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Karen Commins

Atlanta Audiobook Share-rator™

"A Vacation For Your Ears"

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6 Low-Cost Avenues For Greater Audiobook Sales

4 April 2018

megaphone with icons for marketing channels

 

Congratulations! You’ve got a brand new audiobook! It’s time to get the word out about it!

I minored in marketing while in college and have always loved to think about marketing ideas. Sandra Beckwith at BuildBookBuzz.com recently asked me a number of questions related to audiobook marketing. Our interview was posted today, and you can read it here.

A while back, I wrote 2 articles on the ACX.com blog to address this very topic. In Part One, I explained some reasons why people are resistant to listening to audiobooks. I then offered 3 ways to make your audiobooks more discoverable to an audience, including an invaluable site to use when developing a promotions calendar.

Part Two contains 4 more ways to promote your audiobooks and includes some very specific tactics about several social media sites, such as instructions about adding the audio edition of your title to Goodreads and subscribing to my Twitter list of audiobook reviewers and bloggers.

While I encourage you to mine those articles and their comments for their wealth of actionable steps, I’m excited to share these 6 low-cost avenues of audiobook promotion.

Author Mentions

The number one thing that any author can do to sell your audiobook is to consistently alert your fans that you have an audiobook available!

Any time you promote your book, make it a habit to say that the audiobook is also available.

I have been astonished and dismayed by the number of audio rights holders who use ACX to create their audiobooks but then do little or nothing to promote the finished product. The audiobook won’t sell itself!

Some narrators like me heavily promote our titles. However, narrators generally can’t spend much energy marketing any one book as we are constantly recording the next one. The author is the person who wrote the words in the book and has the fan base who most wants to know about — and is most likely to buy — an audiobook edition.

Here are some easy ways to constantly update your fans specifically about your audiobooks:

  • Write progress reports on your blog during audiobook production.
  • Add a blurb about or even a link to your audiobook in the front matter of your other editions.
  • Create a sales page on your web site specifically for your audiobooks, or add links to the audiobooks along with the print editions on your site. Include the audiobook “buy” links from Amazon, Audible, and iTunes every time you mention the book (your web site, blog, social media, interviews elsewhere, etc.)
  • Notify your email list about all new audiobook releases.
  • Conduct an audiobook event on Facebook to celebrate release day or some other occasion in your promotions calendar.
  • Host a Google Hangout On Air or a Zoom chat with your narrator and invite your fans to participate in the live stream. Fans love to have a look behind the scenes! Once the event is over, the recorded video of the Hangout is posted on YouTube. You and your narrator could then share that video on your blogs and social media sites for even more coverage.

Audiobook Boom

The popular AudiobookBoom.com site is the brainchild of  fellow audiobook narrator Jeffrey Kafer. Audiobook Boom is kind of like BookBub in that it is a paid service where authors and publishers highlight certain titles. However, Audiobook Boom is only for audiobook promotion, and the weekly email newsletters are sent to subscribers who are audiobook listeners.

You pay $10 per title for a  Listen & Review ad. If you used ACX to create your audiobook, you will automatically receive 25 Audible promo codes so you can give copies of your audiobook to eager listeners. With a Listen & Review ad, you’ll quickly receive a number of requests for your book from people who are willing to review it.

Whispersync

If you publish an edition of your book in Amazon’s Kindle format, your audiobook is eligible for the Whispersync feature. This amazing technology allows people to switch seamlessly between the Kindle ebook and the Audible audiobook.

I created a 3-minute video that demonstrates Whispersync in action.

Whispersync also increases sales of both editions. Amazon offers a discount on the audiobook if the buyer first purchases the Kindle edition. In fact, some people will buy the Kindle book simply to get the audiobook at a discount.

If you promote your free ebook on services like BookBub, you can expect to see an immediate ripple effect of sales of your audiobook edition. For instance, a recent Kindle Free ad on BookBub resulted in over 300 audiobook units sold the same day! The royalties from the audiobook sales might easily exceed the cost of the BookBub listing!

QR Codes

You’ve probably seen the square black and white boxes on coupons, in magazines, on store shelves, and on actual products. These boxes are called Quick Response, or QR, codes, and you can create a QR code on-line for free.

QR codes link to some content of your choosing on-line and can create a deeper level of engagement with a fan. People with smart phones can use an app that takes a picture of the QR code and immediately sends them to your link.

