Interactive Audiobooks Plus Watch an Instant Translation in to Spanish & French

Foreign. Hello and Happy Tuesday. I am at home with a under the weather child. So we've made a beautiful makeshift background for you all. But today I am pretty excited about what we're covering today and a lot of people think, well, a lot of you may have heard me talking about audiobooks and books being interactive and how books as a passive thing that your reader is going to consume is a thing of the past. And I'm going to show you today why. I have been saying that we need to change our thinking around books and think about them as something that will be experienced. And part of that is because I think books in general are becoming a very interactive layer of your intellectual property. I'm going to show you something today that I think will help you visualize what I have been saying for a while. The actual interactive audiobook that we created for the second edition of Self Publish and Succeed. And of course, if you don't know, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers. And well, before I get into it, I want to be clear about the lens that I'm using. There is a tool that I used to turn this into an interactive audiobook. But I think. And maybe you want to use this system too. For me, it's less about the system. And as I demoed it to the team today, I said this may or may not be the system we use. And in fact, probably what is more likely to happen is the big players in this game are going to create something similar or buy this system or something like it. But this is really helping open your mind to how you can turn one piece of intellectual property, that first draft, that first manuscript of a book that you've polished into an actual book, how you can really think of it as an asset and turn it into something that works harder and longer. So before I get too far into just talking about what it is, I'm just going to show it to you. But I see lots of people are here saying hello. I think you're going to be really glad you tuned in today. So we've got Jack Groppel in the house.

Hello.

I hope your launch was a massive success. Bruce is in the house too. And then we've got Kevin hall and Alvin Dawkins, Stella, Jennifer, Henry. Now, I know Kevin already checked this out because I sent him a preview. So. So he knows. He knows what I'm talking about, what this is going to look like, but he hasn't seen it live. He just saw a video of me talking about this. So let me share My screen and hopefully. Actually, Angela, is there a particular way we share audio? I didn't think about that here. Because in Zoom, you choose. You choose something to share audio. I don't know if there's a way to share audio with this or not.

Do you mean, like, with the video itself or to be able to speak over it?

I'm okay if the video is the only thing talking, but that's what I'm wondering is if everybody's gonna be able to hear this, because I don't. There's no button like there is in Zoom that says share sound. You know what I'm talking about, right?

Yeah. I would just try to say share screen. And then if we can't hear it, like, if only you can hear it, but we can't, I'll hop on and tell you.

Okay. Yeah, sounds good. Weirdly, hold on. It's not. It's not coming even coming up in here, so just give me a second. Weird. Okay. It isn't even showing as a choice, so in the share screen part. So I'm going to need a minute. Do you want to maybe pop over and do a quick giveaway for everybody that's already here and said hello while I have a technical. While I sort this technical glitch out here?

Yeah, I was just trying to see if I could figure out some of the settings for you, too.

Okay.

Yes. Let me pull up our giveaway tool and I will start to pull a winner. So if you haven't yet said hello, now would be the time to do so so that I. So that your name will be entered to win. Okay, let's see. Let me choose today's live stream. All right, we've got 10 people so far. Let me share my screen, though, so that you guys can see what I am looking at. And here we go. Let's take in. There we go. Okay, we've got a couple more people who have said hello. Good on you. All right, we've got 12 entries. Let's see who this first person is. First winner for today is Jack.

Congratulations, Jack. That's fabulous.

Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna go over some of the. The swag, but, yeah, you do that.

While I get the screen up. That would be great.

Okay, perfect. Yeah. So, Jack, I ha. I can pull things from the back of my prize closet if you would like for me to. I have no problem with that. Of course, we do always have our oh, so soft journals, our hashtag no boring books mug. We've got copies of books. I've got Copies of other of our author's book like Nick Hutchison, Rise of the Reader, a couple others that we have had in the past. So just let me know what you want me to to do and write to me at Team T E a m book launchers.com and we can get you all set up.

All right, I've seen it.

I do see what you're looking at.

Okay, now let's see if you can hear it. We will just press go over to listen and Because I have a feeling that's not going to work. But anyways, that's okay. We the only part there's one. Do you hear it?

No, unfortunately.

Yeah. I had a feeling. I realized as we were joining that I think that the only way we could share sound when we did the summit was. Was to pre record a video and upload it.

That's exactly what we did.

