The Technologically Challenged Girl’s Guide to Converting Your Stories into Audio Files

A simple way to help you gain traction for your articles

Full disclosure #1: I’ve always wanted to be Lisbeth Salander.

Full disclosure #2: I am not Lisbeth Salander.

For years, she was my role model. A world-class hacker who went after men who hurt women, a badass Aspie angel who could do pretty much whatever she wanted on a computer. And if I couldn’t be Lisbeth I’d settle for Criminal Minds’ Penelope Garcia or Abby Sciuto on NCIS. Aside from their quirky individuality, their prowess when it came to keyboards held an immense appeal for me.

Sadly, such skills continue to elude me. So when I recently read an article that laid out in straightforward, easy-to-follow steps about how to convert my stories into audio files I was euphoric. As the author rightly pointed out, audio is becoming hugely popular.

The number of podcast listeners continues to rise rapidly and news organizations are scrambling to add audio (and video) content to their sites. According to a recent article in Business 2 Community, nearly 70 percent of the U.S. population listens to audio content on a monthly basis, which is a significant increase from 2020. This statistic does not include music.

Of that number, 62 percent consume audio content every week, with the average weekly listening time hitting the 16-hour mark. These figures will only continue to rise.

“Audio is the evolution and future of content.” -Ron Jaworski

My fading Salander fantasy

After boning up on my audio statistics last night, I sat down at my laptop with the intent of converting some of my stories to audio files. Feeling very tech savvy, I went to the one of the sites the article recommended and began. I was fairly confident I had things well in hand.

I didn’t.

The first thing that went wrong was I inadvertently hit something that limited the time on my audio files to 35 seconds. Try as I might, I could not get past those brief moments. I had a female robot reading my title plus the caption and photo credits for the picture at the top of my article.

Then poof. Done.

In addition to this, I managed to use half of my free credits and couldn’t delete the file. Even when I managed to get past 35 seconds, my files were still designated as too long for conversion. My Salander fantasy was fading fast.

Granted, things probably would have gone a lot more smoothly had I consulted the original article as I was trying to convert my file. Meanwhile, its generous author — who actually is tech savvy — was writing immediate responses to try to help me through it.

For some reason I’m the equivalent of the pre-GPS dad who refuses to ask for directions even when he’s hopelessly lost. In other words, I threw caution to the wind and somehow convinced myself I could figure it out on my own.

I began frantically googling and entered into what I can only describe as a low-key fugue state. Extensions were downloading, verification emails were arriving, robotic voices were simultaneously narrating on tabs I couldn’t find. Most importantly, none of these parts were coming together into something I could use.

Instead I was getting messages like this:

Something went wrong (invalid_scope)

The requested scope is invalid, unknown, or malformed.

A malformed scope? I had no idea what that meant but it sounded bad. All in all, my effort to make an audio file was the Monty Python version of “The 12 Days of Christmas” — only with malformed computer messages instead of milkmaids.

Real simple

At last I stumbled onto Andy Nelson’s “How to Add Audio to Medium,” which mentioned a site called Blogcast. In his article he also mentioned a site called play.ht. The word simple in the subtitle jumped out at me.

I felt a quiet surge of hope. I dismissed the play.ht site from my mind. I like many Karens — my inimitable and brilliant sister-in-law is a Karen — but I didn’t want one narrating my story. I clicked on Blogcast instead. I could understand the name of the site and when I got there it didn’t ask for a credit card info to sign up. I entered my email and chose the “Free Trial” version for one week.

I checked my .docx file and made sure I’d removed all the captions and photo credits so I wouldn’t lose my free credit on a file that was cluttered with information that would break the narrative flow and confuse readers.

With my heart beating in my chest, I copied and pasted my file into their New Audio content box. I gave it a title and chose “Ashley” to read my article. I hit the green button that said “Convert.”

There were lots of AI readers to choose from –Aria, Ryan, Mia, Charlie and others, including readers with English and Australian accents. There was Connor from Ireland and Aarav from India. There were Arabic readers, Chinese readers and Russian readers. They even had readers fluent in Malay, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

In all, there were 41 languages to choose from. The default is William so make sure you don’t accidentally forget to change it if you want a different voice.

