Turn Your Vellum Book Into an Audiobook

Vellum is the formatting tool a lot of indie authors reach for first, because it turns a manuscript into clean ebook and print files without much fuss. The catch is that Vellum builds books for reading, not for listening. If you want an audiobook out of the same project, you need a path from your Vellum file to a finished audio file. This post walks that path end to end, so you can take a book you already laid out in Vellum and come out the other side with an MP3 you can publish wherever you already sell.

The short version: export your text out of Vellum, bring it into AudioProducer, keep your chapter breaks intact, choose how each part should sound, and generate the audio. You take the file from there.

Exporting your manuscript out of Vellum for audio

Vellum exports polished EPUB, Kindle, and PDF files, plus a Word document. For audio you want the cleanest text version, which is usually the Word export or the EPUB. Both keep your chapter structure, and both strip out the print-only flourishes that do not belong in a narration, like ornamental drop caps and scene-break glyphs.

Between Word and EPUB, the practical difference is small. The Word export is the easiest to open and skim if you want to make edits to the text before importing. The EPUB tends to preserve chapter boundaries most reliably. If you are unsure, the Word document is the safe default for most books.

A few things to handle before you export. Front matter such as the title page, copyright notice, and dedication is fine to keep, but decide whether you actually want it narrated. Many authors trim the copyright page out of the audio version. Running heads, page numbers, and footnotes do not translate to audio at all, so if your Vellum project leans on footnotes, plan to fold those into the body text or drop them. The goal is a document that reads top to bottom the way you want it heard.

Importing the file into AudioProducer

Once you have the exported file, importing it is straightforward. AudioProducer accepts common manuscript formats, so the Word or EPUB you pulled out of Vellum goes straight in. The same path works whether you started in Vellum, Scrivener, a plain Word document, or an EPUB from another tool, so you are not locked into one writing app.

After the import, give the text a read-through inside the editor. This is the moment to catch anything the export carried over that you do not want spoken, and to confirm the words on the page are the words you want narrated. Audiobook listeners cannot skim past a typo the way readers can, so a quiet pass here pays off later.

Keeping your chapter structure intact

One reason to start from a Vellum-formatted book is that the chapter structure is already clean. When you import, that structure should carry over as distinct chapters rather than one long block of text. Keeping chapters separate matters for two reasons. It gives listeners natural stopping points, and it lets you regenerate a single chapter later without rebuilding the whole book.

Check that each chapter heading came through as a heading and not as a line of body text. If a break got flattened during export, fix it in the editor before you generate audio. Getting the structure right once means every later step, from casting voices to the final export, lines up with the book you actually wrote.

Casting voices once it is in

With the text in and the chapters clean, you decide how the book sounds. You can narrate the whole thing in a single voice, which is the standard for most fiction and nearly all nonfiction. You can also assign different voices to different characters if your book has a lot of dialogue and you want each speaker to come through distinctly. Assigning a voice per character and rendering in one pass is the middle ground between a plain solo reading and a full studio production.

If you would rather narrate in your own voice, voice cloning is available, with one firm rule: you can only clone a voice you have the right to use. That means your own voice, or a voice whose owner has given you permission. We work on AudioProducer, so we are not a neutral party here, but the consent rule is not negotiable on our end.

Exporting the finished audio

When the narration sounds the way you want, you export the finished audio as an MP3 and download it. That file is yours to do with as you like. AudioProducer produces the audio file; it does not publish or distribute it for you. You take the MP3 and upload it to whatever platform you already use, the same way you would with the ebook and print files Vellum gave you.

If you are new to the whole process and want the broader picture rather than just the Vellum-specific steps, our guide on how to make an audiobook with AI covers the fundamentals. And if your next project lives in a different tool, the import path is the same for a Google Doc as it is for a Vellum export.

You can try the full flow on the free tier, which gives you 1,200 words at no cost and no card, enough to run a chapter through and hear how your book sounds before you commit. Paid plans start from $39.99 per month when you want to take a whole book through.

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