Create and Sell an Audiobook and Sell it on Amazon and Audible

She's passionate, she's fun, and she's inspiring. Let's welcome.

She'S passionate, she's fun, and she's inspiring. Let's welcome our host, Kimberly from Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel Web Summit. And a warm welcome to you. Thanks for joining us and we've got an exciting guest coming. Write up, Kimberly. Take it away.

All right, folks, it's Kimberly Hobbschein with Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel and the Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel Web Summit. And today, the Passive Income Web Summit. We're going to be talking about creating audiobooks in 60 days or less. As some of you may know, I actually have an audiobooks company called I'm Hearing Stories, which is a great name, if you like that kind of thing. But it's not really all that great a name because people are like, well, does it have an apostrophe in it? Is it I am hearing stories? Is it I'm hearing voices? What is it? So when you write your own company name, just be careful about how people in the world can interpret that because it's not just awesome. So mercy, I haven't told you this, but if you could throw the link for I'm Hearing Stories into the chat box, that'd be awesome. But I have an audiobook company. It has produced over 100 titles in audio. And so we've learned a lot along the way about how to create audiobooks. And I thought I would share that with this group because it's super fun. Oh, you have to share that with everybody. You can't just share that with me. Because it's super fun to create an audiobook, and audiobooks have royalties. As a matter of fact, every single book that's out there has audiobook rights. That's right. Every single book that's out there has audiobook rights. You have the right to be able. If you have created a book of any kind, you have the right to be able to publish an audiobook. But what if you haven't created a book? Well, guess what? You can actually do the narrator side of that book and you can narrate audiobooks for published authors. So if you have friends that are published authors, you can reach out to them and say, hey, I would like to publish an audiobook with you for your book. Book. And it's a fantastic, fun way to get your voice out there and heard. Because I'm all about getting your voice heard. I believe if you're not being seen, you're being overlooked. And if you're not being heard, your message is not getting out there. We're Going to talk about some fun statistics about audiobooks and I'm going to give you the 20 steps that it takes in order to create an audiobook in 60 days or less. So we're going to go through it pretty quick. But I had some fun statistics for you. I know that a lot of you are like, well, how do I even get started? How much time is it going to take? How can I possibly get it recorded? What if I want to self narrate it? How do I get it to market it out to audiobook listeners? And we're going to give you the answers to all kinds of questions, things that are gonna, like, be normal stoppers for you. We're gonna break right through those and get you guys to have an audiobook. So one thing that I want to know from the audience is if you have a published book on Amazon or not yet. Now, this is not necessarily an ebook, although ebooks can certainly be turned into audiobooks. Just shoot a note in the chat. If you have a published book on Amazon, just say, I have a published book on Amazon. Or you could say, I want to publish a book on Amazon because we have a speaker coming up for that as well tomorrow. Or you could say, I do not have a book on Amazon and I am never going to write a book ever, ever, ever. But please don't say that because everybody should write a book. Especially if you're an entrepreneur. Especially if you're looking for passive income, because that's great royalty. Expecting to publish this year? Not yet, but I have some ideas. Yes, I have two of them. Fantastic. All right, so we got a bunch of people out there. All right, so first I'm going to talk about some secrets of audiobooks. Then I'm going to talk about some benefits, having an audiobook. But first I want to tell you how I got into the audiobook business because it's a great story. Turns out that my son was. And I was actually in a spiritual crisis with my business. I was doing a business that was a seven figure business and I didn't love it. I was doing it because I was really good at it. But that doesn't mean that I should have been doing it. I was good at it. I was talented at it. I had grown a business with a team, I had employees, it was up and running and I just was super unhappy to go into work every day. I was like, w I have created this entity and my own jail cell and I really, really didn't like it anymore. And I didn't want to do It. And my son came to me and it was summer was coming up, and he was 15 and a half, and he said, mom, I have a problem. It's 50. I'm going to be 15 and a half this summer. And that's too young to get a summer job. And it's too old to go back to summer camp, because summer camp is boring. And it's for little kids now, and I'm too old. And frankly, he was really tall. He was taller than I was. And he's like, I'm taller than all the camp counselors. I'm not going back to summer camp. What do I do? And I said, well, you know what? You are never too young or too old to be an entrepreneur. That's right. So I said, you know what we're going to do? We're going to create a little business around you and what you love. And so we put into Google, as any good parent would do, all the cool things that he loved doing. He loved kids, he loved being on stage. He was very charismatic. He did improv. He would do voices and stuff like that. And so when we put all that stuff in, up popped. Why don't you be an audiobook narrator? Now, he had never written a book, but he's like, hey, that sounds like a great idea. Do you think I could narrate audiobooks, specifically children's books? And I was like, absolutely. So I gave him a little startup budget of 500 bucks. We bought some microphones. He set it up Harry Potter style under our stairs in a closet, like a coat closet. You know, the one where the vacuum is. The vacuum was there, and then it got renovated into this home studio. And I actually. I don't think I've seen the vacuum ever since. But that's cool, you know, now we have a home studio and it's super fun. So he went off and found some audiobooks to narrate. He did so well. We actually went gangbusters. We had people coming out of the woodwork saying, hey, you know, his uncle came and said, hey, I have a book, and it hasn't sold anything in 17 years, and I'd really like for it to sell something. Would you like to create an audiobook out of it? So we actually narrated his audiobook. We actually got it done. My son didn't actually do that one. We actually hired another narrator to do it because we had so much big business, we couldn't handle all of it. The fact of the matter is, there are more books out there that need to be narrated than there are narrators to do them. So if you're thinking of narrating your own book, I definitely recommend it. There's just some tricks and tips that I'm going to give you to make sure that you can get it done. Because when we narrated our first audiobooks, we submitted them into itunes, Audible and Amazon and we were