It took a few minutes to convert my file to .mp3 format and I nervously hit play.

Ashley’s voice filled the room. She sounded pretty good, not like an actual human being but not like the robotic phone recordings either. I didn’t want to immediately hit the mute button. I listened and didn’t hear many mistakes, other than a few pronunciations that went with other versions of a word (“lead” rope pronounced “leed” rope, for example).

The site said I could edit the file. I’d come this far so I wasn’t going to mess with that. I moved on.

I saw that I had one free credit left. After my trial week I could subscribe or buy credits. For 10 articles with no length limit it would cost 20 bucks; if you subscribe at the basic level, you get 10 articles a month for 8 bucks, i.e. for 80 cents an article. Two dollars an article and no monthly commitment isn’t bad — less than I spend at Starbucks for a coffee.

I had a team

One of my favorite things about Medium is that our articles continue to earn money long after they’re published because they appear in Google Searches (like the article I mention in this piece). Then there is the possibility of using other email accounts for free conversions because I never had to enter any financial or other identifying information into the system. . .ssshhh.

But those two dollars may ultimately pay for themselves because Google now prioritizes content that includes multiple formats. In addition, audio may become a separate search in the near future in the same way videos are now. This means your content will rank higher in general searches if it includes audio and will appear in audio searches as well.

Whether that happens sooner or later is something I could worry about later, I decided last night. In the meantime, I downloaded Ashley’s quick work and got an email from the Blogcast Team.

“Thanks for using Blogcast!” they told me.

I liked the idea I had a whole team working with me on this. If anyone needs a team, it’s me.

But I wasn’t finished. When I went to add my file to my story I realized I couldn’t embed it because it was on my hard drive, not on the internet.

More googling but less frantic this time. I already had Ashley. I already had a team. I could do this.

Converting my .mp3 to Soundcloud format

Both Medium articles I read mentioned Soundcloud, which I’d heard of but never used. I signed up for an account and uploaded my MP3 article. Again, it only took a few minutes to sign up and I didn’t need to enter any financial information. It took less than 60 seconds to convert the file and my 9-minute article only used 7 percent of my allotted time. Users who aren’t on a plan get three hours of audio for free, which seems like a fair deal.

By this time, I was cooking with cyber gas. I added a picture to my audio file and a logo to my Soundcloud profile. I decided to go all in and put up a banner.

Afterward I went to my Substack site and edited my article to include an embed of the Soundcloud file. I returned to my article in Chameleon (which is run by the talented, prolific and gracious Fatim Hemraj) and added a link to the audio version.

Was I done? Was it possible I had finally finished with this formidable task?

Not. Yet.

Because I needed to try the whole thing again to prove to myself I could do it without lapsing into a quasi-fugue state. I wanted to share my knowledge with the world.

The second conversion of this article took about 10 minutes total, including choosing the voice and the language on Blogcast, uploading it to Soundcloud and embedding the link below.

One thing to remember: be sure your pasted content doesn’t break at random places when you’re shifting from one site to another. When I first converted the file above to .mp3 it was filled with weird, awkward pauses because there were random line breaks in the text. I had copied it from Medium to .docx then loaded it into the text block on Blogcast and apparently the computer gods didn’t like that. I went back and fixed that issue for free via my new friend Chloe (*cough*). The redone version sounded just fine.

I hope this article helps you realize that anyone can convert text to audio and embed it into their articles, which will radically increase your content’s reach. If you want to ration your 180 Soundcloud minutes you can even convert shorter sections and embed them at key points in the article.

Once I had the process down, it was simple and quick. I was the one who needlessly complicated things.

Thanks for traveling this journey with me, dear reader — dear listener!

Much thanks to Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) for tagging me in her prompt about things that would be better with clear instructions. I’m stretching the interpretation a bit, because I did start with clear instructions but failed to follow them. I’ve been writing about some heavy content lately and needed a break. Lucy’s prompt gave me the perfect excuse to shift gears and write something fun.

If you want to give her prompt a try (and read her wonderful poem) you can read it here: