Did you guys know that you can have your Kindle app read you allowed any book in your Kindle Library, including the book you're working on right now, effectively turning your book into a kind of audiobook that you can simply listen to and enjoy, but also experience your book in a fresh way so you can then edit it more effectively. Like, am I the only one who didn't know this? I don't know about you guys, but one of my writer goals is to eventually have one of my books as an audiobook so I can listen to it. So my mind is officially blown right now. Well let me first back up and tell you how I came across this amazing information. In some of my recent videos, I was showing you guys how I put the current draft of my young adult fantasy novel into an ebook format to then go on my Kindle and I could do a fast read through on my Kindle using the highlighting and notes feature to make editing notes. But while I was chatting with you guys in the comments, I got talking to another YouTuber, Fiction Technician, and she was just casually like I like to have Kindle read my books to me so I can review it while I watch my kids at the park. And I was like, wait, what? Basically, I freaked out and I was like, please, Fiction Technician, which I believe her first name is Jane. Teach me your ways. So before I get into this, I just wanted to thoroughly thank Jane for sharing these tips with me. So thank you, thank you so much because now I can share these steps with all of you. In order to show you how this fully works in the end, I'm actually going to have my Kindle read the first page or so of the current draft of my novel, which I haven't done this publicly yet pretty much anywhere maybe Patreon. Chapter one five, I called again into the night. So if you're excited about that, definitely stay tuned until the end, but let's get into the steps right now. Also, all of these steps you're going to see are on my iPhone. I don't know what the steps would be for Android, but if anybody does figure it out, let us know in a comment and I will put those steps in the description below so that we have it for any kind of phone or if there's any kind of phone, now I'm not thinking of include that too. But if you have an iPhone like me, first obviously you want the Kindle app. So just make sure that that is loaded onto your phone. Then you want to go to the settings of your phone. The screen will look like this and you just want to scroll down to accessibility and click that and I have my little notes over here. So after accessibility, you want to go to spoken content and then you want to click pretty much everything on this page. So first is speak selection just so that is enabled there if it's not already. Then you want to put on speak screen and this will just allow the Kindle app to not only read the entire page, but also turn pages for you and continue to read for you so you don't have to keep switching the page which is awesome. The final thing that fiction technician said to do was to go to speech controller. And turn that on and you'll see it's popping up this little thing that I can move around and it's basically like a control area where you can play or wind select the page if it's reading the wrong page. You can speed up or slow down the reader and that's really fun. And then finally you can have some fun picking what voice you want to read your book. That's exactly like the real thing where you would do auditions to have a reader read your book, but this is as close as we're going to get right now. So what you want to do is click voices and then you can see that there's a bunch of different languages even. Obviously I'm going to pick English and then you can see here too that there are different accents. So there's an Australian accent, Indian accent, Ireland, South Africa, UK and I personally I don't know why, but I just love listening to the British or Australian accent. So what I did is I went in and clicked different ones and then tried it with Kindle to see how it would sound with my book and I ended up picking the Australian one. There's actually a couple different options for each one usually. There's like the normal one. So we have Karen here and then Karen enhanced. So I think what that basically means is like the voice is like a little smoother or it sounds a little more natural. You can actually click and... Hello. My name is Karen. You can click and play and see what it sounds like in comparison to the original. Hello. My name is Karen. So she's like a little more straight I think and there's a little more. Hello. My name is Karen. There's like a little more personality and I can't remember if I already said this but you can see here there's little download options so you can download additional voices if you haven't found the one you really like. Also keep in mind too that all of these voices will have an element of sounding a little robotic. There's definitely some things that I don't like in the Kindle reader where I don't know why it does this sometimes yes and sometimes no but like usually the voice will stop at the end of a period and then continue. Sometimes it just chooses to like read it as if two sentences are actually one. I don't know why but it happens. So this method is not perfect but short of spending a ton of money and time to get someone to record an audiobook of even just like your draft of your book which