like, yes, we narrated the whole book. It's awesome. And we submitted it and it got rejected because there's something called audio quality standards that you run up against. And it's no fun to have to redo a book after you've already produced all of it and then you have to reread it or reread parts of it or re engineer it because it doesn't meet audio quality standard. Not so fun if that happens to you. So we're gonna try to help you avoid some of those problems. Alright, so now once we got the first one approved, it seemed to be really wicked fast and super easy. And we were approving them one right after another after another. We actually have six, several over 100 books out on Amazon now and we have two of them are best sellers, which is super fun. So not only am I a best selling author, I'm actually a best selling audiobook producer as well, which is super fun to say. As a matter of fact, only 1 in 20 books are produced in audiobook. But you know what? About a third of the population only read audiobooks. About two thirds of the population will read an audiobook because about a third of them are crossover and then a third of them are only book book people. Like my mom, she likes to curl up with a good book at night. She likes the way the pages smell. She likes to curl up with a good book and you know, eat some chips and drink some wine and enjoy her book. Not me. I'm always on the go doing one thing or another. So if I'm on an airplane, I love having my earbuds in and listening to an audiobook, or if I'm out for a jog, or if I'm. If I'm even in the car. I absolutely love having an audiobook going in the background. Whether it's fiction or nonfiction. I am definitely an audiophile. I absolutely love audiobooks. But my mom has no use for them. So if you are trying to market your book to me, you're not going to get me unless you have an audiobook. And that's true of a lot of people. So when you write a book, it's really, I won't say important But I will say it's to your advantage to create an audiobook out of it. All right, so we're also going to talk about some secrets about audiobooks. So the secrets about audiobooks are that it's a brand new extra stream of revenue from a book you already created. Why would you not want to turn that faucet on? Right. It's a whole stream of revenue from new people that want to consume your material but can't consume it because they don't actually buy book books. They don't buy ebooks. They only buy audiobooks. So it's a whole extra stream of revenue that you're going to get from a book that you already created. Not only that, remember the story I told you about my brother and my son's uncle? He had a book that had not had a sale in 17 years. It was called earning without being employed 35 businesses anyone can Start and Run. And that book, it sold in the very beginning, but then it kind of just like went nowhere on the bestseller list. I mean, it just didn't sell a whole lot of extra copies. However, when we got a hold of it, we. We did promotion for it and went by doing promotion, it actually breathed life into the book. Book as well. Because when we were advertising that, hey, the audiobook is out, there were people who were like, that's awesome, but I want it in a real book copy. And so they ordered the hardback copy of it and the paperback copy of it. So he was making new sales from a book he had written many years ago that hadn't had sales, and now he was able to get additional sales from it because it was an audiobook format. How cool is that? It can breathe life into a book that was, like, on the shelf for a really long time. Also, only 5% of books, that's 1 in 20 books, are created as an audiobook. What? That's great. That means you have wiped out 95% of your competition in the audiobook space if you have an audiobook. And if you don't have an audiobook, you're not in the creme de la creme. So you definitely want to do that. One other really cool statistic. I might have another one after this. I'm not sure. One other really cool statistic is I want you to guess, like, if you write a book, how many. What percentage of the people are going to get to the end of that book? Like, the people who buy the book and make the investment into the book, how many of them are actually going to read the book all the way to the end. We have some guesses in the chat. Go ahead and throw a couple guesses in the chat. I'm going to wait for everybody to try to put some. Some thought into this. The next question I'm going to ask you is actually, how many people do you think finish audiobooks? Which is really interesting. So we have some guesses. They're all over the map right now. We have 50%, 20%, 15%, 12 and a half percent, kind of odd. 60%. Really cool answers. Guess what, ladies and gentlemen? It is 10%. That's right. 10% of the people will get to the back where it says the end. That's right. 10% of the people who get a book will actually get all the way to the end of that book. How sad is that? Very sad. Very, very sad indeed. So if your ob. The game is to get your book all the way into the audiobook or into the book listener or into the consumer, you're only going to get to them about 10% of the time is get them all the way to the finish. And for the audiobook, any guesses? We got 60, 70, 80%. You guys are right in. There it is. 85 to 90% of audiobook listeners will listen all the way to the end of the book. Is that amazing or what? Why? Because it's the next thing on their earpods. The next time they go for a jog or a run or get back in the car, it's just there with them all the time. They're. Quick story. I actually bought Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking right before I got on an airplane. That's right. I bought it in the, like, in a bookshop right before I got on an airplane. And I'm reading it, and it's fantastic. It is so funny. It's awesome. And then I did exactly what they tell you not to do. I tucked it in that little thing, the seat pocket right in front of me. And I got off the plane and I forgot it. I left it on the plane. I was so bummed because it was such a great book, right? Awesome book. Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking. And so I got to my destination. It was a work destination. I finished my thing, I went to sleep. I woke up the next morning, and I was flying home. Sure enough, in the bookstore, there it was right there again, Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking. So I grabbed it. I'm like, great, I'm gonna finish it. Sure enough, exact same thing happened. I tucked it right in the seat Pocket, left it on the airplane and walked off the plane. And I was like, no way. At that moment, I went and bought the audiobook version of it. And that was pretty much the last time I ever bought a book. Book. Because audiobooks never go away. They're always with you and they until the finish. So I was able to finish the book, but only because I bought the audiobook. Now, I would have. If I'd been able to hang on to that book. I'm pretty sure I would have read it to the end, but that would have been the 10% that I had done that with. All right, so that's. Those are some secrets. By the way, if you are turning your back on audiobook listeners, you are cutting out about a third of the population and probably more than that, because there are people who do both read audiobook, read books and listen to audiobooks, but.

