Why The Growth Equation Ended Up as an Audiobook (and Why I Didn’t Read It Myself)

I even started down the traditional route. I recorded myself reading the first couple of chapters, with the intention of doing the whole thing.

That was as far as I got.

What I hadn’t fully appreciated is just how unforgiving audiobook recording is. All the ums and ahs you barely notice on a Zoom call suddenly become unbearable. Every tiny mouth sound jumps out at you. And once you’ve recorded, you’re faced with hours of editing just to get something listenable. I parked the project, telling myself I’d come back to it when I had a spare week or two.

Unsurprisingly, that week never came.

I did look at alternatives. I considered hiring an audio engineer to handle the editing so all I’d need to do was read. I also explored hiring a professional audiobook narrator to record it for me. Both options would have produced a great result, but they were time and cost prohibitive for an indie-published book.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I logged into my Amazon Kindle account to see how the book was selling in the run-up to Christmas. As an aside, it’s been selling surprisingly well. While I was there, Amazon surfaced an option I hadn’t taken seriously before: releasing an audiobook using AI-generated narration.

I was sceptical. Not because I’m anti-AI, but because I care a lot about how the book sounds. But when I listened to the samples Amazon provided, I was genuinely surprised by the quality. There were a dozen or so UK voices available. Most of them sounded far too posh and upper-class to feel like me, but one, I think it was “English Voice 11”, had a more natural, conversational tone that felt close enough.

Amazon lets you either publish the audio more or less as-is, or go in and edit it. But caring about the listener experience, I chose the second approach. I’m very glad I did.

I spent about five days going through the entire book, listening carefully and making corrections. There were lots of small issues. All-caps headings sometimes turned “founder-led sales” into “founder L.E.D. sales”. Certain words were pronounced oddly and needed to be written out phonetically. Despite the voice being English, some pronunciations defaulted to American, saying SKED-jool instead of SHED-jool, for example.

There were also some genuinely strange edge cases. Occasionally, instead of pausing at a full stop, the voice would literally say the word “dot”, which made me suspect something odd going on with the underlying text. The system also pulled in image captions, so I had to neutralise those so they didn’t interrupt the flow of the audio.

Some things that worked perfectly well on the page also felt clunky when spoken aloud, so I tweaked wording in a few places.

By the end, I’d probably made several hundred small edits. It was detailed, slightly obsessive work, but it mattered.

The result isn’t perfect. A fully human-narrated version, professionally engineered, would still be the gold standard. But it’s significantly better than anything I could realistically have produced on my own, and crucially, it exists.

There is one final wrinkle. Amazon is quite right to be transparent and flag that the audiobook uses a virtual voice. But the way it’s presented in the listing gives it a lot of visual weight, almost like a warning label. It subtly frames the format as something to be cautious about, rather than just another way to consume the book. I’m genuinely curious to see how much that affects people’s willingness to give it a try.

If there’s enough positive signal, people listening, finishing it, and telling me it worked for them, it may be the nudge I need to bite the bullet and record a fully, personally narrated version myself.

For now, though, it means that if you’ve wanted to read The Growth Equation but never quite found the time or energy, there’s finally an audiobook version that fits into real life. On your commute. Out walking the dog. Or halfway through a workout.

If you do give it a listen, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think.