When I wrote my first real book I did so in secret. Told no one — no friends, no colleagues, not even my wife. This was primarily because I didn’t want to admit to anyone it had failed, as fail it must, because every other attempt I’d made at writing a novel had wound up that way.

Today not much has changed. When I’m working on a book it’s just me in there. I rarely show part-finished work to anyone. I don’t see the point. How does anyone know you’re going to finish it?

More than anything I do not seek opinions until there’s an actual manuscript, beginning to end, to be read, revised and judged. Lots of professional writers I know work this way. Lots of people who want to be writers don’t. They constantly share scraps of work with each other in writing groups or informally. Is this a good idea? Or is it a way of never finishing a book?

It depends, of course. But here is the risk. Every reader of a part-finished manuscript is judging something that is, by definition, not yet what it’s trying to be. They will respond to what’s there, not to what you intend to put there. Their notes — however well-meaning — will pull the work towards their vision of what it should be, not yours. Multiply this by four or five people in a writing group and you have a piece of work that has been argued over, second-guessed, and committee-edited before it’s even finished. That’s a hard thing to come back from. Most authors starting out are short of time to write. This is a foolproof way of eating into what little you have.

I learned to write by reading. Everything I needed to know was there already, readily available in a very obvious format — books — in a place I could find them for free, the library. The conversation with other writers happens at a later stage, when there is something solid to discuss.

Get it down first. All of it. Make it as good as you can on your own. Then, once it exists as a complete thing, ask for opinions if you really need them before seeking representation. Not, in my view, before.

Audiobooks are big these days. But what if you’re not in audio, either because your book didn’t sell or you’re self-published? Are you out of the loop?

Well, not necessarily thanks to AI which is popping up everywhere right now. Yes, you can use AI to turn your work into an audiobook. But is that a good idea? Is it really worth it?

First off let me state my bias. I’ve been fortunate enough to have my work narrated by some of the best in the business over the last twenty years. Performers like Richard Armitage and Alan Cumming, and lately Owen Findlay. All trained actors, as familiar with the stage as they are on screen, and that shows in their work.

Can you replace people like this with AI? Not fully, in my opinion. Narrators don’t just read a book. They interpret it and bring it to life, often in ways I never saw as the author who created it. I don’t think there’s an algorithm around that’s capable of that. But the technology is getting pretty close. And you may feel that close enough is good enough.

It’s your book and your decision. I’m not of the opinion that anyone who touches AI has handed their soul over to the devil. The truth is AI is becoming so ubiquitous you’re probably using it every day right now and not even noticing.

So your decision… and here are some of the things to consider.

The options

If you want to produce your own audiobook, there are three fairly different routes open to you right now. The cheapest and most obvious is Amazon’s own Virtual Voice, built into KDP — pick from around 80 stock voices, adjust pacing and pronunciation, and it’s live on Amazon, Audible and Alexa within minutes. But this is very, very basic and, to me, very obviously artificial. Your control of what’s being done is limited. You’re not directing a performance, just selecting and tweaking one.

Further up the scale sits ElevenLabs, which has spent 2026 pushing hard into audiobooks specifically. There’s a free tier that auto-converts your ebook for their own ElevenReader app, a self-directed studio, typically costing between $100 and $200 a book. You can cast narrators, clone a voice, add music and sound design, and there’s a fully managed production service for professional publishers that’s going to be beyond the budget of most individuals.

Then there’s the non AI option that hasn’t gone away: paying a human narrator through ACX, still the default route onto Audible.

The barrier that actually matters

Here’s the big gotcha you have to appreciate: ACX’s rules say submitted audiobooks must be narrated by a human unless otherwise authorised, and list unauthorised text-to-speech or AI recordings as prohibited. Use AI, and you’re immediately locking yourself out of the biggest and best-known audiobook platform around. Audible still holds somewhere around 60% of the US market, even as Spotify eats into that share. So the principal AI-narration barrier isn’t technical, it’s commercial. Doesn’t matter how well AI has handled the narration, your largest potential distributor won’t touch it with a barge pole, unless you go through Amazon’s own more rudimentary tools instead.

Spotify, Apple Books, Google Play Books and Kobo all accept AI narration provided it’s disclosed. But is that really enough? And there’s another complication we’ll come to shortly… the return may well stink.

What if you want it to sound like you?

I’ve tried audio narration. Trust me, it’s hard, time-consuming and difficult to get right both artistically and technically. But there are now ways with ElevenLabs you can ‘narrate’ in your own voice with AI. Cloning your own voice comes in two grades, and the gap between them is bigger than the marketing suggests. Instant cloning needs a minute or two of decent audio and gives you something usable within minutes — but it tends to flatten emotional range and natural rhythm, which matters over the length of a novel. In other words, it’s probably not good enough.

The proper version, Professional Voice Cloning, is a different undertaking entirely. You’ll need to record up to three hours of clean, studio-quality recording, at 44.1kHz/24-bit minimum, in a quiet or treated room, ideally in one continuous take rather than stitched clips. You also need to record in the tone you actually want for narration, since whatever style you feed it is the style you get back. Processing then takes several more hours on top. In short: to get an AI clone good enough for a full audiobook, you end up doing something that looks a lot like recording an audiobook.

And the money?

This is the part you really need to think about. What are your chances of making much of a return? Audiobook income splits into two completely different mechanisms, and only one of them pays well.

Sell a copy outright and you get a proper cut of the price — 50% on Spotify’s direct sales, 60% through ElevenLabs’ own store, comparable rates via ACX, Google Play or Kobo. That’s a real royalty worth having.