The population that only listens to audiobooks will not buy your book. So if you have a book, you're going to want to get it into audiobook format, plus extra stream of revenue, breathing life into a new book. Tons of good reasons to do that. All right, so some of you are like, I think I want to hire a narrator. And some of you are like, I want to narrate it myself. Either way, it's totally fine. Go ahead and throw a note in the chat box. Like, I'm going to just hire this sucker out or I'm going to narrate it myself. Either one is totally fine because it can be done. You can do it with a microphone from. You got to get a good quality microphone. But if you have a podcasting mic, that'll probably do. If you have a good quality microphone, that'll probably do it as well. And then you just need some editing software. The editing software is free. They have GarageBand, if you have a Mac, which I highly recommend, and also Audacity, both free, both really good programs and great for editing audio files. So you're going to want to get your hands on those. But they're free. The microphone might set you back a piece. You're going to want to get a stand and some other stuff if you self narrate. But I have some stuff for you and some tricks for you on that if you want to self narrate. We're not going to get into self narrating. We're just going to talk about how to produce the book and get it on itunes, Amazon and Audible. Because you can always hire a narrator, right? You can just get somebody on fiverr or you can go out to a site that you can just google it and there's like five sites, major sites that have audiobook narrators for you. Alright, so we're going to do it and I'm going to have mercy type these in very quickly because we're going to talk about a 20 step, step by step formula for creating audiobooks in 60 days or less. That's right. We're going to get all 20 steps in there and we're going to figure out the exact process that I go through in order to create an audiobook every time I create one. At the end of this, we're actually going to give you a 20 step process to go through. You can have my downloadable, which goes through all of these 20 steps if you like. So you don't have to write them. But definitely if you want to write them, you can jot them down right now. But we're going to go through all 20 of them. So get your pen ready because you can see how fast I talk. Right. If you know, in the chat box, like cut down the caffeine, Kimberly. It's not actually caffeine, these are caffeine free. But I do have a tendency to talk a little fast. So it's going to go by you really quickly. All right, so I have somebody that says I have a friend to introduce to this profession and pay her to read our book. That's right. I actually teach a course on how to create an audiobook, how to become an audiobook narrator. So if you're interested in that, you should probably email supportrfsummit.com that's supportrfsummit.com and merci. I'll throw that in the chat box and just put I want to be an audiobook narrator. I'm going to be teaching a course. I think the next one's not until July, but I'm going to be teaching a course on how to be an audiobook narrator. If you want to learn how to do that, whether it's narrating your own audiobook or somebody else's, I'd love to do that. What's one of my favorite courses to teach? And it's just a half day course and you get it all knocked out by the end of the day. You have your profile set up, you've got books to read. It's. It's totally super fun. It's like one of my favorite courses to teach. Just a half day, like a Saturday, we'll get together, we'll have some fun and then by the End, you're actually going to have your narrator profile set up and you're going to be ready to go. It's super fun. Awesome. Okay, so here goes our step by step formula for creating an audiobook in 60 days or less. All right, number one, get clear on your why. Get clear on your why. Why? Because you need to know what you're after. You need to know whether or not you're after market share or you're after royalty money. Are you trying to get out in front of a wider audience or are you trying to get money, cashola bucks from the royalties? Both are really, really great. If you are a speaker and you get on a stage and you're like, I have a book. And people say, hey, I really just want your audiobook. Great. So are you trying to get as many people to have this book as possible, in which case you might want to make it available as an MP3, or are you wanting to actually sell it, like, make royalties from it, like, charge people for it? Now, if you want to charge people for it, you can have it on itunes, Amazon and Audible. And you get the most royalties if you do it exclusively on itunes, Amazon and Audible. But if you want to see if you want to give it away for free or make it available, like on CDs, like, if people use CDs, does anybody have a CD player in their car anymore? I don't even think we have that. I think they repurpose it to make them into cup holders Now. Anyway, long story short, if you, you have to figure out whether or not you're trying to go except exclusively with and get the most money you possibly can from royalties, which is the exclusive way with itunes, Amazon and Audible, or you're trying to get out, out to a wider audience. There's also something called Overdrive. Now, Overdrive gets it into libraries. So if you're trying to get your book out to as many people as possible, overdrive might be the way to go, because you're going to get a lot of listeners to it. Right. However, if you're trying to make cashola on it, library is not so much the way to go. Right. Because you're not actually making money from each one of those. There's also other places that you can put your audiobook. You can put it little snippets here and there. And you can't do that if you actually have it exclusive on itunes, Amazon and Audible, but they represent most of the market. I'm somewhere between, depending on who you get quoting you, somewhere between 80 and 95% of the population buy their books through Amazon, itunes, or Audible. And so if you're trying to get mar. If you're trying not to get market share, if you're trying to get as much money as you possibly can, you're going to want to go exclusive with itunes, Amazon, and Audible because they're going to give you the best deal for not selling it on the back end. Now, if you give talks and you are selling CDs or you are selling it from your website or anything like that, you can't go exclusive. You get less money that way. But you get full price if you sell it from your website. Okay, that was just number one. So you can tell that there's a lot here. Number two is find a pool of narrators. By pool of narrators, I mean a pool of narrators. So I saw some of you say, hey, my best friend, she wants to narrate my book. Awesome. That's great. She should be one of five to 10 to 20 people that you audition for the book, because you might not actually. She might not actually have the best voice for your book. Now, if she does, fantastic, wonderful. But what I want you to do is have a pool of narrators that you go to that you reach out and you say, I want all of you to audition for my book. And then you're gonna select the one that