You could print the image of a QR code on a business card, postcard or flyer that you mail or hand out at your live events. If you have a print edition of your book, you could include a QR code in it.

After scanning your QR code in her phone app to read them, the recipient’s browser opens to the link you used when creating the QR code. For example, you might create a QR code link that sends people to your audiobook edition on Audible, plays the MP3 of the audiobook retail sample, or calls up the YouTube video of your Google Hangout with your narrator.

As you can see in these pictures, I have a QR code on the back of my business cards. Once scanned, my QR code will bring up my web site in the phone browser.

front of my business cardthe backside of my business card has a QR code on it

Podcasts

A podcast is defined as a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.

With the proliferation of smart phones, podcasts are enjoying increased visibility and popularity, and they are a perfect platform for audiobook promotion!

In a Kindle Direct Publishing newsletter, author Hal Elrod, who has sold over 100,000 copies of his self-published ebook, said, “I can confidently say that the number one key to driving book sales has been securing interviews on other people’s podcasts!”

He further commented, “A great place to start is to look on iTunes in the “New and Noteworthy” section to find podcasters who are new (so they’re not inundated with requests) but are gaining a lot of momentum and listeners. Google them, go to their websites, and reach out to tell them how you and your book would add extraordinary value for their audiences!”

You can also seek out interviews on established podcasts. Harper Audio Presents usually features author interviews, even if the author was published elsewhere. In fact, you’ll find many more terrific podcast possibilities by looking in the iTunes store under Podcasts/Art/Literature.

You even can create your own podcast and host it on your web site and/or Soundcloud. For instance, my colleague Ann Richardson and I recorded each of our InD’ear columns and uploaded the recordings to our Narrators Helping Authors Soundcloud account. If you hold a Google hangout with your narrator and/or fans, you can extract the audio and repurpose it as a podcast.

Radio Shows

A podcast interview is valuable experience and can definitely drive sales, but a real radio station has many more listeners. However, unless you’re a celebrity author, the media probably won’t come looking for you. As with podcasts, you can contact local radio stations and ask to be a guest on a show.

According to morning show host Wayne Kelly, the key to booking radio interviews is that you do NOT want to approach the producers as an author promoting a book! The producer could fear booking an introverted author who would provide no value to the listeners. Instead, you would position yourself as someone who increases audience interest with your specialized insight and comments about current stories.

First, keep a list of topics covered in your book. Authors who research topics for fictional stories would develop expertise in those areas. When it’s time to publicize the book and audiobook, look for hot topics in the news which tie into your subject matter knowledge.

Google stations in your locale. You then can find them on social media and/or call the station to ask for the email address of the person who books the most interviews.

 

As you can see, you can market your audiobook with your book and as a standalone product. Want even more ideas for audiobook marketing? You’ll find them on my Audiobook Marketing Cheat Sheet! If you have questions, please leave a comment on the blog or book a personal consultation on my Shop page.

 

Most of this article originally appeared in the February 2016 issue of InD’Tale Magazine. I’ve updated some of the info and links.

 

 

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Filed Under: Audiobooks, Authors, Marketing Tagged With: Ann Richardson, audiobook, AudiobookBoom.com, BuildBookBuzz.com, Hal Elrod, Jeffrey Kafer, marketing, QR code, Sandra Beckwith, Wayne Kelly

Karen Commins’s Audiobook Marketing Cheat Sheet

27 November 2016

Last updated 6 December 2018

 

4 audiobook covers on a billboard
Since many people listen to audiobooks in the car, look for my billboards, coming soon to a road near you! ????

 


Don’t you just LOVE to market your audiobooks?

I think many people would answer an emphatic NO! to that question, in part because they feel uncertain how to proceed.

This page will give you plenty of creative ideas for promoting your audiobook!

Before we get to those ideas, I want to point out that the author and publisher should do most of the marketing and promotion of the title. Even on royalty share contracts, the narrator’s role in and effect from promotion is minimal. Narrators typically have larger portfolios than authors and have shorter deadlines, making it impractical for a narrator to do prolonged and/or substantial marketing on individual books.

I hold the view that the best long-term marketing any narrator or author can do is to narrate or write their next book. Being prolific in your field improves your skills, builds the fan base of buyers (with sales and royalties to follow), and always gives you something new to promote.

In addition, authors and publishers would do well to spend the bulk of their time and money in promoting the BOOK rather than a particular edition of it. Some of the methods on this page will work very well for promoting the book, while others will help you give the audiobook greater visibility.

