Vox9 Updates & Guides

Some listeners specifically prefer audiobooks narrated by a real human voice — but until today there was no way to find that content on Vox9. Every episode card looked the same, AI or human.

Today's update fixes that, in three places:

• A new bright-blue 🎙️ HUMAN badge appears on every episode card across the hub, author profiles, and playlists when the episode is narrated by a real human voice.
• A new Human-Narrated row on the hub (between Extended Listens and Science Fiction) pulls together every human-narrated episode across the platform — mixed sci-fi, fantasy, horror, drama — in one discovery row. The row only appears when there are episodes to show it; expect it to grow as more authors tag their work.
• Authors can self-tag their work via a checkbox on the upload form and the episode-edit modal. Existing episodes can be tagged retroactively from the creator dashboard.

A handful of authors have already tagged their human-narrated episodes — the row launched with stories from Peter Rambo, MWMN19, and others. Worth a browse.

Why this matters. AI narration is what made Vox9 economically possible for indie authors in the first place — production at zero cost, distribution at any scale. But a meaningful slice of audiobook listeners specifically want a real human voice, and authors who put the time into recording themselves deserve clear recognition for that effort. The 🎙️ HUMAN badge does both jobs at once: helps the listeners who want it find it, and surfaces the authors who do it.

Authors — if you record your own narration: open any of your episodes in the creator dashboard, click Edit, tick the "🎙️ Human Narration" box near the bottom, and save. The badge appears on the card immediately. Voice clones (real voice profile, AI-generated audio) count as AI, not human — keeps the badge meaningful.

A handful of small changes worth flagging since the last update.

• Promo cards you might have noticed — those are me. Small pill-shaped image cards inside the All Episodes, Sci-Fi, and HFY rows on the hub, plus short audio ads before some episodes. They're "house ads": I'm using Vox9's own slots to test the ad delivery system with my own products — the merch shop, the Tip the Author prompt, and reminders that subscribing to any author makes the audio ads disappear. If you'd rather not hear the audio ads, subscribe to any single author (the $2.50/month platform subscription, or any author's individual subscription) and they stop platform-wide.
• Password reset works again. If you ever clicked "Reset Password" on the login page and ended up on a 404, that's now fixed. New reset emails route to a working flow that lets you set a new password and continue to your dashboard.
• Subscriptions unlock episodes properly after Stripe checkout. A couple of supporters reported paying for an author's subscription, returning to the episode page, and still hearing the 30-second preview instead of the full chapter. Tracked it down to a caching layer that was serving stale audio URLs after upgrade. Fixed. If you've ever had this happen and didn't bother reporting it, a single hard refresh of the episode page (Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + R) clears it.

Author payouts — small honest update

PayPal has a confirmed technical issue affecting their mass payout API across many merchants, not just Vox9. Their engineering team is working on it but hasn't yet shared a resolution timeframe. Author earnings are continuing to accrue normally and are visible on the Insights tab of every author dashboard. Manual payouts are unaffected — email dennis@vox9.io if you'd like one in the meantime.

As always, every live platform number stays published at vox9.io/public-stats.

Two small changes worth flagging this week.

• Clearer 30-second preview on locked episodes. When you hit the preview clip of a paid chapter, the player now tells you that's what's happening. A small "Preview" pill sits in the corner of the cover, the timestamp reads "0:30 PREVIEW", and at the 20-second mark a slide-in prompt offers a one-click jump to the full episode. No more wondering why the audio stopped.
• A quiet ads trial on the hub. You'll occasionally see small image cards labelled "PROMO" inside some of the genre rows. They're an early test of a future ads system we're building that, if it works, would give our authors a new way to earn from their work -- alongside subscriptions and tips. We're keeping the trial small while we learn what fits.

As always, the platform's live numbers stay published at vox9.io/public-stats.

