Closed-beta support is direct.

We invite beta authors in waves of 2–3, weighted toward people who already have a finished or nearly-finished manuscript and a clear target platform (most often ACX). If you have a specific timeline ("I want to publish in October"), put it in the notes field of your signup — that helps us prioritize. You'll get a personalized email from sandon@hivejournal.com when a spot opens.

$5 / month via the Graphene+ subscription — that one fee bundles listening (every show on graphene.fm) AND creating (the full Studio suite + 500k characters of TTS / month, ~10 chapters). Heavy users top up with one-time credit packs ($10 for 500k extra characters, $25 for 1.5M). See /studio/pricing for the full breakdown.

Yes — the .m4b export is loudness-normalized to ACX spec (-20 LUFS, -3dB true peak) with chapter markers, cover art, and metadata embedded. You upload it via the standard ACX submission flow. Note: ACX as of mid-2026 requires disclosing when an audiobook is AI-narrated. Tick that box during ACX submission.

No. Studio is for works you wrote or hold the audiobook rights to. Uploading without the rights violates our Terms and risks DMCA-style takedown from the rightsholder. If you're a ghostwriter or work-for-hire author, you need the audiobook rights specifically — not just print rights.

Not yet. The available voices are the curated ElevenLabs library — synthetic voices trained on consenting, compensated voice actors. We won't add custom voice cloning until we can do it with explicit written consent from the person being cloned. If voice cloning ships later we'll re-publish the policy at that time.

About 10–30 seconds per chapter on the first render (the time is mostly the ElevenLabs TTS round-trip). Bulk renders are sequential to respect ElevenLabs rate limits — a 12-chapter book ≈ 3–6 minutes. The live progress modal shows per-chapter status so you can watch the batch advance.

Three tools, in order of cheap-to-thorough:

1. 🎧 Preview audio — render a 60-second test clip with your current settings before re-rendering the whole chapter. Lets you tweak lexicon entries or character voices without burning credits.
2. 🗣 Pronunciation lexicon — add a per-term IPA or respelling for any name the TTS gets wrong. Applied to every future render automatically.
3. 🎭 Character voices — re-cast a character to a different voice; the next render auto-routes their dialogue to the new one.

Subscribers get 500,000 characters / rolling 30 days included — roughly 10 full chapters at $0.10–0.30 of TTS each. The cap is a safety net so a stuck workflow can't accidentally burn $500. If you need more, buy a one-time credit pack ($10 = 500k extra, $25 = 1.5M extra; never expire) from /studio/billing.

We won't pull access from anyone mid-book. The pricing model that ships in Phase 2 will be applied to NEW work; in-progress beta books finish on closed-beta terms. The .m4b export is yours regardless — you can download it and walk away to any other tool at any time.

Use the form below or email sandon@hivejournal.com. You'll get a human reply (Sandon), usually same day.