In this episode Mark interviews Phil Marshall, the author of the recently released science fiction novel Taming the Perilous Skies and the founder of Spoken, a platform that removes numerous audiobook production barriers for indie authors and small publishers.

Prior to the interview, Mark shares comments, a personal update, and a word about this episode's sponsor.

This episode is sponsored by ScribeCount (affiliate link). Spend less time logging in to multiple platforms and crunching numbers, and more time writing and marketing your books thanks to ScribeCount’s handy all-in-one interface.

In the interview, Mark and Phil talk about:

Phil's background with Conversa
Being trained as a surgeon and then switching to product development and technology
The novel (TAMING THE PERILOUS SKIES) that was baking in his head since 2021
Distributing 130 copies of his novel to early readers at a recent WorldCon
The market info of "Dan Brown meets Andy Weir"
How the novel and Spoken itself were both inspired by the same thing
An explanation of what Spoken is and how it addresses Phil's desire for multi-cast narration
Multi-voice narration being a speciality of Spoken
Why Phil is releasing the novel in multi-cast narration via Spoken for free in chapter by chapter installments
Spoken having just completed a full year of beta release and is now available as a fully available product
A bit of a walk-thru of how Spoken breaks out different character voices in an automated manner
How ElevenLabs and Hume are the two partners Spoken uses for their character and narrator voices
The costs involved in producing these audio books
How there is no cost for listeners who want to check out how things sound on Spoken
Phil's message to authors who are nervous/anxious about A.I.
And more...

After the interview Mark reflects on a couple of things related to the conversation.

Links of Interest:

Phil Marshall Bio:

I build technologies, organizations, and stories that imagine a fantastic future. From my theory of persistence, which sits at the heart of my sci-fi writing, to pioneering conversational AI that transformed the relationships between doctors and patients, to creating groundbreaking tools that are transforming the relationship between authors and their readers, I thrive at the intersection of imagination and execution.

My current project is Spoken, bringing authors and readers together around great audio stories that are made possible by technology. Before Spoken, I co-founded Conversa, a platform that connected patients and care teams using conversational AI. Along the way, I’ve built technologies that span personalization (WebMD), collaborative movie-making (JumperCut), ontology-driven knowledge graphs (OntoLogic.ai), and concept-based health record threading (WellMed).

The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

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