When Vox9 launched on 8 February, the question wasn't whether it would work -- it was how quickly it would tell us either way. Three months later, listeners have played 100,000 hours of audio across the platform. That's not a vanity metric. That's a real number of real evenings, commutes, walks, and quiet rooms spent with stories that, before Vox9, didn't exist in audio at all.

A few other numbers from the same window:

• 581,000 episode plays
• 614 published episodes from 39 independent authors
• 5,912 registered listeners -- 1,517 of them have become supporters (subscribers or tippers). That's a 1-in-4 conversion rate. Most subscription platforms count themselves lucky at 1-in-50.
• 66% completion rate -- the share of listeners who finish what they start

Everything above is published live and updates daily at vox9.io/public-stats. Nothing rounded, nothing cherry-picked.

What also shipped this week

A handful of quality-of-life upgrades that the milestone post would be incomplete without:

• Keep screen on while playing -- a new toggle inside the sleep-timer modal. Android in particular has been aggressive about suspending background audio; this stops that for long-form listeners who'd rather not lock and unlock their phone every ten minutes.
• Auto-recover from stuck buffering after sleep -- if your phone hibernates mid-episode and the stream stalls on resume, the player now refreshes itself instead of leaving you tapping play. Particularly noticeable on PWA installs.
• Full audiobook creation, properly finished -- when an author combines a series into a single full-book, scene images now carry over, chapter captions stitch together with precise timing (no drift over long episodes), and the finished file lands on the fast CDN.
• Calmer mobile layout -- hub, author and playlist pages now reserve space for images before they load. The "everything jumps when something pops in" feeling is gone.
• About page polish -- founder photo, plus a new "Why AI Narration?" section explaining where Vox9 fits relative to professional audiobooks. (Spoiler: not in competition with them.)

Thank you

To the authors who took a chance on a 7-day-old platform back in February: I owe you most of this. To the listeners who showed up, kept showing up, and told friends: thank you for the part of those 100,000 hours that's yours.

The next milestone has a number on it too. We'll get there.

We've completed registration with the U.S. Copyright Office's DMCA Designated Agent Directory. Registration number DMCA-1072320, effective today.

In plain terms: if anyone, anywhere in the world, believes content on Vox9 infringes their copyright, they can now send a formal takedown notice to a registered, public agent -- and we have a clear, time-bound process for handling it. This puts Vox9 on the same legal footing as YouTube, Spotify, Substack, and every other platform that hosts user-uploaded content.

• For authors -- stronger protection against bogus claims. We now publish a counter-notice procedure, a documented repeat-infringer policy (three validated claims in 12 months results in a ban), and a misrepresentation-liability notice that puts real legal pressure on bad-faith claimants. Section 7 of the Terms of Service has the full detail.
• For listeners -- the platform's legal posture is now formal and transparent. You can see exactly who handles complaints, by what process, on what timeline. The platform isn't going anywhere.
• For everyone -- a wider Terms of Service refresh is coming in the next few weeks. Mostly clarifications around AI disclosure, transcripts and captions, and standard creator-platform indemnification language. Active authors will get an email with at least 30 days notice before the new version takes effect.

This is the kind of thing that doesn't matter at all -- right up until the moment it matters a lot. Better done before we need it than after.

Four changes shipped over the last 48 hours, all small individually, but each pulling in the same direction: showing more of how Vox9 actually works, and making the bits you use every day a bit smoother.

