Manuscript Studio

Delivery and stores

What a store-ready audiobook package contains beyond the chapter files — room tone, credits, a retail sample, an M4B — and where AI narration may be sold.

Rendered chapters are not a delivery. Stores reject packages that are only audio files, for reasons that are specific and unobvious.

Packaging costs no credits — the synthesis was already paid for and this only re-encodes it.

What gets added

Room tone

A short silence at the head and tail of every file — under a second at the start, a few seconds at the end.

Its absence is a rejection. Digital silence is acceptable here precisely because AI narration has no noise floor to match.

Opening and closing credits, as their own files

Generated from your front matter: title, author, narrator.

The opening credit states that the narration is synthetic. Disclosure is required by the stores that accept AI narration, and transparency rules in some jurisdictions point the same way.

A retail sample

One to five minutes, and — the part that gets books sent back — it skips the chapter heading.

A sample must open on narration, not on the words "Chapter One". This is the single most common reason a sample is rejected, and it is handled automatically.

If there is not enough narration to make a valid sample, no sample is produced rather than a short invalid one.

An M4B, alongside the MP3s

Different stores want different things, so both ship:

  • Per-chapter MP3s, encoded to the technical spec stores expect — 44.1 kHz mono, constant bitrate, loudness-normalised into the required range.
  • A single M4B with chapter markers, which is what Apple wants.

Length limits

Nothing over two hours per file. Long chapters are handled accordingly.

Where you can sell it

ACX and Audible prohibit AI narration. That is their rule, and this product will not pretend otherwise.

These files are for:

  • Google Play Books
  • Spotify
  • Kobo
  • Findaway and similar aggregators

For Audible, the route is Amazon's own Virtual Voice applied to your eBook — a different product, generated on their side, not something you upload.

What to watch for

  • Check each store's current AI policy before you upload. They change, and they are the authority on their own rules.
  • The disclosure is not optional and not removable. It is what makes the package compliant on the stores that do accept AI narration.
  • Audio is not in your account backup. Download the files if you want them locally — see Back up your work.