is best for you. So you're going to go and find a pool of narrators. And my program actually teaches you how to do that, but you can do it, too. You can just reach out to friends and family and be like, does anybody else want to narrate my book? Reach out to a lot of different people and get a bunch of different people, have them read an excerpt from your book. Number two is the audition script. Sorry. Number three is the audition script. So number three is your audition script. And that is you're going to take about 500 words from your book. Just 500 words. And you're going to have everybody that is in your pool of narrators read the same 500 words and send you an audio sample of it. And then you're going to do a blind spot test with other people to see, like, which voice they like the best. And then ultimately, it's up to you. You can be like, no, I actually do like my best friend's voice the best. Totally fine. I mean, it's author's choice at that point. Totally fine. But you do want to get a pool of narrators so that you might be able to go so and so read it a lot better. And I'm just going to go with them. So you do want to do an audition script. You take 500 words. Now, not the first 500 words of your book. That includes the table of contents. Nobody gives a crap about the table of contents. You're not going to read the table of contents on your audiobook. It's just not going to happen. You go right into the story. Now, for your audition script, you're actually going to want a chunk of the heart of the book. So if you have medical terminology, you have to put medical terminology in the audition script. Make sure you get a chunk of 500 words that include medical terminology. If you have accents, if you have people that have accents, if you have, like, a fiction book and you have people with accents, you're definitely going to want to give a section in there with the accents, right? So you're definitely going to want to have the characters in there interacting with each other. Main characters are very important. So if you have a main character, definitely make sure that their excerpt is in there. And I'm not saying put five excerpts in. I'm saying take one chunk of 500 words all together and let the interpreter be able to really get a feel for the book. If you cut it up and you're like, I want this word from here and this word from here, it's just not going to make sense. And that the person auditioning for it will be like, you're all over the map. I don't even know what you're doing. So you're going to want an audition script. So from the heart of the book, remember that phrase. Okay, Number four, you're going to want to do a teaser campaign. So now, just like Chuck just said in the last one, what we're going to do is create a teaser and talk to people about the book before it's even out. What? Yes, of course you're going to do that. You're going to want to take pre orders. You're going to want to tell people it's coming soon. Do you know what that does? It creates momentum, and it creates momentum for your existing book. You're talking about your book. You're talking about, hey, guess what happened? I'm doing this audiobook. It's going to be totally awesome. It's the four stages of being an awesome entrepreneur. And if that's the case, when people see that, they'll be like, oh, man, I meant to buy that book. And they'll pick up your book as well. You'll be surprised at how often you will see people buy your actual book book when you're advertising that your audiobook is coming soon. All right, so four is a teaser campaign about coming. This is my book. Alright, number five, you're gonna screen the auditions. Alright, so now you've given your auditions. You've given this audition script to your narrators. You've looked, you've given them an opportunity to read through it. They've all sent you your audio samples, and now you're gonna screen through them. You're gonna know in about. I'm telling you, it's not gonna take you 500 words. You're gonna know in about maybe 15 seconds if you like this voice or not. Right. If it's the voice for your book or not. And if you take my audiobook narrator classes, it actually, we go through several of them. And you just listened about five, ten seconds into it, you're like, yep, no, absolutely not. Nope. Oh, that one's kind of interesting. And then you listen more. But you're gonna want to screen through the auditions and figure out which one really is sounds like the person to read your book. It's gonna be much faster than you think it is. But you do need to give the 500 words to the people because when you find one or two or three that you really like, you're gonna want to listen to how they handle all of the material of your book, whether it's medical terminology or accents or whatever it is. All right, number six, we're going to talk about negotiating rates. Okay, so you're going to negotiate rates with your narrator. Once you actually select your narrator and you're like, yes, you. You're the one heart. Love you. You're going to be doing my book. Make sure that you negotiate rates. Now, there's three ways to pay narrators, all right? The one way. One way that you pay them is per finished hour. Actually, there's a couple ways, a bonus way, I'll tell you. But the primary ways that you pay audiobook narrators is per finished hour. That means no matter how much time they spend recording the book, you're going to pay them for the finished product. So if in the end, the book is four hours long and you pay $100 per finished hour, you're going to pay them $400 for the book completed, edited, uploaded, and working on itunes, Amazon, and audible. So if you pay somebody else to do that, you're going to pay per finished hour. And somewhere between, I would say 100 is a little low, but between 100 and $200. Probably closer to $150 to $200 per finished hour. I just use 100 because it's easy to calculate. But $150 to $200 per finished Hour is about the going rate for an audiobook narrator. Now, it may take them five or six hours for each finished hour to complete, but that doesn't matter. You're actually paying for the finished product. So that's one way to pay per finished hour. The second way to pay is royalty share. And this is like we were just talking about passive income royalties. Once the book is up, it sells, and over time, you're going to be getting royalties in. You can actually split those royalties with the narrator 50, 50. So they're going to read the book for you. You're going to put it up on itunes, Amazon, and audible, or you're going to put it up on your website, and every time you make a sale, you're going it to put pay them half the royalties. Okay. So that's their benefit for doing the book. And that is a great way to make the have the book be completely finished without you doing any of the work. And you already finished the book, so you did your work right. And then you give it to a narrator, they read it for you, they put it up. It's on itunes, Amazon, audible, overdrive, wherever, and it is a functioning book. And then when you make money, then you pay them kind of like an affiliate fee, right? Are we talking about affiliate fees a lot this week? Yes, we are. Okay, so number six is negotiate rates. Oh, that's the second way.

