A process, documented
From an idea to a finished audiobook, with Claude Code and a laptop.
Short fantasy novels (10–20k words) are planned, drafted, edited and checked by Claude with a set of skills, then narrated by Kokoro, a small open TTS model running locally on the CPU, and packaged as a chaptered audiobook. The author makes the creative calls; everything else is a repeatable pipeline. Every passage that sounded wrong becomes a training case that improves the next book.
How it works, in five minutes
Write your own
Everything here runs in Claude Code on your own computer. The starter kit has all 12 skills, the lessons they learned, and a setup guide Claude can follow (Python, Kokoro, ffmpeg). No books are included: you start from your own idea. MIT licence.
Or paste these commands into a terminal, then ask Claude "Read SETUP.md and set this up for me":
mkdir my-audiobooks && cd my-audiobooks
curl -LO https://jca374.github.io/fantasy-audiobook-studio/starter-kit.zip
unzip starter-kit.zip && rm starter-kit.zip
claude…or open Claude Code in an empty folder and paste this:
Download https://jca374.github.io/fantasy-audiobook-studio/starter-kit.zip into this folder, unzip it here and delete the zip. Then read SETUP.md and set everything up for me.When setup is done, ask: "Start a new book with story-seed."
The pipeline
- 0
Seed
→ seed.md
- 1
Story bible
→ story-bible.md · glossary.md
- 2
Structure
→ outline.md
- 3
Draft
→ chNN.md
- 4
Edit
→ revised chapters
- 5
Reader test
→ fresh-reader report
- 6
Speech flow
→ chapters fixed for the ear
- 7
Narration prep
→ audio/chNN.txt
- 8
Narrate
→ audio/chNN.wav
- 9
Listen check
→ timestamps to listen to
- 10
Assemble & publish
→ .m4b · .mp3 · .epub · this site
How each stage works, in detail →
Latest book
Second-Hand Dragons
13 chapters · 18,502 words · 1:41:42 of audio
Listen, read, or download the .m4b and .epub →
By the numbers
- 12 skills, 7 written for this project
- 8 training cases, 7 turned into rules
- 11/11 rule tests passing
- ~1 h to narrate a 15k-word book on a laptop CPU
- −19 LUFS audiobook loudness standard
Recent changes
- Second-Hand Dragons: re-narrated in af_heart (same voice as The One in the Chair); training case 08
- Second-Hand Dragons: new book 3 (seed to audiobook), narrated by bm_george
- MIT licence (Jonas Carlsson) for the skills, scripts and site; in the starter kit too
- site: starter kit download and copy-paste setup on the home page
- video: add a WebM (VP9 + Opus) source before the MP4
- video: encode audio at 48 kHz (loudnorm had resampled it to 96 kHz)
- site: keep hidden books out of the home page's recent changes
- video: use The One in the Chair's cover and chapter 1 audio