Yeah. So unfortunately you won't be able to hear all of this, so you'll just have to believe me. But let me take you on a quick tour. So this is self publish and succeed the second edition. And I might have the ability to let you hear a couple samples. And so I will see if I can do that through a different method. But because I do want you to hear the voice and hear how good it is in various stages. But for now let's just show you the interactivity of this. So one of the things for me is that I always consume my audiobooks on the go and what happens for me and I'm consuming nonfiction pretty much exclusively. And so I'm driving in the car and I hear something really great and I'll be like, oh my gosh. Okay, chapter three, three minutes in. I have to remember that. And then lo and behold, do you think I remember now when it's really important, I will say hey and I won't say it. S I R I I need you to remind me to go to chapter three and take some notes or check out the URL that was mentioned. You know, all of those things. And so for me, one of the reasons I usually end up with multiple formats of a book is is because I, when I listen to the audiobook, I then want the notes, I want the words. Because then I want to take the notebook version and save it. So what this does for me is I can be listening to it and, and again you won't hear it, but I got to play it. And so it's talking. And then I would go, oh, I need my assistant. So discuss. I'm listening. English Patrick There we go. Okay, so I'm going to listen to this. Okay. And I'm going to go, oh, you guys won't be able to hear what he says to me. Says allow might not even hear me now. So I want to save that paragraph for my notebook. Okay, Best laid plans. We should have used Zoom. I can't use Zoom for YouTube Live, but it won't even let me talk to Eric while I'm doing this. So I'll just have to type it. Please save that paragraph to my notebook. But if I'm driving, I can now it won't work too. You can easily copy paste it because it's not letting me use the microphone at the same time. So we've got a few issues with me demonstrating this like this. So I will have to make a note and do a full video for you. But so just imagine you're listening along and you go, wow, that was a profound statement. And so now you can say, eric, can you please save that and put it in my notebook? And my notebook is up here. So I have a workbook where I can actually ask it to create a workbook and then I can create a sub book of what I'm reading. And and then I also have a section of notes here. So it will save all of my notes as I talk to it. I can also ask it to stop and reverse and come back and repeat that last paragraph and all of those kind of things. So while I'm listening, I can be talking to it. The other cool thing is it's an audiobook. You just have to take my word on it. You just have to take my word for you for it. It is an audiobook, but you're also seeing the actual text. And so while it's reading, you see it's highlighting as it's going along. And now this is not in my voice. It is an electronic voice. And right now you only have two choices, Patrick and Emily. So you can choose which one you want to listen to now. Really cool. Besides the fact that I can interact with it, I can also ask it to create a summary of chapter two or whatever. I was listening to chapter one with three key points and now it will create that. I can also ask it to test my knowledge on chapter one and create a five point test or workbook. Right? So here it is. It's taking the three key points from the book. Then I could say, great, can you create a short quiz to test my knowledge of this chapter? Okay, so now you want to have. How about this? I'm doing a book club. Can you suggest topics of discussion for my book club based on this book? So then it gives you the book club discussion topics. And then like I said, you can also ask it to create a workbook version which would then load in here. And also you can create sub books so you can have it create a sub book with all of these things for the book club as an example. Now, one of my favorite parts of this is the translation. And this is where I would love for you to be able to hear it, because it now translates it beautifully into French. And I can have it talk to me in French. So it'll read this to me in French. And then it will. You can see it side by side as well, by the way. So you can see here's the English version on the left, here is the French on the right. And then you can have. You can listen in French. So I can go, okay, now I want to listen in French. And now I can hit play. And it will play it in French. And right now it is also instantly translated into Spanish. And there's platforms out there like 11 labs and even, you know, Instagram reels will translate to other languages. And YouTube starting to do it. Spotify starting to do it. So you can see that this is starting with Spanish and English, but it will quickly expand to a lot of other languages. And again, what I love is that it will highlight the words while it's reading them. You guys can't hear it, but Christian is reading it to you right now, and you can speed it up just like you can. So I think that this is, like I said, you're not hearing the audio, so I apologize for that. But. But this is a very, very interactive version of a book that you can fully engage with and talk when you're not using a microphone to also live stream at the same time, it will allow you to engage with the book. Now somebody's asking, is it grammatically correct? I am not fluent in Spanish or French, so I don't know. But I did have somebody, I did present this on the weekend, and somebody who is Spanish took a look at it and said, wow. So, you know, they didn't read through the whole thing, but they took a good look at it and they, they were pretty impressed with the translation. So my guess is that it is, it is good. It's probably not spectacular. You know, the. Generally speaking, when we are trans, when we work with translated books, we still need to do some editing to the translated book. So if it went from Spanish to English, we would still edit it in English because it didn't translate perfectly. But things are getting so much better at translation. I suspect there's certain things that I say that are nuanced that did not translate very well, but I don't know. And again, this is kind of the world that we are entering and it opens up a lot of things and it's not perfect yet. I mean, it is this particular platform. It's a minimum viable product. They have an app coming. The app is not available yet. The challenge for an author right now is that you have to sell to this link, Right? So for me, if you want to buy and get my book in this interactive format, you have to know it's available in this interactive format and I have to send you to purchase it from Sinai, the company that has built it. And now they're going to take a cut of that and I will get a small proceed on the other side for that. I mean, not unlike the other platforms where you're selling the books. So it's cool. And I think that this is less about this being the be all, end all final product and more about understanding. When I say books are becoming experiences and to start thinking about how people are experiencing your book, that is what I'm talking about. Skynet. But in French, how do you say I'll be back? All right, just seeing. Are there any questions at this point, Angela? It's too bad I don't have sound. I can try and load the video that I had saved before. Yes, so that's a great question. Can it explain a concept for the reader to better understand? So allow me to. It is so weird. It does not allow me. Like it doesn't give me it in the dropdown list. So like you saw. I don't know if you saw what I had to do last time, but I had to just open up a browser screen and then put it in. It doesn't. It doesn't come up in my drop down for some reason. It's very strange. So let me just get a Firefox it doesn't like. I guess maybe because it's a minimum viable product and I have a back end entrance, that's why it's doing this. But it's very strange. Okay, so we'll do it this way. Okay, now let me go back to you guys and. Okay. All right, so when. Oops. Okay, let me load it back up. Okay, we need to go back to English and we're going to discuss it. And so let's say we're In. Okay. A reader focused hook. Okay. Can you explain the concept of a hook to me? I'm confused. Okay. Hook is a crucial element that can significantly enhance the marketability of a nonfiction book. Oh, and then it went really fast, but it actually broke down. This is great. So it broke down. What it is the importance crafting a hook. And it gave some examples and tools straight from the book. So. And then you could say something. Is there something else I should know? Should know. Sorry about using the hook for my book. And see what it says. And then, I mean, if you could say another thing, another cool thing says, okay, there we go. Why does Julie say you should appreciate bad days? See if it can take that as contextual. Because I, I talk about how, you know, having days that suck allow you to have those experiences that actually make your book interesting. So there we go. And it said, it actually breaks it down because it gives you a source of learning, it gives your story energy, gives you human connection, unique perspective, and it gives you an edge over AI. So, yes, hopefully that demo answers your question to say that it can explain a lot about the book, depending on what your questions are. Okay, what other questions? How could we use this for marketing purposes? And is there a future of its use in alk, our author launch kit? So two, two pieces to that. So marketing purposes. I think, like I said, I think it's early days. I think we're ahead of the game by, by being here. So if you have your own audience, I think that's where you're going to start. Sinai is a marketplace, and they are really just launching. They've been funded, so they've raised, I think, Series A and some other capital. So they're, they're investing heavily in this. Like I said, I see it being more viable as a bigger player potentially buys them up. But. But I mean, I think it's great. I think it's a really, really cool platform. And, and if they invest heavily in getting the word out about their marketplace, it could be that your readers find you through their marketplace and find you in the different languages. For me, for marketing purposes, I don't really intend to market the book heavily at this point because I don't speak French, I don't speak Spanish, I can loosely read, I can loosely read French, and I can loosely carry on a conversation in Spanish, neither of which qualifies me to try to speak. Speak that language to promote my book. But as the world opens up into translations, like I said, when you post a reel on Instagram, you can toggle it that says translate to other languages. So if somebody's consuming my content on Instagram or YouTube in other languages now I can, you know, put a link in there to Sinai and say, hey, you want to read my book or listen to my book in French or Spanish? Here is where you can get the translated version. So that's where I start to see that piece for the interactivity. It depends what you do and what your goals are. And this is always the decision I think comes back to is kind of what are you building and what does success look like for you? In this case it, you know, generally speaking I'm still going to direct people to download the voice cloned version of Self Publish and Succeed, which you can get by the way. I think we have it set up at book launchers.com forward/free audio but Angela might have to test that first to see if I have it set up there. But I think that's where I put it. So book launchers.com forward/free audio and you might be able to get the voice clone version of Self Publish and Succeed. So for me that's where I'm going to direct most people for marketing purposes because that is an opt in. You can listen to the audiobook from start to finish and then I will be getting your email address for that versus Sinai. Yes, I'm going to make a couple bucks but it's, it's not generally speaking where I'm going to market it but it depends on your goals and it depends on your audience and who you're talking to where. Cool. And then for Author Launch Kit there are a few things that we are looking at with Author Launch Kit. I don't think that this feeds into Author Launch Kit and our immediate vision for it right now and but I do think we have some amazing plans. The agentic, the agents that you can build now where you can say okay, log into Kit or mailchimp and create this email series for me. You know, okay, great. You've designed these posts, these social media posts. Now we can connect it to, you know, depending on what you're using hootsuite or whatever other kind of posting system, as long as they have certain API keys we can use you. We're setting, we're working on making Author Launch Kit that place where you go in and you continue to build all of your marketing plans depending on your goals. And now the agentic pieces will actually start executing on it. So if you haven't already bought your lifetime license for Author Launch Kit, you definitely want to get it? Because we are just scratching the surface with what it can do and it's already really, really cool what we can do inside of author launch kit. So. All right, we've got somebody testing the international language here. Thanks, Mike. With. With that. I don't think we something. Something international. That's the extent of my French. There we go. Is that books, the books for the world? I don't know. We need to have an instant Translate on streamyard. We should, we should request that feature. All right, what other questions do we have?