With paying. Perfect. Sorry. First is per finished hour. Second is royalty share. Third is actually a combination of the two. So you can say, I'm going to pay you a flat fee up front of $50, or I'm going to pay you $5 per finished hour, or I'm going to pay YOU $50 per finished hour. And then I'm also going to pay you royalty shares, so you can sort of do that combination. And then the last bonus way is you can actually pay them a flat fee. And you can say, I think it's probably. I don't really know how many hours it's going to be when you finish it, but I'm going to pay you 500 bucks to finish my book. So you can do it a variety of ways, but you want to negotiate that up front because you don't want any confusion on the back end of how long it took them to finish the book. And what you're actually going to pay them next is contracts. You're going to sign contracts. You're going to sign a contract with your audiobook narrator and you're also going to sign a contract with your, the platform that you put it on. So you're going to sign a contract with itunes, Amazon and Audible. The way you do that is you click through terms and conditions. Yes, I agree to everything. And you kind of have to because there's no negotiating with them. But you're going to pick your contract. You're either going to go exclusive or non exclusive. You're going to decide whether you're going to go royalty share and they're going to pay the narrator or you're going to pay the narrator how it's going to work and you're going to figure all that stuff out and you're going to sign contracts, but you have to sign a contract with the platform that says, yes, I agree to give it to you exclusively or no, I don't. And then they know the terms and conditions under which to pay you and you will actually retain your. If you do it right, you'll retain your audiobook rights and you'll be able to keep those rights. If you turn those rights over to somebody else because you signed off with a publisher that they get the rights, then they actually have the rights to publish your audiobook for you. So be careful. If you already signed a contract to somebody else, you may have given away those audiobook rights. If you work with my program, I show you really easy way to reach out to them and just say, hey, if you're not going to produce them, could we produce them? And because of the language that we use, oftentimes they will release the audiobook rights back to you. Number eight, social media announcements. So now you have actually just signed a contract with your narrator. So great news. You're going to do a announcement saying, guess what, I just found a narrator. And you're going to take their sample, their 500 word sample that they did as an audition for you. And you're going to throw it up on social media so that people can get that little taste, that little teaser of what it's going to sound like when it's a real book. It's going to be awesome. You're going to love it. They're going to love it. They're going to be super excited about it and they're going to be really dying and their mouth watering to buy your audiobook. It's going to be great. Plus, if they haven't bought your book book yet. And they are a book book reader. They will go ahead and buy your book sometimes. So that's so super awesome. All right, step number nine. Remember we have 20 steps to get through. We're already at 5:30 my time, so we got to knock these out. All right, step number nine. Remember, at the end of this I'm actually going to give you a recap which not only gives you all of these things that Mercy's so generously typing in the chat box, but also goes through each one of them with about a little bit of a paragraph. Doesn't tell you everything, but it does give you more detail on what you need to do in for each one of these. Alright, number nine is cover art. You're going to need to turn your book which is a rectangle. I don't have a book here. Yeah, I do have a book. Here's one. All right, you're gonna need to turn a rectangle into a square because.