• About page rewritten -- proper founder story, verifiable credentials. The old page was generic platform marketing. The new one tells the real story (YouTube demonetised my fiction channel, so I built Vox9), publishes the deal terms (50/50 subscription split, 80/20 on tips, ads coming), and lists every public registration -- Companies House, ICO, US Copyright DMCA, UK StartUp Awards Rising Star Finalist -- with the actual numbers so anyone can verify them with the issuing authorities directly. Have a read.
• More transparency on /public-stats. The advertiser-facing transparency page now leads with a "Total Views (Last 30 Days)" headline figure -- the single number that maps most directly to ad-impression inventory, which is what advertisers actually ask about first. Updates daily. We've always published this kind of data live, no filters or rounding-up; the new card just brings the most-asked-about number to the top of the page. If you've never visited it, vox9.io/public-stats shows every metric the platform produces in real time -- listening hours, conversion rate, country mix, top series, free vs subscriber split. We'd rather be known for showing too much than for being vague about what's working.
• "New here? Start with these" -- a curated row at the top of the hub (trial). We're testing this for new listeners landing on Vox9 for the first time. Ten genuine entry points mixed by length so visitors can self-sort by commitment level: short samples (7-18 minutes) for a quick try, medium chapter ones (29-69 minutes) for a proper introduction, and full audiobooks (9-20 hours) for committed listeners. If engagement signals show new visitors are actually using it after a few weeks, we'll keep iterating. If not, we'll try a different framing. Existing listeners can ignore it -- it's at the top of the hub but doesn't change anything else.
• Comments now expand on demand -- noticeably faster on mobile. Episode pages used to load every comment on every visit, even if you never scrolled to the comments section. On busy episodes that meant pulling 1-2 MB of JSON for every page view. Now there's a "View N comments" expander -- the page tells you how many comments exist, and only fetches the actual conversation when you click. Episode pages should feel meaningfully faster, especially on cellular data when you're not on Wi-Fi. When you post a comment, the section auto-expands so you see your message land at the top.

None of these are headline features on their own. But they compound -- and we'd rather make ten quiet improvements than one loud one that needed walking back later.

The past 48 hours have been about making Vox9 properly discoverable. New listeners can't find the platform if it doesn't show up in search; authors can't share their work if the link previews are broken. Both of those just got fixed.

• Sitemap submitted to Google -- 663 individual pages (every published episode, series, and active author profile) are now in Google's index. Search Console confirmed it. Long-tail searches like "Black Ship audiobook chapter 47" or "free LitRPG audiobook" should start surfacing real Vox9 pages within the next week or two.
• Every episode page is now individually discoverable -- previously every episode shared the same generic page title and had no description, so Google saw hundreds of near-duplicate pages. Now each one has its own title (e.g. "Chapter 47 -- Wyatt's Stand · The Black Ship · Vox9"), a unique description from the episode synopsis, and structured data describing it as an audiobook. Browser tabs, bookmarks, and Google results all pick this up automatically.
• Link previews on social platforms -- when authors paste an episode link into Discord, Reddit, Twitter, or WhatsApp, the preview now shows the episode cover, title, and description rather than a generic Vox9 logo. Same shape as Spotify or YouTube links. (Heads-up: some platforms cache previews for ~24 hours, so older shared links may need a refresh.)
• llms.txt for AI assistants -- a structured summary of the platform aimed at ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI search tools. When someone asks one of those "what's a good free audiobook platform for HFY stories?", we now have a fighting chance of being cited accurately.
• Robots.txt updated -- explicit allow-list for the major AI crawlers so they can read and reference Vox9 content with our blessing.

None of this changes how the platform looks or works for current listeners. It just makes Vox9 reachable from the rest of the internet.

Late on Thursday, a story shared via direct link drew an unusually big surge of listeners all arriving at the same episode at once. For a few hours, some of you may have noticed the platform feeling slow -- pages took longer to load, comment threads dragged, audio occasionally hesitated to start. We're sorry if you ran into that.