I think that supposed to say I think we need your. I think we need to have your books international. I think he's saying that to like you, Julie. I think that's what that translates to. Maybe.

I don't know, Mike, you'll have to tell us. I could drop it in chat GPT, but then who knows how long I'll be gone.

It's been years since I studied French. Yes, long time.

Um, is the answer pulled from the book or large language model? It is completely separate from large language model. It is only using your book. Your book is not connected to any backend inside of that. So it is in isolation, you know, and this is, this is a different kind of system than going to an LLM, right. And you would get different answers if you went to an LLM. But you know, for us, one of the things we've done is we've created a bot not just from my books, but from all of the YouTube content and our client only trainings that we've done. And again, it doesn't access the Internet, it doesn't access any other training materials. The bot only answers based on our content. And to me, for a lot of people, this is a little bit more trustworthy of an answer because when you ask the book, you're only getting information from the book. When you ask Julie the book bot, you're getting my content, my answers, and it's got a little bit of my personality and flair in it, but you know, it's not reaching the Internet and pulling something that was a blog post from somebody who read a book that derived the content from, you know, from reading, not from experiencing. You can trust the content in general a lot more because it's being derived from the content that we've curated and created. All right, thanks, Jennifer. So how do I translate my published books into other languages? I mean, it's completely up to you. There's a few paths. Now, I am not a translation expert by any means. You know, there is Kindle Translate, so They're trans. They, you know, you have the opportunity to use their system and services to translate your book. You can't edit it. You can just accept or not. You can accept or not publish. I think that's it. Yes. Based on whatever output it has. As with everything they do, they're making more money off your book than, than you are when you do this. And Again, Spotify and 11 Labs, they now have. I think Spotify is beta only right now, so I don't think the typical author can get in there. But with 11 labs, you can create. If you have uploaded your book to 11 labs, that's where I created my voice click clone version of self publish and succeed the second edition. You can change that into other languages. You can even have it create your videos in other languages. The dubbing isn't as strong as, hey, Gen, if anybody's playing in these spaces, you'll know what I'm talking about. But the dubbing is not great. But the translation seems like it's good. Again, I don't speak these other languages, so I can't speak to whether they translate well. Our clients who have had their books translated have typically gone through the Drop Cap marketplace, which is it's book launchers.com forward/drop cap. I will put that in there so you can put your book on there. I think there's a small fee to put your book on their marketplace, but they are an international rights agency and we've had quite a few clients have some great success getting their book purchased by a publisher and translated into other languages. So one of the ones that I know got published into French by Hachette in France was Rise of the Reader. So you can look it up on the French site. Nick Hutchison, his book, it's in the French version, you can see it there. But we've had quite a few other books get translated into other languages through Drop Cap. What happens is, if they aren't representing you directly like they have with some of our clients, you put it on the marketplace and if a publisher is interested, they'll contact you and then you can decide whether to engage Drop Cap to represent you or not. Very good idea to have Drop Cap represent you because they'll handle the negotiations and the royalty payments. But to me, that's one of the best ways to get your book translated because if you go to all the trouble to translate it yourself, you have to pay to edit it, get the new cover, distribute it, and then of course, market it in those languages. But again, systems like Sinai are Making this instantaneous and quite easy. But you still have to get the word out that it's there.

