Audiobook Publishing: How to Avoid Audible

My video on avoiding Amazon as an author was a hot one, which tells me there's a lot of authors struggling with Amazon for a variety of reasons. If you're avoiding Amazon or feeling frustrated with them and looking to diversify, what are you going to do with your audiobook if you're not selling it on Audible? I'm excited to share that there are some great places to sell your audiobook now that aren't Amazon. And if you're ready to sell your audiobook not on Audible, or at least well beyond Audible, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad. I'm the founder of Book Launchers, a full service self publishing platform helping you write, publish and promote your nonfiction book. First, I have to tell you what you likely don't want to hear. Audible is still the place to sell audiobooks. Most listeners of audiobooks are using Audible. I've tried for myself and for our clients at Book Launchers to spread the love and get traction with other platforms, but Audible is still the 90% winner for most of our nonfiction books. That said, that won't stop me from trying to grow my audience on places other than Audible. So I'm trying something a little different for Self Promote and Succeed, and I figured I would share it with you today. So this is not me saying this is the way to distribute and sell your book successfully outside of Audible, but this is me saying, hey, here's what I'm doing and maybe it inspires you to try your own things and come back and share it. Because Audible has not made our lives as authors easy, have they? We can't set our price, so we can't run discounts or control our profits. They aren't transparent with the refunds, and until last year they darn near encouraged refunds because it costs them nothing and cost the author completely. And their fees, they're not generous. Of course they have the listeners and because they have that marketplace dominance, they can do these things and we still use them. But I wanted to play with this a bit. So here's how I've set up Self Promote and Succeed. First, you can visit self promoteand succeed.com audio and and get the audio version for free. All you have to do is opt in to my bi weekly launch letter. That's it. My back end for that right now is super simple. I'm using an unlisted YouTube playlist for the video version of the audiobook, and for the MP3 traditional type audiobook experience, I'm using Book Funnel, the video portion wasn't as easy as I thought because we edited them to be a more enjoyable watch and listen. So while they don't have the same volume of fast cuts that a traditional YouTube video would have, we did add graphics and text and some sound to enhance the viewing experience. And the video editing took far longer in post than I expected, but in time I may actually release them all to the YouTube community and just allow folks to watch and listen to the entire book here on YouTube. Why not? Not yet though. In the meantime, Book Funnel is delivering the more expected audio only version of the audiobook for free. I've chosen the platform building focus for the audio version of the book, but you can still sell direct to your audience and then use Book Funnel to distribute it if you'd like. We've talked about other options in the past, but as right now Book Funnel is the one I like the best. It's the simplest way I found to distribute your audiobook. Right now the program's still in beta, but it's really easy to get added if you're part of their mid list service. All you have to do is send them an email and within an hour you'll be added to the beta program. It also helps you to create an almost instant landing page for your offer. Now the beta program is likely to change soon, so by the time you're watching it you may not have to take that step. Probably will be an extra fee. But first let me show you how to upload the files. It's super easy to upload and then reorder them so your book shows up in the right order of your chapters. So take a look at this. So all you had to do is choose the files, upload them, you reorder them and then you send them off for processing within 24 hours. My book was ready. Now the landing page setup is also really easy. Check out the options here. So you can do it. So you can have opt ins. You can do it so it's straight delivery and then you can also create a little bit of a landing page that links to sites that sell your book. If you want to sell it direct, you can sell it through your own system and then use one of these Book Funnel links to then distribute it. Or you could use a zapier zap to do some automations and link it and sell it depending on how sophisticated you are. Basically Book Funnel gives you a lot of options in order to execute it for whatever kind of level you're used to. Offering service for direct books now here's what a landing page with an opt in looks like. It's really nice looking and this opt in box integrates with most email providers and and if yours isn't on the list like mine isn't because I use keep. You can use Zapier to set it up and connect it or you can just export it with a CSV and off you go. Okay, so that's part of what I'm doing with Self Promote and Succeeds Audiobook Next up, I've uploaded it to Findaway Voices and this is something I always do. But this is also because of Spotify, which now has enabled audiobook content consumption for their monthly premium subscribers. Right now this is for 15 hours for UK and Australia for but the US is next as I'm sure are other countries. I am so excited about this. Findaway also of course accesses other platforms, so we've uploaded Self Promote and Succeed here first. If you've never been inside the dashboard, well, here's what it looks like inside Findaway Voices. As you can see, there are a lot more details to get going on Findaway than you needed to upload to Book Funnel, but this is because they're distributing to retailers and retailers need all that data in order to know where to categorize and how to sell your book to the right people. When I give free audiobook copies out to potential clients or partners, I'm likely to give them the Spotify codes and I am constantly promoting the Spotify availability of the audiobook. I tell people all the time, if you listen to Spotify, my audiobook is available on Spotify. Of course Findaway also gets you on Barnes and Noble Audiobook and other sites, but we have not seen a lot of traction with audiobooks for our clients with a lot of the other platforms. One of the other things I love about Findaway, which we've talked about before, is access to chirp, which is BookBub's audio promotional platform. Also not somewhere I found success yet, but I am loving the options and I believe that we are in for some great opportunities with continued audiobook sale and promotion in the future. And finally, we are uploading it to Audible via acx. Now as you watch this video, it may or may not be there when you're watching this video because it's the last thing we are doing and not where I'm focusing any of my promotional efforts. But there's three reasons why I'm still publishing it on ACX to go on Audible. One is scammers like to fill gaps in formats so if you don't have a format for a good performing book, they'll fill it so why leave it open for them? 2. There are people who will still want the audible version. Ultimately my number one focus is to get the book in readers hands. Where they get it and how much money I make isn't my first or highest consideration, obviously, or I wouldn't be giving it away for free so readily. And three I think a book listing looks more professional and serious when it has all the formats. It just looks like a traditionally published book and that's always my objective. And I guess four I know I said three, but I'm going to give you four reasons why I'm still publishing on acx. And the fourth is that Amazon definitely promotes audio versions of books with what seems to be more enthusiasm than print and ebooks. I don't know if that's true or not. That's certainly my perception. So I want to be there when somebody is searching for my kind of book. I know that was a lot to chew on for one day wasn't it? And now you might be thinking I need to learn more about Findaway Voices. So I'm going to do an updated video. So make sure you subscribe to the the channel and turn notifications on after you click like and comment of course. But you should check out this video on Findaway Voices and this one. What to read when you narrate your audiobook. Like what to do with those graphs and charts and footnotes. Oh and then this video over here is the one on avoiding Amazon altogether. Head on over there. I'll see you there.