This is a stupid story. But CDs used to be square, right? Even though they were round, the case on it was a square case. And so audiobooks are known for having a perfect square. So even though they're not a CD anymore, they actually make the audiobook cover have to be a perfect square. Silly but true. Anyway, so that's just one of those things. If you're gonna create an audiobook and get it on itunes, Amazon and Audible, you have to give them cover art that turns your rectangle into a perfect square. And really easy to do. You just give it to your graphic designer, you give them the specifications and you say make that happen. And they do. If you don't have a graphic designer, no problem. You just go to Fiverr and say, hey, I need you to turn this book into an audit, this book cover, book jacket cover into an audiobook cover. And as long as you have a high enough quality resolution, they should be able to knock that out for you. I'm a big fan of Fiverr. Alright, so what step are we on? We're on step number 10, review the sample. Okay, so now your narrator has been working diligently on producing your audiobook, right? But you're going to ask them to give your you about a 15 to 20 minute sample of the first part of the book. And you're going to review that to make sure everything sounds right. You're going to make sure that they're using the proper accents that they're giving the characters. If it's a fiction book, the right quality that they're pronouncing words correctly. You know, medical terminology we've talked about, but there's other terminology as well. If you use the word audiophile, for example, you got to make sure that they're pronouncing that correctly. Sad story. This is a terrible story. But I was listening to an audiobook and it was set in Seattle, Seattle, Washington. So for those of you who are in Seattle, Washington, or been to Seattle, Washington, you know that there's a big body of water there. It starts with the letter P. It's pug, G, G, E, T, T. And it's pronounced Puget Sound. And in this audiobook, it was in the audio file 27 times and they pronounced it Puget Sound each time. That's right, Puget Sound. Every time I heard it, I wanted to shoot my brains out because they were pronouncing it wrong. So you want to make sure that your audiobook narrator is narrating it with the correct pronunciations because you don't want to hear Puget Sound. You want to hear Puget Sound. That's how it's supposed to be pronounced. Now, your narrator is supposed to look that stuff up. But also it's your responsibility as the author to catch that and make sure they didn't screw it up. Okay, so that's number 10, is review the sample. Make sure that they're doing it right along the way. You're going to want to listen into it and just give them a thumbs up. Now you're not going to want to drill into them every detail like, oh, no, I need you to read this word with a little higher inflection. It is a performance art, so give them a little elbow room to be able to perform it. Basically your job should be great job. It sounds amazing. You're fantastic. I just have this one little tweak. That's what you're. You're gonna do with your narrator. Alright. And make sure that you don't have them read hug it sound. Okay. Number 11, you're gonna send out a second teaser. Is everybody still with me? Do a. Like, hell yeah. I'm in it. This is super fun. We're halfway through. I'm excited. I can't wait to hear the rest. Give me some love in the chat box. I feel like I'm all alone here, guys. All right, so perfect. Thank you, Denise. I love it. I love you too. You guys are awesome. Fantastic and very responsive when I asked for it. So thank you for that. I don't like doing these things all alone. It's not fun. For me, I like playing off of people. And if I can't play off of another person here, I have to play off you guys. So fantastic. Thank you guys. I appreciate that. So thanks, Charles. Thanks, Eva. Thanks, Patty. Wow. Everybody responded. Thank you so much, everybody. Marguerite, Everybody responded. That was fantastic. All right, so what step are we on? I lost track of what step we're on. I think we're on step number 11. Step number 11 is the second teaser. Okay, so you're going to put a note out that says we have things are coming soon, right? So now, now that you've had your sample come through and you've had some of the things come through, you now have an estimate on how long it's going to be before it comes out. So you're going to announce again, coming in fall or coming in two weeks or coming in one week, this is going to happen. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to have our audiobook up and available for you. So you're going to throw out your second teaser. Next, number 12, you're going to do a full audio quality screen. That means that you listen on real headsets, not on. Not on the little earpods because you won't hear all the mistakes that people make. I mean, you'll hear the mistakes, but you won't hear this. That just won't come up on your earpods. And they do it regularly. Narrators drink coffee and they drop coffee cups all the dang time. It's true. Okay, so you're going to do a full audio quality screen. You're going to be listening on really good headsets to hear the audio quality, make sure that it's what you want it to be, and then give it the thumbs up. And then you're gonna hit submit. Yay. Submit. You have finally number 13, you're submitting it for screening to itunes, Amazon and Audible. You're gonna go ahead and once you've approved it, you've approved it. That's great. But now it has to go to itunes, Amazon and Audible and they have to approve it for their quality screen. So number three 13 is submit. Number 14 is it goes through audio quality control at your platform. So Overdrive, itunes, Amazon, Audible, all of those places are going to be like, it did not meet audio quality standards if it didn't. This is a real benefit of hiring a professional narrator, because once you've been through it, you do not make the same mistakes twice or three times or four times. It's just too painful. So the first time you make the mistakes, you're not going to know until the whole book is done whether or not there's mistakes in there. Now, the good news is a lot of them don't have to actually be reread all the way. They can be fixed in audio quality with audio engineering, with your software. But you do have to pass audio quality control for it to be up there. Now, you could just sell it from your website at that point if it got rejected, but I wouldn't recommend it. You went all this far. Just go get it fixed. And if your audio, if your narrator doesn't know how to do it again, go to Fiverr, find somebody who can clean it up for you, make it audio quality standards for itunes, Amazon, and audible, and then get it up there. Totally easy to do. And number 15, it's for sale. Yay. Number 15. It is now up for sale because it approved in audio quality, and it is now available on iTunes, Amazon, Audible, Overdrive, and on your website. Fantastic. We're at step 15. How many steps did I say? 20. That's right. We're not done yet. You thought it was finished. No way is it finished, but we are probably close to our 60 days at this point. All right, once it's available for sale, one of the things you have to do right away, super important when it comes to audiobooks, is you have to get it reviewed. That's right. You've got to go out there and get it reviewed by audiobook listeners. Now, everybody knows if your Uncle Chuck said, great job, Kimberly loved