That was the last question that I've seen.

Sweet. I see somebody. Personality poker. Delphi is the. Oops. The platform. We click the button at the same time. Great platform for clone. And that is what we built. Julie, the book bot on it is a fantastic one. And. And we love it. And you can create the full video and it's really realistic. Right now we just use the voice and the texting, typing version of Julia the book bot. But it is fantastic. We love Delphi, so. I agree. All right, well, if that's it, let's do one more prize and then we'll see if any other questions come up. Otherwise, we'll wrap. But what do you guys think? Can you start to see the future?

Do you want me to pull the question?

Sure.

I'm sorry. The winner.

The winner. Yes. Let's pull the winner.

All right, let me get this back up and running. We've had some new names pop in the chat, so maybe we'll have some new winners today.

Oh, I love music. I think you're a new winner, so that's awesome.

I think so too. Welcome. Well, please email me at Team T A M Book launchers dot com. I will need your mailing address and the price choices. I mentioned them earlier, but I'll mention them again. We've got our. Oh, so Software Journal. Our hashtag. No boring books mug. We've got. I've got this second edition of sps. I also have Self, promote and Succeed. I've got a few other things, but let me know where you're located. Oh, there's the journal with a. A nice little doodle.

It's a sticker of. Of our dog that my son put on it, but still, it's still the journal. And then I think this is the old school school mug. I don't think this is the new version, but let's see here. Yes, this is the old. This is the old. The vintage mug. But that gives you a sense of what that looks like.

Our old logo.

Exactly. That was. This is the new one.

Your mailing address. And I will also need to know your name as well because these handles are cool, but I. I don't think the post office will allow me to mail.

No, I don't think so either. All right, a couple pieces of housekeeping. If you're not already in our author lab community on Skool. Come on over. Book launchers.com skool. Skool. And the reason I'm mentioning that is twofold. One, you will see the calendar of events so you will know when we have upcoming YouTube lives. The other thing is starting in February we're going to do something brand new and we're only going to host it inside the free community. We won't be doing it on YouTube and, and that is the state of the publishing industry. So each month we're going to do kind of a news recap and I'm going to highlight some of the things that I am watching and that I think authors should be paying attention to and we can talk about what's happening in the industry. So that is only going to happen on our school platform. Plus we're going to be starting to have writing sprints and other kind of cool things inside the community. So come on over there. Also, if you are working on a book, I highly recommend if you are available March 5th and 6th, you consider coming and joining us in Las Vegas at Author's Empire Workshop. We have about 20, 20, 20 ish seats left so we are filling up and it is going to be a fantastic two day event. We have some incredible speakers coming in to talk about getting yourself in the right room as a speaker, selling, creating your own events to make money, putting your content on, on social media, to grow an audience, to have impact and to make an income from it. We also have somebody who is a branding expert who has worked on I don't even know how many New York Times bestselling books in her career, but it is a lot and so many more. And of course myself and Sarah Bean from our team are going to be there talking about book positioning and setting yourself up for massive success as an author. So come on out, join us atauthors empire workshop.com that's March 5th and 6th and Bruce says I, I have to miss this one. I hope you have another one. If this one goes well, we will do it again. If it does not, you will never hear about it.

All right.

The interactive book becoming popular once it's perfected. Not that anything is perfect and that is exactly true. And again, I didn't show it today to be like, well, you couldn't hear it. So that's, that's the sad part. But I'm going to do a little video and I'll post it in the school community so everybody can hear the voices and kind of hear it in action. But I think it's a great way for you to see what's coming and when I'm saying start to think about how your reader is going to experience your book. I think that that that live demo starts to help open your mind to see it, because I know when I saw it, I was like, oh, okay, now I get it. And it was a game changer for me. All right, I think. I think that's it. I think that's it. So. Oh, and. And I think it's. Eric said he's going, so I'm excited to have you here. Very, very exciting. All right, thanks, everybody. Have a fantastic rest of the week, and we will see you back here same time next week.