Sell Your Audiobook Direct to Readers: How to Use Book Funnel #bookdistribution #audiobook

You can download my book Self Promote and Succeed in Audiobook format for free and I'll give you that link in a minute so you can get it and position you in your book for brand and book marketing success. But the big question I keep getting asked is how to sell or give your audiobook to people without going through ACX or an aggregator service. Well, there are some platforms out there that work for audiobook distribution, but my personal favorite is Book Funnel and I'm going to show you the inner workings so you can upload and give away or sell your audiobook direct to readers using Book Funnel. So if that's something you're excited excited about, well this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad. I'm the founder of a fabulous self publishing services company called Book Launchers where we help nonfiction authors write, publish and promote publish and promote nonfiction books that will grow a brand and a business. And we do that with courses and a team of professionals who surround you and your book with love, support, expertise and sweat. Let's leave that delightful thought behind and go to Book Funnel, which is my favorite tool for selling and giving away audiobooks to your readers. So once you have your audiobook files in MP3, you'll open up a Book Funnel account. Now to begin with, you can probably do just fine with their first time author plan for $20 it's worth it and you can upgrade later when you build your momentum. I've already got an account so I'm just going to go ahead and log in. All right. Now you can click the Add New and then select Audiobook. Most of this is really self explanatory, which is another reason to love Book Funnel. But I'll note a couple of things here. The book label is just for you. Readers won't see. Compare that to the tagline. That is something they will see. So make sure you put something in there that sells the reason for downloading your book and listening today for the book description I usually don't do anything special. I just copy and paste what we've already used for the print book. But if there's something unique or special about the audiobook format, you would want to note that in the description. This Note to Reader section is useful if you have a PDF that corresponds with the book, or if you recommend they also get the print book to follow along, or if you have a community somewhere that you want to invite them to. Once you've entered all of that in, just click Create Audiobook. You now need to upload Your book cover file. You'll also see the metadata that you've entered on the other page. Now, how are listeners going to get their book? Well, readers can listen in the Book Funnel app. Readers can also listen in their browser on any device. Now you have to choose whether you want to disable or use the DRM Free MP3 downloads. For me, I left them disabled. What does that mean, the DRM free free MP3 download? Well, DRM is digital rights management and it's a feature that allows you to protect your book a little bit, preventing it from easily being downloaded to MP3 format, which could give your listener maximum flexibility on the upside as to how they consume it. But they also have the MP3 files which they can then share or distribute however they want to do that. I keep this disabled, which is the default. It's just a little protection from your MP3s floating around. But essentially listeners can use a browser or download the app to listen. So it's very consumable. Even without enabling the MP3 downloads, you can upload your cover. I'll upload one of my comps that my cover designer created. Now obviously this is not the final one we went with for self promote and succeed. Did I tell you yet how to go and download that audiobook? Okay, go to selfpromoteandsucceed.com audio and now you're going to get that in audio on the Book Funnel page. Now if you are paying attention, you'll notice that this page, when you go to it is not a Book Funnel page. Let me take a short tangent to explain why we were using the Book Funnel page for a while, but we run ads to give away the audiobook for free and and Book Funnels free landing page didn't allow for enough tracking to be put in place for us to go granular on our ad tracking. So we couldn't see what ads were working and what audiences were converting. So we had to set it up in leadpages. We also had one extra issue which is we use KEEP for our CRM and our emails and this doesn't integrate with that. So we had to integrate it using Zapier to port them over or manually upload them through a CSV, which neither was ideal. So what you'll be doing when you download the audiobook is you'll sign up on this page from LeadPages and then it's integrated with Book Funnel. So you'll get an email from Book Funnel and then you're automatically in our email newsletter. And now we've got our tracking metrics in place and you're set up the way we need you to be set up, that might be next level for you. I have to tell you, if you are just doing a free opt in to give away your audiobook and you're not doing anything ad that needs sophisticated tracking, just stick with the Book Funnel page. Now if you are planning to sell your audiobook, there's