Listen to This Story

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Months or perhaps even years before both I and hundreds or perhaps thousands of others here on this medium write stories with titles like “How I Made $2,500 Last Month With Audio Stories” or “Earn $5,000 Per Month With This Easy Hack,” I need to learn if and how to do this “hack.”

What hack am I referring to?

Why it’s the robotic voice reading my stories. That’s what.

A few weeks ago (or was it months?), an interesting story appeared in my never-ending feed of “how to make more money” or “how I made this much money” stories. More recently, I read a story by Sara Ali about how this entire platform now seems to exist for writers (I guess I’m one too now) to write about money and then brag about how much they make doing so.

The gist of it is “writing about money to make money.”

Another story that caught my interest detailed how to convert your stories to audio, which led me to investigate quite a few apps, most of which I found required some type of monthly or annual fee that may exceed how much I make on these stories.

However, being a big proponent of adopting the abundance mindset rather than the scarcity mindset that was beaten into my head over the course of five decades, I kept looking and even considered paying $19 for a month to give Play.ht a go.

What’s the worst that could happen? I would lose $19 out of the $60 or so that I’ll probably make on Medium this month.

Finally, I discovered Woord and signed up and figured that some day in the near future when I would have a few spare hours, I would tinker with it and try it on a couple of my more popular stories. Let’s say the ones with at least 500 views.

Incidentally, my own voice and speaking skills are superior to the robotic ones employed by these apps, although I will concede that their quality has generally improved dramatically over the past year or so.

As an obsessive walker, I began doing some contemporaneous speaking about various topics on my phone and I figured that I would insert those MP3 files into my stories. The first one that I had planned to use it on is a forthcoming one about How Much it Costs to Be You.

Long story short, I struggled with the insertion of the MP3 from my Android phone, finding that it would require an additional step of uploading the audio onto some platform that Medium is amenable to.

Fair enough. I did not create Medium and do not make the rules.

A Pleasantish Surprise

Upon checking on my stats and earnings for the month this frigid Monday morning in the Chicago burbs, I was pleasantly surprised to see a link to audio versions at the top of most of my stories.

I guess it should not be too surprising since I had been seeing audio links at the top of all of the stories that I had read over the weekend, but I had assumed that those writers were all more tech-savvy than I am and went through some rigamarole with apps and whatnot to convert their stories, further widening the gap between their tremendous financial success on this platform in comparison to me.

So Riddle Me This.

Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I am glad that Medium has taken this action to make our stories available by audio, even if by stilted computer voices.

But we all own our stories here, don’t we?

And even though I am writing this and you are reading this on Medium, the vast majority of the world does not access this site or know that it exists.

Those of us who like to read and write more than the average Joe or Jane use this site, but there are tens or hundreds of millions of people who do not.

That said, wouldn’t you like your own audio story to also be on some app like Spotify or Google Play? Perhaps with an ad or two sprinkled in? Perhaps with a Medium-like revenue sharing percentage like a few nickels or dimes per listen? Per hour? Per whatever?

So this short story will end here not with a “How I Made an Extra…” or “The Easy Way To Make X-Amount Per Month.”

It will end with a question that I am sure will soon be answered in many a story.

That is, how should I extract the audio version of my stories? Where should I put those to make an extra few bucks here and there? And how?

And if you prefer to listen to an audio version of this “story” read in a robotic voice, just click at the top.