We've spent today fixing the underlying causes and doing a stack of audio improvements that listeners on mobile data should feel straight away. In plain terms:

• Lifted a quiet ceiling on our database -- we'd been pushing close to one of its monthly usage limits, which was slowing every query down without us realising. That ceiling is now removed.
• Added a global edge cache in front of the platform -- when many people load the same page in a short window, most of them now get served from a nearby cache instead of asking our servers fresh each time. The same approach big platforms use when something goes viral.
• Database optimisations -- a handful of tweaks make the most frequent operations (loading comments, the hub banner, the featured-episode card) noticeably quicker.
• Quieter background saves -- your listening position still saves automatically while you listen, just a touch less often. You won't notice the difference; the servers will.
• Smaller, faster audio files for cellular listeners -- a lot of audiobook uploads were arriving at a much higher quality setting than spoken-word narration actually needs. We've started shrinking them to the right size: about half the data per minute, identical quality to your ears, and dramatically faster on mobile. A wave of popular episodes (Shore Leave, Academy Days, Barony, EXILED EARTH) has already been converted -- you should feel the difference if you skip into the middle of a long episode on cellular.
• New uploads automatically optimised -- from today, every audiobook an author uploads gets this same treatment in the background, no matter what tool they exported it from. Authors keep their normal workflow; listeners just get faster files.
• Audio served from a faster network -- newly-uploaded and recently-converted episodes are now delivered through a content network that's closer to listeners and built for streaming. Less travel time between the file and your phone.
• A pile of small player and dashboard polish -- better recovery when something hiccups mid-playback, fewer "where did my edit go?" moments in the author dashboard, smoother seeking on long episodes.

The platform should now handle spikes several times larger than yesterday's without any visible slowdown, and everyday browsing should feel a little snappier going forward too. Long episodes on cellular in particular should be much smoother to scrub through.

This is part of the journey. As more listeners arrive, the platform learns where it needs to grow. We'd rather hit these moments and fix them than design for traffic we don't have. Thanks for sticking with us through the bumpy bit.

A handful of upgrades aimed at making the platform feel less crowded and giving authors more control over their workflow.

• Buy more ElevenLabs credits -- every active author still gets 100,000 free characters every month from the platform, exactly as before. What's new: when you need more on top of that free allowance, you can now top up directly from the dashboard. Three packs (Starter $3 / Standard $12 / Large $22) handle anything from a single chapter to ~1.5 hours of extra narration. Purchased credits sit alongside your monthly free pool, only get used after the free 100K is gone, and roll over forever -- so you can stockpile if you're planning a big release without losing what you don't use. Look for the new + Buy more button next to the ElevenLabs Credits widget.
• Redeem credits from your earnings -- if you've got a balance from tips or subscriptions, you can spend it on credits at cost price -- cheaper than buying with a card because there are no payment fees in the way. Same Buy More modal, same packs, lower prices ($1.80 / $9 / $18). Reduces what you'd otherwise withdraw to PayPal, but most authors prefer credits over cash for ongoing production. The redemption section only appears if you have enough balance to afford the smallest pack.
• Bonus credits visible on the dashboard -- the AI Credits widget now shows your purchased pool alongside the free monthly one. Format: 13,165 / 100,000 + 25,000 paid -- the bonus part renders in amber so you can see at a glance what you've stockpiled.
• Tidied-up dashboard header -- the top bar had grown to 12+ items competing for attention. We've moved Browse Hub, Manage Playlists, theme toggle, and Logout into a single dropdown that opens when you click your name on the right. Tabs (Library / Comments / Insights / Profile / Settings) and the Create Episode button stay visible. Far less visual noise; nothing more than one click away.
• Hub: arrows on horizontal carousels -- on desktop, every horizontal-scroll section now has cyan chevron buttons on the left and right edges. Click to scroll smoothly without needing to shift+wheel or grab the scrollbar. Mobile is unchanged -- swipe still works natively there.
• Hub: clearer titles, durations, and "already heard" indicators -- episode card titles now show their full text on hover (no more guessing what's after the ellipsis), the title font shrunk slightly to fit longer chapter names without truncation, the duration text on each thumbnail is brighter green and easier to spot, and the progress bar that shows what you've already started/finished is now thicker and glows so you can tell at a glance which episodes are new to you.