But most listening on Spotify happens through a subscriber’s monthly allowance, not a purchase, and that’s paid from a shared pool split pro-rata across everyone’s listening that month — the same mechanism, and the same dynamics, that leave musicians earning fractions of a cent per stream. If you want to know how that works out in reality, ask a musician about Spotify and stand well back before they answer.

ElevenLabs’ own streaming payout, through their ElevenReader app, is quoted at $0.20 per hour listened — and even that headline figure doesn’t sit comfortably with an earlier, much higher number the company floated during its beta. Nobody’s publishing a rate that makes streaming income easy to plan around.

Does that make AI narration pointless? Only you can decide. I know I’d get killed by my listeners if my work went to AI because they’re used to top notch narration from my long-term audio publisher WF Howes. But that’s how it stands for me. Others may feel it’s a real way to get a backlist title into audio at a fraction of the traditional cost, and reach listeners a print or ebook edition never will.

My feeling… don’t get sucked in by the hype, and do expect some blowback from the ‘all AI is bad’ people out there. From my point of view as an established author, any arrangement that would keep me off Audible is a non-starter. Others will doubtless feel differently, as is their right.

Hallelujah… you’ve finished your first draft. A complete book. Well done. And from the outside you’ve probably had a working title in mind. And now — probably — you know it isn’t going to work.

Working titles are useful because they give you something to call the thing while you write it, a handle to grab hold of in the dark. It doesn’t matter one bit if you find they don’t work as the title for the finished book. You usually come up with them before you have a fully-formed idea of what you’re going to write; by the time you finish, you know the book very well indeed, and what it needs is usually different from what you thought at the start.

Here’s how it works for me. As I write, I note down title possibilities along the way. Usually I’ll have a good stack in the book notes by the time I reach the end. The first thing I do is whittle them down to five or six favourites, then check whether anyone else has used them recently. There are a lot of books in this world, and a good many share the same title. Ideally yours will be unique, but it doesn’t have to be. If an obscure book used the same title several years ago, you’re probably fine. Just don’t pick The Godfather or any other obvious and well-known title.

A few observations on what tends to work and what doesn’t. Very long titles occasionally succeed — Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, for example — but they’re harder to remember and harder to sell in conversation. Single-word titles can be striking but will usually have been used elsewhere, so you’ll need to check for competitors. Titles that play off other books — The Vermeer Code — are best avoided unless you’re deliberately making a point or taking the mickey.

The title does several jobs at once. It tells the reader something about the book’s tone and genre without giving anything away. It lodges in the memory. In an ideal world it has a slight ambiguity that only becomes clear once you’ve finished reading — so that looking back at the cover you think: ah, so that’s what it meant.

The best titles feel inevitable. They sound as though the book could not have been called anything else. That feeling usually arrives quite late, often after the book is finished. Be patient with it. And don’t agonise over it too much. In truth, if you sell the book to an editor they will tell you if your title works or needs replacing. And very likely come up with what they think is a better one. So listen to them and learn.

Don’t sweat it. They’re just words. We can always change them.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a remarkable man. Not only did he produce some wonderful books but he was allowed a degree of freedom few of us can enjoy today. Stevenson wrote a children’s adventure classic Treasure Island and the dark gothic horror of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He penned the historical novel Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae, a kind of international revenge blockbuster with locations ranging from the Scotland of the Jacobite Rising to America and India. There was plenty of journalism and travel too, all in a mere forty four years of a life blighted by sickness.

No one ever said to Stevenson, ‘Stick to what you know, dear boy.You can be a kids’ writer, a teller of adventure tales, a master of horror, or the forerunner of the Clavells and Archers of the century to come. But you can’t be them all.’

He was lucky. Very few authors will find themselves so fortunate today. We live in the era of genre, of intense and rigid classification. In the 1960s, when I was a teenager browsing the shelves of the library in the small town where I grew up, already imagining where a book bearing my name would end up on the shelf, titles were divided into the most basic of categories.

One part of the library was for fiction, one for non-fiction. The only sub-division in fiction might be an area where the sci-fi titles were kept, usually in the tell-tale yellow jackets of Gollancz. Everything else – from Mary Renault to Henry James, from Raymond Chandler to Somerset Maugham – was arranged alphabetically on the same shelves.

I grew up reading books of all kinds, not a set selection relegated to a genre, a pre-defined classification of the rich and sprawling world of literature that someone had kindly sifted and sorted beforehand. Like Stevenson. I was lucky too.

Today most popular fiction comes with a label attached. Crime, young adult, thriller, mystery, history, chick-lit, science fiction, fantasy, romance, romantasy… These interbreed so we also have chick-lit mysteries and historical crime. Then there are the sub-genres such as noir, steampunk, gothic, hardboiled, legal, police-procedural, speculative and alternative history.

Some of these terms have geographical limitations. American readers are always surprised to learn that the word ‘mystery’ means precious little to their counterparts in the UK. The US term ‘cozy’ – used for a crime novel that avoids nastiness such as overt violence, sex and bad language while still managing to kill people somewhere along the way – used to be equally foreign to most readers outside America, though the kind of book it describes is universally popular. But both are gaining currency in the UK now too.

Rail against the rise of the genres as much as you like, but you would be foolish to ignore it. One way or another your book will probably be defined as belonging to one of these categories, even if only tentatively. Accept that fact and start to understand how best to use it. You’ll stand a much better chance selling your work as ‘upmarket crime’ than as ‘general fiction that happens to involve a murder’.