If you've published a translation, you already know where the audio conversation ends. A Spanish edition sells, a German edition sells, and the audiobook stays English-only — because commissioning a second full production in a language you can't personally audition is a spend most independent publishers won't make on a maybe.
That's the gap this release closes. Midsummerr now produces audiobooks in twelve languages, and "produces" is the operative word: not an English production with a translated voice bolted on, but the same full-cast, scored, sound-designed audiobook, made in the language your book is written in.
The twelve
English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Hindi, Korean and Arabic.
You choose one when you upload the manuscript, from the same dialog where you name the book. From there the production runs in that language end to end — the cast is built for it, the performance is directed in it, and the finished chapters come back in it.
Ready to try it on your own book?
Start your first chapter free →What "the same production" actually means
The thing worth being precise about is what doesn't change. A multilingual mode that quietly drops you to single-voice narration isn't multilingual production; it's a translation feature. Everything that makes a Midsummerr production a production carries over:
| English | The other eleven | |
|---|---|---|
| Full cast, one voice per character | Yes | Yes |
| Score and sound effects | Yes | Yes |
| Timeline editing and re-rendering | Yes | Yes |
| Martin, the editing assistant | Yes | Yes |
| Price per 1,000 words | Same | Same |
Pricing deserves its own line because it's the question authors ask first: language has no effect on cost. A 90,000-word novel costs the same in Polish as in English, on the same per-word pricing as any other production.
Arabic gets one additional piece of work: the manuscript, the chapter text and the editor all render right-to-left, so an Arabic book is edited in the direction it's read rather than in an English layout with Arabic text pushed through it.
Setting and changing the language
The language is a property of the project, chosen at upload. Your Generate page shows it in the header line — Español · Full Production — with a Change control beside it while the project is still unproduced.
Once a chapter starts generating, the language locks. That's deliberate: a cast, a set of voices and a sound guide are built around a specific language, and swapping the language mid-production would mean discarding them. If you picked wrong and you've already generated, upload the book again with the right language selected.
One case to know about: a project set up with English narration voices can't be switched to another language later. Those voices only speak English, so the correction there is a fresh upload rather than a setting change.
What's still English-only
Two capabilities haven't crossed over yet, and it's better to say so than to let you discover it mid-project:
- Voice conversion — the production type that performs a book in a voice you supply — is English today.
- Custom phoneme pronunciation, the precise pronunciation control in the Pronunciation step, is English today. Non-English projects still run through the full pronunciation and quality-check pass; you just can't hand-specify a phoneme spelling for a word yet.
Everything else — self-serve, director-led, full cast, single narrator — is available in all twelve.
Why this is worth doing now
Outside English, the audiobook catalogue is thin. A reader in Warsaw or Seoul has a fraction of the audiobook choice a reader in Chicago does — and the reason is rarely absent demand. It's that a studio production priced for a large market never penciled out for a smaller one, so the translated edition shipped in print and ebook and stopped there.
Those economics are what changed. If you hold translation rights and you've been sitting on foreign editions with no audio, that decision is now a per-word cost and a few hours, not a second five-figure production budget per territory.
Try it
Start a new project, pick your language in the upload dialog, and run a chapter. One chapter is enough to hear the cast and the score before you commit the book.
If you haven't heard a Midsummerr production yet, the sample productions are the fastest way in — they're English, but the casting, score and sound design you hear there are what the other eleven languages get too. For the wider picture on how full-cast production differs from narration, start with our guide to full-cast audiobooks.
