Your accent is who you are, no need to apologize or even mention it. It sounds great and authentic. 

Basically,you're creating an audio book, stating the obvious here. The more relaxed you are when reading, the relaxation will come through in your voice. I'm a world of AI generated voices reading books now, a real human is a luxury. 

Any decent external mic will help the quality tremendously. Smartphone mics are a mess for quality.  Something like this works great to start (see link)

Keep doing it. You'll improve at all of it the more you do it. Stick with books that interest you emotionally. The emotion and interest will be genuine and come through the recording. 

Great first try. 

 https://rode.com/en-us/microphones/on-camera/videomicro-ii

 

 Thank you! Thank you, for the encouragement and support and the mic recommendation 🙏🏻☺️ I've been trying to find a mic that could fit my nomadic lifestyle that I could also attach to my MacBook pro to record video virtual meeting interviews. Would this also work for that as well, do you think? 🙏🏻 

 You could also try https://rode.com/en/microphones/usb/nt-usb-mini 

 Thank you. This one of the few options that has been sitting actually in my Amazon shoping cart for a few days. I had also seen the first one through my research just didn't quite think it would fullfill the podcast interview mic needs I had been mainly after. I will sit with it and need to pull the plug here in the next day or two. These are the other couple ones I'd be looking at. https://image.nostr.build/5cdcb39383f622cd93e86f09f8ce94ce51676ea28ac808fac37e2ad72823791b.jpg
Been reaching to perplexity.ai for the more real time Google search results on what's popular right now.