• Rotating hub announcement banner -- the strip at the top of the hub now cycles through approved listener tips ("Thank you, Steve! $5.00 tip") alongside any platform announcement. Tip amounts are tier-coloured so you can see at a glance who's chipped in big. A new 💜 Tip now button on the banner takes you straight to the tip box and opens it for you. Listeners on the dashboard see the same banner; authors don't (you don't need to be reminded to support yourself).
• Inline comment replies -- previously, clicking "Reply" on a comment scrolled you up to the top comment box and changed its placeholder. Disjointed and confusing. Now clicking Reply opens a small inline form right under the comment you're replying to. Type, click Reply, and your response nests under the parent. You can have multiple inline forms open at once if you're triaging a long thread. Replies stop nesting at three levels deep so threads don't crawl off-screen on mobile.
• Vorts: new HOOK clip type for narrative pull -- on the short-form Vorts feed, a new HOOK category catches chapter openings, "and then" pivots, loaded questions, and ominous foreshadowing -- the lines that leave you needing to know what happens next. Early data shows HOOK clips convert listeners into full-episode plays at ~9% compared to ~4% for action clips and under 2% for everything else, so we've made HOOK the priority pick type going forward. We've also retired the FUNNY and REVELATION categories from new extractions because they didn't drive listening. Existing live clips of those types stay in the feed.
• Scene editor fix -- we shipped a bug yesterday where editing the timestamp on one scene image would silently re-sort the data without re-rendering the grid -- so editing a few in a row made it look like images were jumping around. Fixed: every time edit immediately moves that row into its correct chronological slot. Also switched to a clearer two-column Time | Image row layout.

Our biggest author feature yet. You can now attach scene images to specific timestamps in your episodes. As the audio plays, images cross-fade in sync with the story -- giving your listeners a visual accompaniment without turning the platform into a video player.

• How it works -- open any episode in your dashboard, click Edit, and scroll to the "Scene Images" section. Play the audio, set a timestamp, and upload an image. The image will appear at that moment for every listener.
• Batch upload -- got a lot of scenes? Use "Create empty tiles" to set up multiple placeholders at once with auto-spaced timestamps. Then drag and drop images into each tile, or click to browse. Images upload directly to our cloud storage for speed.
• Editable timestamps -- change the timing of any scene after uploading. Click the timestamp on any saved scene and type a new value. Scenes re-sort automatically.
• Audio stays untouched -- this is not a video. Your MP3 is unchanged. Listeners with the screen off hear the episode exactly as before. Listeners watching the player see the images fade beautifully between scenes.
• Use your YouTube frames -- if you've already made a video version of your story, you can screenshot each scene change and upload those images. Same visuals, delivered as an audiobook.

We recommend 16:9 widescreen images for the best look across desktop and mobile. Episodes without scenes look identical to before -- the feature is completely opt-in.

• New landing page -- the front page has been redesigned with a two-column layout. Clean branding panel on the left, content browsing on the right. Faster to scan, less scrolling.
• Genre duplicate fix -- authors can no longer accidentally select the same genre as both primary and secondary when creating or uploading episodes.
• Mobile player refinements -- top bar buttons, episode title, author name, and play controls all reduced for a cleaner look with more space for cover art and scene images.
• Landing page analytics -- we're now tracking visitor journeys (page views, CTA clicks, scroll depth, referrers) to understand how people discover Vox9 and improve the experience.

• Comments tab in the author dashboard -- authors can now see every comment across all their episodes in one place, without having to open each episode individually. Includes the ability to hide and reply to comments directly from the feed -- no need to navigate to each episode. Find the new "Comments" tab between Library and Insights.
• Vox9 Store -- we've launched an official merch store with mugs, t-shirts, and caps from The Black Ship and Scifi Stories. All items are made to order and ship worldwide.
• Ad-free subscription -- don't want to hear ads? You can now subscribe to the platform for $2.50/month to remove all ads from your listening experience. 100% of the subscription goes towards keeping Vox9 running and paying authors.

Two updates this week -- one for authors, one for the platform.