Why do audiobooks need greater visibility? I answered that question and many more in the interview I gave to Sandra Beckwith at BuildBookBuzz.com. This interview is a good place to start when you’re developing a marketing plan for your book and audiobook.

 

Author Mentions

My article in the February 2016 issue of InD’tale Magazine, “6 Low-Cost Avenues For Greater Audiobook Sales” lists 7 ways authors can mention their audiobooks on their sites and in their newsletter mailing list, references my 2 ACX articles below and offers even more promotional and marketing ideas:  AudiobookBoom.com (discussed below), Whispersync, QR codes, podcasts (see this article for a case study), and radio shows.

Author Melissa Storm has created this video that shows her attractive sales buttons on her site and her links on Soundcloud. She also discusses email automations to send info about your audiobooks to your mailing list.

 

Social Media and Other Tactics

I had the pleasure of being a guest writer on the ACX.com blog to discuss audiobook marketing in depth. Both articles and their comments include examples from other narrators and me.

In Part One, I explained some reasons why people are resistant to listening to audiobooks. I then offered 3 ways to make your audiobooks more discoverable to an audience, with related tactics for each:  be authentic, be consistent, and be creative.

Part Two contains 4 more ways to promote your audiobooks and includes some very specific tactics on 5 social media sites (Goodreads, Twitter, Soundcloud, Facebook, YouTube) such as instructions about adding the audio edition to Goodreads and subscribing to my Twitter list of audiobook reviewers and bloggers. Be sure to read my comments for updated info about the Goodreads process. This page gives more detailed instructions about subscribing to and using my Twitter lists to find reviewers.

I created an Evernote check sheet of my minimal publicity actions, which you can view here.

This post from Kate Tilton lists 25 ideas from a March 2015 ACX Twitter chat about audiobook marketing tactics. It includes my organized Storify recap with threaded Q&As.

ACX published a great article on their blog highlighting 7 successful tips and tactics from authors interviewed at 2015 Romantic Times and BookExpo conventions.

You’ll find a growing number of groups of audiobook fans on Facebook. Be sure to read their rules and post promotions only where allowed. A few are listed below, but you can search Facebook for more generalized groups relevant to your topic.

  • Audiobook Addicts
  • Audio Books!
  • Audio Books Rock!
  • Aural Fixation

You can sign up to receive the free, 3-times-daily alerts from journalists who are looking for sources for stories at Help A Reporter. I especially encourage non-fiction authors to take this step because it’s a great way to share your expertise of your topic with the media. However, fiction authors and narrators still have many opportunities to pitch their ideas and experience as a source. Review their rules for sources before responding to any of the queries. If a journalist uses your information, you can increase your publicity by sharing your media coverage as I did in this Facebook post.

 

Audible Tools

Share the link to your audiobooks listed on Audible in the most favorable light to you as I explained in this article.

You can add the Audible sample of your audiobook to your web site and social media. If you don’t have the file, you can use this free, nifty utility from narrator Steven Jay Cohen to extract the MP3 sample file from Audible’s site.

If you published your audiobook using ACX, be sure to use the bounty referral links found in your dashboard each time you post about your audiobook.

This article on the ACX blog shows you how to create a 30-day free Audible trial. The free trial may lead to an ACX bounty payment!

Once you have the audiobook in your Audible library, Audible lets you send it for FREE to as many people as you wish!

Best of all, Audible has created Author pages that take information from Author’s Central on Amazon. This post in the ACX blog explains how to find and share your Author page.

‪
Reviews

The Literate Housewife blog offered these tips about submitting requests for reviews. This page from the Geeky Blogger’s Book Blog outlines additional details you’ll want to include in your pitch.

This blog post contains my Storify of an ACX chat about submitting your audiobooks to the premiere industry publication AudioFile Magazine for review.

Library Journal is a major influencer in library sales.

AudiobookJukebox.com is an incredible site that indexes thousands of audiobook reviews for all genres. You only have to fill out a simple form to request a review. Reviewers can check the list and request your title if they are interested in it.

The popular AudiobookBoom.com site is the brainchild of audiobook narrator Jeffrey Kafer. It’s like BookBub but is for audiobook promotion. You can advertise your audiobook on this site and use your ACX promo codes to give copies of your audiobook to eager listeners in exchange for a review.

Thanks to the efforts of narrator and audiobook columnist Ann Richardson, InD’tale Magazine accepts audiobooks for review.