a couple paths you can take and you may want to Especially if you're running ads, you may want to set up your own page where you can set up appropriate tracking to sell your books and then use Book Funnel to deliver it. So you might have a sales page where you sell the book and then you'll send an email to the customer with the audiobook download instructions. Or you can connect it directly through their platform. Basically, Book Funnel handles the delivery. However you're going to be making the sale. They'll email your buyer a download link immediately after purchase. If your reader has any trouble transferring the book to their reading device, a top notch support team is always there to help you. If you're already set up with Gumroad, Payhip, PayPal, Shopify, Thrift and WooCommerce, they're connected and they support sales delivery through any of those platforms. So if you're ready to start selling, they can start delivering and all you have to do is save your store's delivery settings in their platform. They have lots of tutorials to walk you through that and I'll put a link in the description below so you've got it. Okay, but first, before you can do any of that, you have to upload your book. Like I said, it was a little bit of a detour important, but we still took a left when we were heading straight. You still need to have all your files ready to rock and roll with the right labels. You also need a sample. This can be your introduction or a chapter with a great story. Think about what is going to entice a reader or a listener to want to consume more. As you can see, looking at my self Promote and succeed. I don't have a sample uploaded here, but I'm not selling it, I'm giving it away. You'll have this if you upload to any retail platform because it's required. I'm not going to walk you through how to do this because I don't have a fake book to upload, but it's also crazy crazy easy to do. After your book is set up, you have options and their dropdown menu makes it really Easy to see what options you have to do next now that your audiobook is uploaded. Okay, so now you need to create a landing page. Super easy again. Just click on landing pages, click on new landing page and this explains it fairly clearly. But let me quickly show you use cases for each so an email signup page to collect new readers. Book Funnel will collect the reader's email address before they can receive your book. This is where you can connect it to a variety of email providers and or just get the download. We would download the CSV and upload it to keep for our purposes, this is if you are using your audiobook to grow your platform, which is what I'm doing with Self Promote and Succeed. The page looks nice and it functions really well. I loved it and would have left it because of its simplicity, except for the fact that I started driving paid traffic to the page and needed that Tracking a simple download page is what you would use if you're having someone download the book after they've opted in or purchased elsewhere. The page you get is what I showed you earlier. A sales landing page would be integrated with a payment provider they work with so that you can sell and then deliver your audiobook. So you're selling it on the payment platform and then delivering it using Book Funnel. And finally an option for a restricted landing page for current subscribers. Readers will be asked to give their email address to you and then you put it in Book Funnel. And Book Funnel will confirm that they're actively subscribed to one of your integrated lists before allowing them to download the book. New readers who are not already on that list will not be able to sign up and download the content. Where would you use that? Well, probably in the case of an arc, an ARC team, so the Advanced Reader Copy Team, you would have them on a list first and then when you have it ready, you would give them access to this. But you don't want anyone who doesn't already have your permission to access to have that early access. Or maybe they opted in somewhere else for something else and now you're granting them access but don't want it to be allowed to be shared with others. In this case, you upload a list of emails and then when they go to access, they have to be on the list to get access. Once your book is set up here, you can do so much more with it. Gift it bulk delivery. Like for example, if you booked a speaking gig and included 100 copies of your audiobook, one for every attendee. Well, how the heck do you deliver that well, you use Book Funnel. Of course I've said it before, but I'm going to say it again. There really has never been a better time to be an indie author and have control over your intellectual property to sell and give away. And because there are so many of us awesome indies in the world now, there are great platforms supporting us like Book Funnel. So thank you to Book Funnel and thank you. Are you using Book Funnel or do you have a question about audiobook distribution or delivery? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And then this video on selling your book direct is a great follow up to this one. As is this video on how to prepare and narrate your audiobook. Go ahead and click on one of them. I'm waiting for you.