• Shadow-hide comments -- authors can now hide individual comments on their episodes. A hidden comment stays visible to the person who wrote it (they won't know it's been hidden), but is removed from everyone else's view. This gives authors a quiet way to manage their comment sections without confrontation or public drama. Look for the "Hide" button on any comment when viewing your own stories.
• Trial ads for free listeners -- we're trialling short ads on the platform for free listeners only. Right now these are Vox9's own announcements -- promoting our merch, Vox9 Post, and platform features. In the near future, we'll be introducing real advertisements to help fund the platform. When that happens, 50% of all ad revenue will go directly to the authors whose episodes the ads play on. So by watching an ad today, you're helping us build the system that will soon pay the creators you love. Subscribers are completely unaffected -- subscribing to any author for just $2.50/month removes all ads across the entire platform. Thank you for your support while we get this right.

• Infrastructure upgrade -- we've scaled up the database and optimised how platform stats are computed, giving us significantly more headroom as the community grows. Pages should feel snappier, especially the hub.
• Edit playlist details -- authors can now edit a playlist's title and description anytime from the Manage Playlists modal, or via the Edit Details button in the episode reorder view. Previously these could only be set at creation.

• Cover image library -- authors can now pick from a library of pre-made cover images when creating episodes, instead of having to design or source their own every time.
• Warhammer 40,000 (40K) genre -- added as a dedicated category for authors writing in the 40K universe.
• Long-form showcase -- all 2+ hour episodes now surface on the hub, so listeners can find the longer-form stories more easily.

Our biggest update since launch. Three things landed together, all aimed at giving fans more ways to support the stories and the platform they love.

• Author Tips -- fans can now tip authors directly from their profile page. 80% goes to the author, 20% to the platform. A real earnings boost on top of subscriptions.
• Platform Support -- you can now tip Vox9 itself to help keep the platform running. Every pound goes directly to infrastructure, storage, and keeping the service alive.
• Supporter Badges -- tippers get visible recognition through avatar rings in 5 tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond) shown wherever your profile appears on the platform.

A huge thank you to everyone who's already started tipping -- it genuinely makes a difference.

We've overhauled how listening time is counted. Authors now see accurate cumulative listening hours on their dashboard -- how much fans are actually listening, not just where they clicked. The same accurate numbers now power the platform totals on the landing page.

Authors can now turn a 30-second snippet of any story into a shareable video clip -- perfect for TikTok, Instagram, X, and anywhere else you want to promote your work.

• Ken Burns zoom on the cover image, clean typography, and Vox9 branding baked in.
• Pick any start point down to the exact second.
• One-click social share buttons on the download screen.

Look for "Create Clip" on your episode pages in the creator dashboard.

Audio files and cover images now upload directly to our cloud storage rather than routing through the server. Significantly faster -- especially for long episodes -- and fewer failed uploads on slower connections.

A new physical product is on the way. Vox9 Post is a subscription for beautifully printed stories delivered to your door twice a month -- a tangible companion to the audio platform for people who love holding a story in their hands.

• Launching May 2026 with Book One: The Black Ship.
• Interest signup is open now at vox9.io/post -- no payment required, just register to hear when it goes live.
• Letter preview gallery is on the page so you can see the design direction.

We've added Sci-Fi News as a new genre category for authors writing in that future-news style. A dedicated section appears on the hub once enough episodes are published in the genre.

We're carrying out platform upgrades this weekend. Here's what's happening:

• Stripe payments going live -- We're switching from test mode to real payments within the next 24-48 hours. Subscriptions to your favourite authors will use real payment processing.
• Browse all content -- You can now see ALL authors, playlists, and episodes on the platform. The hub's "See All" buttons now show the full catalogue instead of just featured picks.
• New "All Episodes" section -- A dedicated browsable section on the hub page showing every published episode, sorted by newest first.
• This updates page -- You're looking at it! We'll post regular updates here about new features, fixes, and what's coming next.

There may be brief interruptions over the weekend as we finalise the payment integration. Thanks for your patience!