By Piotr Pelka
This is an Author Feature. The words below are Piotr Pelka's own, edited only for format. AudiobookSoul has not listened to, scored, or independently reviewed The Silent, and nothing here is our rating or verdict. The audiobook edition is digitally narrated with ElevenLabs voices, as the author discusses below.
The Silent started with my own twin sons
They are very close, although you might not always think that if you watched them for a day. They argue, fight, annoy each other and know exactly how to get on each other's nerves. But when one of them isn't there, everything changes. They miss each other. They feel that something isn't quite right.
For all the fighting, they don't really know how to be without each other.
That relationship stayed in my head and eventually became the starting point for The Silent.
I didn't want to write a story directly about my sons, so I moved the idea somewhere completely different. I've always enjoyed science fiction, particularly the kind that has something underneath the technology and strange worlds. I wanted the science fiction to be part of the story, but not the whole point of it.
So I created Kael and Ori, twin brothers, and separated them between two worlds: Earth and Vaelis.
The setting is fictional, but the emotion behind that separation came from something very real.
Twenty episodes in Word
Originally, The Silent wasn't supposed to be a novel at all. I planned it as a series. I wrote around twenty episodes in Word and started showing them to my sons. They really liked them, which was probably the first moment when I thought, maybe there is actually something here.
Then I gave some of the drafts to friends.
The response was surprisingly positive. Quite often, after I sent someone a few episodes, the reaction was basically: "Send me the next one."
That gave me confidence, but I also got some useful criticism. A few people told me that although they liked the story, certain parts needed more depth. The characters were going through something huge, particularly the twins suddenly being separated, but the episodic format sometimes moved through those moments too quickly.
A very different calculation
At the same time, I had started experimenting with turning the series into something visual using AI.
That was when reality kicked in.
Creating even a relatively short AI-generated series takes a lot of time, and the costs add up very quickly. Every tool seems affordable on its own, but when you're generating scenes, correcting them, trying again and building an entire episode, it becomes a very different calculation.
I didn't have the budget to spend a large amount of money on a series without knowing whether anybody outside my friends and family would even care about the story.
So I changed direction.
Instead of twenty episodes, I started turning The Silent into a proper novel with chapters. That gave me more room to slow down where the story needed it. I added more dialogue and spent more time with the twins after the separation, as well as the emotional moments when their paths eventually came together again.
The story could breathe a little more.
A synthetic voice isn't the same as a human performance
The audiobook came partly from the same practical problem.
Hiring a professional narrator wasn't financially realistic for me, so I started looking at digital narration and found ElevenLabs. I began experimenting with different voices for the narrator and the individual characters.
That turned out to be much harder than simply finding a voice that sounded good.
I also learned very quickly that a synthetic voice isn't the same thing as a human performance.
A human narrator can say the same sentence five different ways and completely change what you feel. Digital voices are getting better, but there are still moments where the emotion isn't quite as deep, or a line doesn't land exactly the way I imagined it.
I spent a lot of time changing voices, adjusting the delivery, listening again and sometimes starting over.
I don't pretend that digital narration and human narration are the same thing. They aren't.
But for this project, the most important question for me wasn't whether AI could perfectly reproduce a human narrator. It was whether the story itself worked.
Why stop at audio?
Would somebody care about Kael and Ori?
Would they want to know what happened next?
Before publishing it, I kept giving parts of the story to different people. Again and again, the response was essentially the same:
"Where's the next part?"
That was enough to make me think it was worth taking the chance.
I released the audiobook on Spotify, and once I had done that, another thought seemed fairly obvious. If I had already turned the original series into a novel, why stop at audio?
So The Silent is now also available as a Kindle ebook and as a paperback on Amazon.
Send me the next one
The whole project has been a bit of an experiment.
It started with watching my own twins drive each other mad. That became an idea for a science-fiction series, then a novel, then a digitally narrated audiobook, and finally a physical book.
I still don't know where it will go from here.
For me, that is part of what makes it interesting. I wanted to find out whether a small idea, created without a big budget or a publishing team behind it, could become something that people genuinely wanted to continue reading.
So far, the most encouraging words I've heard are still the simplest ones:
"Send me the next one."
Find The Silent
About Piotr Pelka
Piotr Pelka is the author of The Silent, a YA science-fiction novel inspired by the complicated bond between his twin sons. The Silent is his first published novel and is available as an audiobook on Spotify, a Kindle ebook and a paperback on Amazon.