I don't know why you would do that but just for fun just for right now just so you can hear your book in a new way and then also make some editing notes and decisions based on how it sounds. This could help improve your dialogue it could help improve flow and pacing and it could just give like your eyes a rest from looking at the words on the page and actually hear it as a story that's being told out loud. I also personally like it because my story is told in the first person so again choosing someone that has sort of like a similar voice that I feel like my character would have has just been really cool and on that note let's listen to what it sounds like you guys. Again this is the first page of my current draft of this book. I am actually actively working on reworking. My first chapter specifically based on some beta feedback and other things that I want to do to the story. So when the book is actually published this first page will probably look completely different but it'll still be really fun to show you guys sort of the behind the scenes and what it looks like right now. I am really proud of it but yeah there's just a lot more that I want to change and improve even more. You'll also see here that there is a cover and I have shown you guys in previous videos that this cover is not the official cover it is a fake cover that I made with a free image and I used Canva and it's just for fun just for me to be able to see my book in my Kindle library and make it look like official and fun. So I do give steps about how to do this in the other videos as well but let's get into actually reading it okay. So what you want to do is open up your Kindle app, open up the book you have already downloaded on to your phone and again I do have the videos that show you exactly how to turn your word document into an ebook file and then put it on your Kindle app. But assuming you've already done that here we are with our book on our Kindle. I'm going to swipe over to the first chapter and then I'm going to click the player that we already enabled. Then I'm going to press the hand and then click the page to actually make it start reading. You can also press the play button but if it starts reading like the wrong page or something else sometimes that has just happened to me the way to fix it is to then just go close. Go to the hand and click the page you actually want it to start on and it should start playing. Okay here we go you guys are going to hear it for the first time in the voice that I picked this is Karen enhanced I'm pretty sure and yeah this is my first page right now for on Wings of Ashen Dust, a YA very fancy. Here we go. Chapter one fire I called again into the night raising my sword high into the smoky air another cannon boomed and my heart fluttered as the blast lit up the dark sky like fireworks illuminating the ships that battled below calling out to my crew from the lookout nest my throat was ragged from yelling but my voice sounded as strong and resolute as ever carrying over the symphony of crashing waves, shouting fairies and clanging sorts music to my ears usually I'd allow myself to indulge in the sweet sounds of battle the pointed ends of my ears twitching my wings begging to release and take flight but this night I needed to stay focused this night we needed to win steady now I commanded the sea knocking us back and forth as we struggled to advance on the opposing ship though my tone remained confident I held tightly to some nearby rigging as the mad minnow rose and fell at the will of the storm threatening to engulf us all when had everything gone so wrong the evening had started out promising the silvacy quiet and unassuming almost too quiet like the sea herself had a secret she wanted to keep from me but like a lady okay so you could hear like a couple things like when she would just keep reading from one sentence to the next and pretend like it was one sentence even though there is a period there I don't know why that happens but uh did that was really cool right um really excited the first time I tried this after fiction technician I'll walk me through the steps I was like almost in tears just because it's just really emotional to like see your hard work like transformed into like a different medium like this and like a medium that could reflect something that it could be someday and it just sounds like all official and fun and makes me really happy so I want all of you guys to experience this joy that I'm feeling right now and so I hope that these steps help you so much I also want to know are there any other Kindle tips I'm missing because seriously you guys I thought I shared all of them in the last video and I was so excited to find out that there was even more that I wasn't accessing or taking advantage of so if you guys know even more things that you use in your own Kindle as a writer with your own book like please share because I want to know we all want to know let us know down in the comments if you enjoyed this video definitely give it a thumbs up subscribe if you haven't already because we always do fun writerly videos like this and if you missed out on the previous two videos where again I shared how to turn your book into an ebook put it on your Kindle and then use the features like highlighting and editing to make editing notes you can check out one of these two videos and we'll see you there