bank transfer.
To select a payment option from within the Author Portal, once you have chosen your preferred narrator, you will be directed through to the payment page. From here, the default option is to pay be credit or debit card. If you would prefer to pay instead by PayPal or a Bank Transfer, simply click the tab for those options.
There are a number of reasons why your card transaction may not be working. One thing to check is that you have included your correct billing address, postcode and country for the card you are using. If you continue to have problems with your card, please contact our support team: support@sounded.com
Yes. For your convenience you can check out using your PayPal account directly with PayPal, or checkout as a guest and enter your card details with them. Simply cleick the option to Complete Payment with PayPal.
Yes, You will be redirected to the PayPal website where you should complete your purchase. You will be automatically redirected back to this site after but if anything goes wrong, please return to the "Manage Existing Projects" page to complete or confirm your purchase.
Yes, you can pay for your audiobook narration by Bank Transfer direct to Sounded.com using the details provided on the banking page. Note: Bank transfers requests are monitored daily and it may take upto 72 hours to appear as paid in your account, subject to bank opening hours and Sounded Internal processing time.
Note: Bank transfers requests are monitored daily and it may take upto 72 hours to appear as paid in your account, subject to bank opening hours and Sounded Internal processing time. During this time, your audiobook project may be temporarily suspended until we can confirm receipt of payment.
Yes, we will notify you once we have identified your payment by bank transfer.
Sure. We want to give you the best tools we have at all times to help with creating the best version of your audiobook. Therefore, we may provide additional tools or updated features within the Author Portal, for example new narrators, enhanced vocal capabilities as well as tools to assist with the protection of copyright.
Yes. If you have an Author Account, you can create as many audiobooks as you like. Simply start a new project in your Author Account.
Yes. If you have an Author Account, you can create as many audiobooks as you like. Simply start a new project in your Author Account.
If you have a new version of your book, you can resubmit the latest version to your Author Account and create a new audiobook using the latest text.
Please contact us if you have any further questions that can't be found in our FAQs. We're more than happy to help!