Fellow narrator Paul Heitsch created this document that lists sites for audiobook reviews. This Google doc of Audiobook Marketing Resources lists additional reviewers and was created for a panel at the 2017 Romantic Times Convention by narrator Karen White, bloggers Felicia Sparks and Viviana Izzo, and Michele Cobb, the executive director of the Audio Publishers Association.

You can find other reviewers and bloggers on Twitter by subscribing to my Twitter list of audiobook reviewers and bloggers. This post shows you how to subscribe and use the list.

I hope to continue to interview audiobook bloggers and reviewers on my blog. You can read past interviews at this link.

Visibility is the key to strong sales. In this video, author Chris Fox talks about giving away a significant number of review copies to gain a spot in the top 20 in the Audible category.

 

Advertising

You can pay to advertise your audiobook in AudioFile’s Indie Press Showcase.

Audavoxx.com offers several levels of paid advertising in its weekly newsletter.

If you’d like to run Facebook ads for your audiobooks, Melissa Storm covers them in her paid course.

 

Awards

In this article, audiobook narrator and columnist Ann Richardson explores many of the awards available for audiobooks. I want to highlight 2 of them to make you aware of their deadlines:

  1. The Call For Entries in the annual prestigious Audies competition, sponsored by the Audio Publishers Association, usually begins in July.
  2. The Voice Arts Awards, presented by the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences, has entry deadlines running from May to August each year.

 

Distribution Channels

Even if your audiobook is only available as a digital download, you can still sell it through independent bookstores by distributing it through Libro.fm. This article outlines a number of ways that Libro.fm helps booksellers promote your audiobook.

 

Other Resources

When I was a guest on Stephen Campbell’s The Author Biz podcast to talk about audiobook marketing and promotion, I mentioned the ripple effect of BookBub ads for ebooks. As I demonstrate in this 3:03 video, Amazon has created technology called Whispersync that enables you to seamlessly go between the ebook and audiobook or even immerse yourself in both concurrently. Many avid listeners will acquire an Amazon Kindle ebook when it is free or heavily discounted in order to buy the Audible audiobook on Amazon at a lower price. In fact, the ripple effect is so high that the money made on the audiobook royalties following the promotion oftentimes pays the cost of the BookBub ad!

Audiograms are short videos that consist of an audio file added to a picture. In this article, narrator and publisher Steven Jay Cohen explains their use and a free audiogram generator named Headliner. I used the service Wavve.co to create the audiogram in this tweet. Wavve lets you create one 1-minute video per month for free; they offer a sliding scale of prices for additional videos. The site allows you to choose different shapes and colors for the wave form, and the support team was super responsive when I ran into an issue with the progress bar not lighting as expected.

You could include your audiograms or other audio samples in your messages sent to your mailing list.

Members of the ACX Narrators and Producers group on Facebook may also want to check the FAQ in the group’s pinned post. I created the FAQ from that group’s discussions, and it contains 5 excellent discussions about audiobook marketing that may reveal additional tactics. Note that you must have a profile on ACX in order to join the group.

 

Obviously, marketing is such a broad topic and is subject to one’s availability and creativity that I couldn’t possibly write about or include every idea.

For instance, I don’t have much to say about Pinterest. I pin the audiobook cover on a board of my titles, and I like seeing which titles have been re-pinned. Authors and publishers also use Instagram and other sites to promote their titles.

Rather than being on every social media channel, I stick with the few I enjoy using. It takes time to build a following, and I hold to the belief that “scattered thinking leads to scattered results”!

 

By steadily employing multiple techniques from this page to promote your audiobooks, you’re sure to have consistent sales!

 

Filed Under: Audiobooks, Authors, Marketing Tagged With: ACX.com, Ann Richardson, Audavoxx.com, Audible, Audies, Audio Publishers Association, audiobook, AudiobookBoom.com, AudiobookJukebox.com, AudioFile Magazine, Bookbub, BuildBookBuzz.com, Chris Fox, Felicia Sparks, Geeky Blogger, Headliner, InD'tale Magazine, Jeffrey Kafer, Karen White, Libro.fm, Literate Housewife, marketing, Melissa Storm, Michele Cobb, Paul Heitsch, reviews, Sandra Beckwith, SOVAS, Stephen Campbell, Steven Jay Cohen, The Authors Biz, Viviana Izzo, Voice Arts Awards, Wavve.co

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