A few years back I started writing a middle grade novel. It’s about a kid named Mike McNulty who lives in a small Jersey Shore town, turns 10, and finds out he has a power passed through his family that can drop him into alternate dimensions where he meets other versions of himself.
In his first trip in the book, he lands in a world with a purple sky where his counterpart is a sorcerer apprentice who accidentally froze his entire valley. There’s a talking crow named Pib who has zero patience for either of them. It’s called Into The McNultyverse.
I finished the whole book. Then decided not to publish it as a book.
Before making that call I had Claude pull competitive research on KDP for kids books in the middle grade space. The short version: very difficult to rank, very crowded, and discoverability without an existing audience or publisher backing is rough. A serialized fiction podcast gets distributed by Spotify and Apple for free. The book would’ve needed a marketing push I wasn’t ready for. So the book became a season.
The thing I didn’t expect to find
Full-cast audio dramas dominate the 7–12 space. Mars Patel, Six Minutes, Kaboom — multiple voice actors, cinematic sound design, the whole thing. Great. Also not happening on a solo creator budget.
But there’s a show called Finn Caspian — one narrator, third-person limited, doing distinct voices for each character — that ran 200 episodes across 12 seasons. That’s the model.
And here’s where my own concept accidentally solved my biggest production problem. Every book, Mike meets an alternate version of himself. Same voice, different world. I was always going to need two Mikes. That’s not a casting problem — that’s an ElevenLabs brief. Clone my own voice, adjust the pacing and delivery to be a little slower, a little more formal — and that’s the counterpart. The AI weirdness is actually right for an alternate dimension character.
What the build looked like
I used Claude to research the kids podcast market before writing anything. Then worked through the whole adaptation — book chapters don’t map cleanly to podcast episodes, and the book didn’t have a framing device. Claude suggested a “Counterpart Log” that opens and closes each episode in Mike’s voice, looking back on the adventure. It fits the format perfectly and wasn’t in the original book at all.
Then we wrote all 9 episode scripts. Full book adapted into a full season. About 2.7 hours of audio.
The stack:
- Audacity for recording and editing
- ElevenLabs for the counterpart voice clone
- Buzzsprout for hosting and distribution
- Gemini (Lyria 3) for the show’s music sting
Where it is right now
Scripts are done. Logo is done. Recording hasn’t started. Launch date TBD.
The plan is to record all 9 episodes before publishing any of them, drop 3 on launch day, then weekly from there. I’ll document the whole thing here — the recording setup, whether the voice clone actually works, and what it sounds like when a 43-year-old tries to voice a 10-year-old convincingly.
Coming soon (unless I bail).