it, that it's your Uncle Chuck, Right? So don't just get it reviewed by Uncle Chuck. Make sure that somebody out there who has an audiobook listening repertoire reviews your book. Now, how do you do that? You reach out to audiobook listeners, or you can get it out there on a variety of ways. Just make sure that the people that are reviewing your book or if you know somebody who reviews a lot of audiobooks, ask them to review your book for you. Now, we at I'm Hearing Stories, we actually built reputation with a lot of really good audiobook reviewers. They have over 300 reviews or more, and they have a following. That means people watch what they read and they're just like, you know, Siskel and Ebert like this, two thumbs up, right? Daze me a little bit. But if they're saying, yes, this was a good book, they're reviewing it for a variety of things. They're reviewing it for the quality of the material in the book. That's the stuff that you actually wrote as an author, and they're reviewing it for the performance by the narrator. So if you're a narrator and you're narrating, they're actually going to review your performance as well. And number three is they review the book as a whole, as a piece. All right, so they're reviewing it three times and they review it with paragraphs, but they review it with stars three times. So you're looking for five star reviews obviously. But you cannot ask people to give you five star reviews. If it's found out that you're giving five, that you're asking for five star reviews, the audiobook listeners reviews can be removed, which doesn't do you any good, but it also hurts the audiobook listener. So please do not ask them to give five star reviews. What you want to do is you can ask them for, for an honest and encouraging review. Alright, so I encourage you to use the word encourage rather than a five star review. Please do not ask for five star reviews. But if you could offer them up to ask, if you could ask them to offer an encouraging review, that would be great. Now Sometimes they rate four star reviews, but they rate everything. Four star reviews. If they have 300 people listening to them and they only review 5 to 10% of their things and five star reviews, they're still a great person to review your book. If you get a four star review from them, thumbs up. Great job. That's awesome. Okay, so I wouldn't discourage yourself from using those reviews. It's not necessarily a bad thing. But you do want to get reviewed by really good reviewers. All right, number 17, video. So audiobook people, guess what, they're multimedia, right? They listen to podcasts, they listen to audiobook and they watch YouTube and they watch videos and they're out there on Facebook. There are a lot of different places. So your book is great and all, and it's in words and the words are great and all, but they stay in the book. But you know what a video does, it gets out to a wide range of people and it can be shared a lot. So I encourage you to do a video about your book. Now the video can be done sort of in a multimedia presentation with music behind it and like have the book, book title on it and the author and then maybe some main character stuff and some pictures and things like that. Be sure not to use, be sure to use royalty free pictures and then maybe some of the narrator narrating over the top of it and you just go to Fiverr and have somebody make you a quick video for it. Super easy to do. Might cost you 25, 50 bucks, whatever. It's totally worth it because you're engaging a multimedia audience. So number 17 is create a video about your book because that engages that audience and people will pick it up because they've been engaged that way. Number 18, put your links to buy up. All right, you're put your links to buy everywhere. Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and I don't know what TikTok is, but probably there too. You should probably do that. Mercy is the person for me who does all of my social media posting and it's awesome. But here's the thing, authors, here's the thing. I'm talking to you. If you're an author, I'm talking right to you. Put the link on your website. Most authors forget to put the link for the audiobook on their website. They forget to put the link. They're like, oh, yeah, I'm a reader. Of course you are. You're a reader because you're an author. Authors are readers. Readers are authors. You read books. However, there are people who want to buy your material and pay you money. So let them.

Please, please your audiobook links on your website. Okay, all right, enough said. Number 19. Number 19. We're getting close to 20. I'm going to have you guys start guessing here. You're going to have to guess number 20. All right, number 19 is an ongoing drip campaign, ongoing marketing. All right? So you definitely don't want to like set it and forget it about your marketing. You want to, you could set it and forget it, but you're going to want to make sure that you actually have an ongoing, some sort of drip automated campaign where you talk about your audiobook, your book, your next book, your. All kinds of different things that are happening. Like what you like, the story behind your book, what happened when your dog ate your book. All kinds of ongoing marketing to promote the stuff around it. And then you can talk about the reviews that just came out about it, you can talk about the ways that you got. You're going to a book signing, you can talk about all kinds of things, but make sure you have ongoing marketing and you didn't just do a book and then forget about it. All right? Because that is what. Where good books go to die. Alright, so you got to do ongoing marketing. Now, number 20. Any guesses for number 20? I'm going to wait patiently. Not really patiently because I'm not a patient person by nature, but I'm going to wait patiently for something to appear in the chat box that says what you think step number 20 is because we've gone through all sorts of steps. We've gone through steps one through 19 and now there's just one more step to do. And I would love to hear what you guys would think that step number 20 is. So we've got a lot of answers on celebrate and party and have a drink. And you're not wrong. Like a cocktail would be a great thing to have right about now, especially to wet my whistle. But I'm not doing cocktails this evening. That's for Thursday night quarantine cocktail hour. You should definitely join me for that. Super fun. Only during quarantine though. Reza says open a blog. Great idea. If you don't already have a blog. As an author, you totally should have a blog. But that is not number 20. Number 20, ladies and gentlemen, specifically for audiobook listeners is plan your next audiobook. Plan your next audiobook. You know why? Have you ever heard of Netflix? Netflix is one of those things where you watch one and then you binge watch, binge watch, binge watch, binge watch, binge watch. Same thing with audiobooks. Once they read one and they listen to one, they're like great, where's the next one? And they're ready to push the button for the next one. If you are a one hit wonder, you will lose out on it. All of that potential one, that potential revenue. Alright? And we are here about passive income. So plan your next audiobook. Make it happen. That's a big thing. It is a big deal to plan your next audiobook because that's what we are here for. Alright? So how many of you liked this? Did you guys like this? Mercy, get ready for the link that you can drop so that people can get all 20 of the steps