… and other crimes.
So … explaining yourself before anyone’s asked the question feels a bit like apologising for a crime you haven’t committed yet. But the audiobook for The Fragments is out, narrated by a voice that doesn’t have a body, and I’d rather say the quiet part out loud than have it sit there unsaid.
New here? I am New Zealand-based writer, artist and maker Minu Freitag. If you like this post, why not sign-up to my newsletter to keep in the loop!
So. Why a digital voice and not a human narrator?
The honest answer is money. Audiobooks are expensive to make and expensive to buy—expensive enough that I mostly borrow mine from the library. Hiring a narrator, a studio, an engineer, was never going to be a line item I could afford. I love what I do, but that is just the reality I share with many self-published authors.
But money’s only part of it. The other part is that I wanted to learn the trade. Not “learn how to talk to a narrator”—learn the actual mechanics of digital narration: how a voice is built, how pacing works, what a pronunciation dictionary can and can’t fix, why dialogue is, in ElevenLabs’s current state, a small horror. I now know things about cadence and breath and emphasis that I didn’t know six months ago, and that’s mine now, not contracted out.
Which gets to the third reason: control. The voice is built from a prompt I wrote. The settings are mine. If a name is mispronounced, that’s a problem I can fix at 11pm without emailing anyone or waiting on a turnaround. There’s also the rights question—who owns a performance, what I’m allowed to do with it later, how it sits next to the rest of my work. With a human narrator, that’s a negotiation. With this, it isn’t.
None of that makes it easy. It took roughly a hundred hours—a hundred human hours, mine, not the machine’—to get The Fragments into a finished audiobook. Regenerating lines that almost worked. Listening back at 1am to decide if a pause was half a second too long. The machine didn’t do that work for me so much as it gave me a very patient, very literal collaborator who needed everything spelled out, including, apparently, how to say “Graphyn.”
The fourth reason is pricing. Audiobooks have been closing in on ebook sales, and I want to make my books as affordable as possible—the audiobook is sold at cost—so that more readers might discover my work.
There’s a risk in that. A digital voice doesn’t forgive much. It’s quick to expose my shortcomings in sequencing and rhythm, where a skilled human narrator might smooth over my mistakes without you ever knowing they were there.
Which gets to the last reason and the hardest to admit—The Fragments is a good book, but it is not perfect. I want perfect. Using a digital voice and digital distribution allows me to tweak and tinker and polish until even I am sick of it (and the reader gets every update for free).
I’d still love to pay a human narrator one day. That’s not off the table—it’s just not on it now. For this book, at this point in the very expensive habit that is writing and publishing, this was the choice that lets the book exist in audio at all.
So that’s it. Not a defence. Just the reasons.
New here? I write adult fantasy that sits somewhere between dystopia, post-apocalyptic fiction, and science fiction—complex, a little dark, unapologetically nerdy.
I’ve published two books in a trilogy called The Spheres—The Fragments (2022), The House (2025)—and am working on Book Three. If you enjoyed this post, why not sign up to my newsletter or get a free review copy?
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