Audiobook Marketing Strategies to Sell More Audiobooks

Audiobooks are widely considered one of the fastest growing segments of the publishing industry, and if you've made an investment in creating an audiobook, then you're probably wondering how you can get that audio product into the ears of your readers. If you're looking for audiobook marketing strategies and ideas, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie, the book Prod of Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing services company. You're the publisher, so you keep all the rights and royalties, but we help you every step of the way, including if you're producing an audiobook, helping you get that book into the world and market it. And if you haven't done your audiobook yet, let me tell you that recording the book can be a lot of fun. This is me recording the audio for Self Publish and succeed in a studio in Victoria, bc, Canada. They were fantastic to work with and I had a blast. So you've gone and done the fun work of creating the audiobook and now you're ready to sell it. There are some distribution decisions that impact your marketing choices, and that's a bit of a rabbit hole, so I'm not going to go deep into that, but I do have a video on ACX versus Findaway Voices and another on Findaway Voices versus Authors Republic. I'll put the links to those videos in the description below to help you with those decisions if you haven't made those yet. Ultimately the choices are about money, reach and marketing opportunities, so it's an important one for your strategy. But for today I'm I want to focus on the options out there for selling and promoting audiobooks. If you want your audiobook to be available to library listeners, which has been a popular topic around here lately, then you must make it available wide, not exclusive, through Audible so it can be requested through platforms like Overdrive at the library. Now, before I give you my marketing strategies, I have to emphasize that an audiobook with a bad title or a bad cover has the same problem as a print book or an ebook with a bad title and a bad cover. Title and cover are vital when it comes to your audiobook. It's most common for the audiobook cover to use the same design elements from the ebook or the print cover with a few differences. The audiobook cover is square, the narrator name is usually included, even if it's your name, and the lettering is usually in a different place than on the print book or the ebook cover. You need to select the right categories for the audiobook, and the audio categories will be different for acx, this is the list of categories your book may appear in. Now, assuming your audiobook metadata and design is good to go, my first audiobook marketing strategy for you is, number one, launch it with your print and ebook. Some authors try to do an audiobook launch after their book comes out, and this works great if you've got an existing audience that's asking for it and waiting for it, because you can communicate directly with them when it's out. But marketing wise, it's not so easy to generate a lot of attention or interest in an audiobook version or only. And you've also already missed out on the people who heard about you and your book when you did your big push for launch. You see, there's people who hear about you, whether you're on a podcast or they saw a promo or a friend mentioned your book or a media appearance you made, and they check you out. But they're only audiobook listener. And when they don't see the audiobook there, they move on and they never come back. So you've lost those folks. But but in addition, having audio on launch might help with Amazon's algorithm decision to show your book to more people. It's thought that Amazon gives preferential treatment to books with multiple formats. Now, logically this makes sense, because I've said this many times, Amazon is an algorithm machine that cares about one thing, conversions. And if you've got lots of formats, you're more likely to convert. All that said, hope is not lost if you're launching your book and after your print book's already out. Number two, your audience is interested in your audiobook. So tell them. Even if you're notifying people who already have your book, they may know other people who wanted the audio version, or perhaps they haven't finished reading your book and they would prefer the option to listen to it. Also, if you are with Audible, there is this great feature called Whisper Sync. Whisper Sync lets readers switch back and forth, forth between reading the ebook on their Kindle and listening to the audiobook on their Audible without ever losing their place. So they get home from work after they've been listening to it in the car, they sit down to read the ebook and they're in the same place. And some readers will buy both versions because of that, although one is at a discount. So less royalties for you. But it's a bonus sale selling to the same person twice. And now the reader's happy because they can listen interchangeably. Listen and read interchangeably. So tell the world you have an Audiobook, email, social media. Mention it when you're on podcasts and when you do live appearances, make sure everyone knows you have an audiobook version of your book out when you do live appearances. Here's a little bonus tip. If you're selling physical books, you should have a QR code available to link people who might prefer the audiobook version. You can even have them buy the audio on the spot and give them a print book free or give them a pen or do some other sort of incentive so they make that purchase on the spot. If they walk away, they might forget or lose motivation so that you've got them there. Get them to buy it while they're there. Number three to bring your book to life for any promotion you do, post samples of your audiobook on SoundCloud and then