About Vox9

I'm Dennis McCarthy. For three years I ran a YouTube channel called scifistories1977, narrating science fiction, HFY, fantasy and serialised stories from independent authors using ElevenLabs AI voices. It was a popular channel, and I knew early on that I wanted to share that success with the authors whose stories I posted. In total I shared 30% of every dollar of ad revenue across eleven authors over the course of three years. Other authors turned down the ad revenue, wanting recognition instead — and I respected that. Either way, the platform was mine, but the work was theirs.

Then YouTube demonetised the channel.

So I stuck two fingers up to YouTube and built Vox9 — a platform I control, where the authors I'd been narrating for could publish their own work, keep the audience, and get paid. The first writers on Vox9 weren't strangers. They were the same authors whose stories I'd already been reading. They came across to test it. All of them stayed, and other new authors came and joined the platform.

That's still the mission: get independent authors in front of an audience, with a fair cut of whatever the platform earns, and production tools they couldn't have built themselves.

Vox9 makes indie fiction audible. We're a discovery and serialisation platform for serialised independent fiction — the kind written on Royal Road, Reddit, Wattpad and Patreon — that would never otherwise have an audio version.

Professional audiobook production starts at £3,000-5,000 per book. For a writer earning a few hundred pounds a month from royalties, that's not a price-down decision; it's a "this audiobook doesn't exist" decision. AI narration via ElevenLabs lets these authors reach audio audiences for free. The 100,000 free narration characters per month per author covers roughly an hour and a half of audio without the author paying a penny — the platform covers the cost.

Vox9 is not a competitor to Audible or to professionally-narrated audiobooks. The alternative for our authors isn't "better-narrated audio"; it's "no audio at all". For listeners, we're audio access to fiction they couldn't otherwise hear — not a replacement for narrators they already love. The two markets sit beside each other; they don't overlap.