all at once and be totally awesome. Go ahead and throw it in there. But if you liked what you heard today, can you just do a shout out? Because I had to do this all by myself. I mean it's super fun to do it all by myself, but it's more fun to do it when I hear cheers and applause. In fact, I could live on stages and coffee and applause and pretty much compliments. And that's it. That's all you would need. You don't even have to feed me food and water. I pretty much live on compliments and applause. Okay, so thank you. Thank you everybody. Oh yay. People have 40 big ideas. That's fantastic. Denise says question number 17, video. Is this a promotional video or a reading of the entire book on video? Oh no. Lord I mean, I guess you could do that. That'd be a little painful, but no, it's just a promo video. You can do it five minutes. You can do it one minute. You could do it 30 seconds. I actually have some videos that are out there for some of my books that I've done that are on my website that are super fun. And it's got some music in the background, and then they throw pictures in, and then they have some words written, like, read over it, and there's some stuff that shows up on the screen, and it's just, I mean, super fun. Little multimedia presentation. 1 to 5 minutes, 30 seconds to 5 minutes really would totally do it. Awesome. Okay, so I'm super excited if you guys want to get all 20 in one place. Merci, can you drop that link in there? That'd be fantastic. And you can download that. And if you are now, like, very excited about the whole audiobook thing and you're like, you know what? I totally want to do this, and I want to narrate my own audiobook or I want to narrate other people's audiobook, because I think it would be super fun to do what Kimberly's son did. And by the way, I did it too. It is super fun. What a great hobby. What a great way to use your voice and get it out there in the world. If you want to learn more about how to do audiobooks yourself as an audiobook narrator, send a note to supportrfsummit.com and in the subject line, put audiobook narration and voiceover class. Because we're going to teach you both. We're going to teach you to how. How to be an audiobook narrator and voiceover artist. However, if you have listened to all 20 of these steps, and you're like, geez, Kimberly is a genius and clearly knows her stuff, and I don't want to do all 20 of those steps. I want her to do them for me. I would be happy to do that, because, of course, we have that program available. In that case, you can also send a note to supportrfsummit.com and MERCI will hook you up with our done for you program, which is awesome. And you can just sit there and basically, it's just one of my clients actually said, this is like having a massage. We get to do all the good parts, and you do all of the hard work. And it's so true. Actually, Mercy does most of the hard work. I'm not gonna lie. She does a lot of the advertising. But we do have narrators that we have a huge list of narrators, thousands of narrators that we have contacted that we have access to who can audition for your book. People who are amazing and talented and professional, people who have review books and reviewed multiple books. People who can get you out there on social media. We have the cookups, we have the contacts, we have all that we need in order to make you a huge success in your audiobook. So if you want to have us do your book for you, fantastic. Now one last thing, which you probably don't want to do because it's too much work, but if you do, it's possible that I will reteach my class on how to be how to do this. Like it's a six week class on actually dialogue with you where we teach you along the way what you need to do on those steps. And you don't get through all 20 steps except for in those six weeks. So it's under 60 days. But it won't be in the next six weeks because I'm not teaching the class anytime soon. But if you want to do the class, shoot Mercy a note. If we get enough interest in it, then I will hold a class. But it probably is not going to be until mid June or July possibly. So sorry about that. That. But if you want it done for you, totally can make that happen for you. And if you're not worried about the 60 days, totally can make that happen for you as well. And if you just want to hang out with us and have fun learning to be an audiobook narrator, my favorite class, half a day just spent with me. Super fun and totally awesome. And at the end, honestly, you'll have your profile set up and you'll be able to audition for multiple books. I'll actually show you where you can get books to audition for and how to find books and like what the audio quality requirements are and everything that you need in order to be an audiobook narrator and super successful at it. Okay, we are at time. So if you want to contact me, you can go to, you can go to supportrfsummit.com and send Mercy a note and let her know what you're looking for and she can guide you every step of the way. You can also if you just want to check out my website, you can go to I'm Hearing Stories and you can look and see all of the books that we have created. And by the way, if you're an audiophile, if you like listening to audiobooks, we actually have all of the books up that need reviews and if you are an audiobook reviewer and have done reviews for before, you can check out all of our books. And if you see one that you like and you are a regular reviewer of audiobooks, we will give it to you for free. That's right. So you can check out the books that we have available on audio on our website. I'm hearing stories.com, you can go to the listener page and check them out. And if you see one that you want to listen to for free and you have done audiobook reviews before, you don't have to do 300 of them, you just have to do 300 of them to be one of our preferred reviewers. But if you want to get a book for free, let us know and we would be happy to provide you with a free copy if we still have one of the links available. Alright, does that sound good? I have given you everything that I can give you. I'm just kidding. And we actually have one more speaker up after this. Who's coming next? I actually saw you throw it in the chat box. I'm not sure. Who's up next? I don't know. Who's up next. We have one more after this. Up next, why your passive income goals aren't worth aren't working.

David Smith is up next. I love David. So David is actually going to share with us something super cool. He's going to his method, his, his methodology is that nobody should have to work at the golden arches in their golden years. That everybody should have passive income so that they can have an extra passive stream of income coming into their bank account so they do not have to work into their golden years. Wouldn't that be awesome? It would be awesome. I love David. He's coming up next. I have to go get a drink of water or something because that was a lot of talking. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I have had a lot of fun with you and we have one more speaker coming up, so stay with us. I'm excited. I'll see you guys. Back at the top of the hour. I am Kimberly Habschade with Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel and the Passive Income Web Summit. We'll see you back at the top of the hour. Cheers.

That was an amazing expert. We're here with Kimberly who is the rocket fuel for entrepreneurs. She's on a mission to help you launch your business to new heights. Nobody lives out loud better than Kimberly.