embed those on your website and share them in your newsletter and pretty much anywhere you're talking about your audiobook. Once you've uploaded a file to SoundCloud, they have a really easy embed function that you can use. I'm planning on a Book Launchers website redo, so we haven't really promoted self publish and succeed on the website at all. And the redo keeps getting delayed for more pressing projects. But I am going to get a sample posted on the website for you and I'll link to it down below so you can see it in action. You can also use that embed code in newsletters or as an email signature if your email provider will allow it. You can even upload a free chapter and give it away to people who listen to you interviewed on a podcast, which is a great way to build that connection with potential readers, customers, clients or even partners. Number four, when you upload your book, you'll be getting codes that you can give audiobooks away with. If you have ACX codes, the listener will be able to get an audible version of the book. If you use Findaway Voices, they'll give you 30 codes that you can give away. These one time codes will allow you to give away free copies of your book to anyone you'd like. They can go to a designated site to redeem your code and then they can listen to your audiobook on any of Findaway's free Author direct mobile apps. Now what should you use these codes for? Well, you can use both of them, whether it's from ACX or Findaway Voices, fairly strategically because they are limited in number. But if you know somebody who will be a committed reviewer, that's a good use of a giveaway code. If you are pursuing professional reviewers, you can give them one of your codes to use. If you encounter an audiobook blogger or a podcaster that might want to listen to this, you can use your codes for those folks as well. You can also do giveaways you can give away to your audience. If you're on a podcast or doing a live event, you might want to give away an audiobook and you can use these codes for that too. I also use them for thank you gifts to someone who's been a great supporter or someone who did something extra for me. Number five Paid Promotions the audiobook promotion space is emerging, which means it's small and places have limited reach and we've ultimately found limited value in paying for a lot of audio specific promotions. My Book Launchers team is going to put a lot more emphasis on audiobook specific promotions again in 2022 just to see now that it's grown more if we can uncover some gems. But ultimately this is what I recommend testing if you have a bit of a budget for paid promotion first paying for some reviewers to review your audiobook. There are a few review sites. The only one that I've seen work really well consistently as of right now is Audiobook Boom. I suspect that will change and it's worth testing because different books get different results. And Jane Friedman has a blog on her site where other paid review sites are mentioned. I'll link to that below. There were things like Audiobook Blog, AudioBook Reviewer, audiobooks today.blogspot, the audiobook worm, Karen Cummins and Tower Review. Again, the link will be below. There's also some audiobook specific awards that you can enter your book into. The biggest is probably the Audi Awards from Audiophile Magazine. There's also the Independent Audiobook Award for us self published authors to be featured. There are more and more audiobook specific awards out there and my feelings on a lot of these awards remain the same. An award win is really what you make of it. An award win is itself doesn't do much to sell any books. You have to be the one that leverages it into credibility, promotion and sales. But the one paid promotional offering I'm excited to be starting to test now is from the biggest promotional service out there, BookBub, and their service is known as Chirp. I have a video specifically on Chirp that I'll link to at the end. If you're wide and you've chosen Findaway Voices as your aggregator for wide distribution, I A Chirp deal is something you can apply for through Findaway Voices if selected, your book will be promoted to a huge volume of readers. I'm doing this for self publish and succeed, and we'll be testing some of our clients with this in 2022. So if you want to know how that goes and get our tips, make sure you've subscribed to the channel and turn the notifications on. Promotions have traditionally been a staple of ebook marketing since the beginnings of bookbub, but there are not as many promotional services for audiobooks, largely because Audible controls the price. You can't set a promotional price for your book if you're using Audible, so I think a lot of promotional services just haven't cropped up yet. But as more and more authors go wide with their audiobooks, you're going to see more and more opportunities to promote your book at a discounted rate. So I'm crazy excited to see what audiobook promotion ideas you have, so let's chat about them in the comments below. Let know me have you seen audiobook specific book clubs? For example? Have you tried anything I didn't mention? Are there sites you've used with success? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you get entered to win some sweet noboringbooksssswag like this fabulous T shirt. And you also get one step closer to being one of my beloved YouTube besties like Deborah Lloyd, Brian Krieger, the one, the only Kevin McGuire, easy graphics and of course Rachel Robertson. Hugs to you all. Now this video right here is all about Chirp and this one is one about what you can do when you win a book award so you can leverage any award win into book sales and fame. Okay, maybe not fame, but book sales. Both are pretty great and frankly, I just want to hang out with you a little longer. So click on over and I'll put some coffee on for you.