Get into the Bedrooms (and Bathrooms) of Your Perfect Customer - Audio Book in a Week

And then the audiobook game became interesting and then the podcast work gave us the backbone which led to the AI of this. So this is a progression, this is a solid progression of that same content. Some of you were with us from day one and you're probably going to email us and say, hey, that book I did 10 years ago, can I release the audiobook version that. Because that's the next step in the evolution.

There's a lot of nuance to recording an audiobook, but It's, I'd say 95% of the complexity or more is taken away when you don't have to do it.

And so to get a sample of you reading the book in your, you reading the book style is very viable. And you know, that's where we get the breaths, you know, that's where we get the natural nuances. That's where we get the bass, that's where we get all that stuff. The audience, there's no pressure, nothing happens. If you want to change things later, you can.

The other thing that happens is the audio gets sweetened. So it's as though it's gone through effects. And it really does sound good, but it doesn't make mistakes. And one thing that can happen is you can determine if you want it to retain your own colloquial or not.

I think the most important thing I've done from a business perspective, besides have great partners in my life, is written books. And one of the things that Paul Calligan and I are here to talk about today. Hi, Mr. Paul Calligan.

Hey, Mr. Mike.

Audiobooks. We love audiobooks. And first of all, we've got some exciting things to share statistically. And we're really going to talk about AI audiobooks. And they are mind bogglingly good when they're done right. And we're going to talk about creating audiobooks that help you grow your business. So first of all, some interesting little stats. Paul, you and I agree that audiobooks are big and getting bigger. I don't know exactly what all the stats and the numbers are, but they're phenomenal. I know you've got a couple for us. Take it away.

Well, 60% of high value readers prefer audiobooks. Voices.com, the audio industry, a whole bunch of stuff. This one is really, really interesting. They turned on audiobooks for Spotify Premium. They just turn it on. Not, not much hullabaloo, not much attention. 25% Bam, engaged.

You know, that's music and podcast and audiobook. And then what's interesting is the listeners. 2.5 hours longer on the app. So they're not just, you know, listening what Mike's voice sounds like. They're engaging for hours just 14 days after starting.

Okay, so I assume today we're going to be talking about how you get your audiobook on Spotify too.

Absolutely.

Okay. Okay.

And everywhere else. And then this one, this one I love, ma'.

Am.

So 53 listening to an audiobook, up from 45, 20, 22. So that's fascinating. I mean, that's a huge jump. But this is post pandemic. We were all listening to audiobooks when we were stuck at home. Now that we're out partying again, we're still listening to more Audiobooks. And then 53 read more with audiobooks. So high.

Yes, I know for myself, like I consume probably an hour and a half of content every day and I have it on my phone. It's how I do my walks, how I do my exercise. I've always got some sort of learning going on in the background and I'm consuming it 1.75 times, which means getting a lot more information a lot faster. And I would say, with very few exceptions, so in the rooms we're in together. So that would be strategic coach, genius, network abundance. 360 EO ypo gobundance. You know, high value business owner type groups. Everyone says, can I have your audiobook or is there an audiobook? And then second to that is actually Kindle. And look, I, I love physical books. I still use them. I give them away. The latest book, AI Accelerator, has been selling like hotcakes. And.

That'S one of the things we'll give away at the end of this is we'll actually give everyone a copy of the AI accelerator audiobook too. So let's wait a minute.

You can give away an audiobook, Mike, you can give away an audiobook as a way to entice your audience for more.

It's not just the entice. Here's probably from my point of view, people who consume audiobooks.

When they talk to me, they will say, I'll have people who will go straight from, I listened to your audiobook and I called up and I knew I wanted to do business with you. And that's a big ticket sale. It's a six figure sale. So between podcasts and audiobooks, I think they're the two most important media types to use today for a real business audience. And that comes from practical experience, tools, talking to people, and seeing the results myself. So I think that's a big part of what we're going to talk about, besides the fact that here's how we can make the production easier, too. Go ahead.

Well, it's an industry standard now, Mike. They're calling it audio routines. People are now having audio routines as part of their life. And the audio routine is some podcast, some audiobook. And here's the thing. Don't choose. Do both.

Yeah, Mike, there's a problem.

Mike, what's the problem with audiobooks?

Recording them sucks.

Yeah.

Okay, here, I'll. I'll frame this up. So I've recorded a bunch of my audiobooks until the last few, which we use AI to do. And.

So the typical routine is you have to hire an engineer. Most people end up traveling, and then you start reading your book, and you have someone telling you to stop and redo that. Stop, redo that. And you find out really quickly, unless you are a professional speaker, just how badly you read it can be incredibly frustrating. And if you do it right, you're going to be in a audio booth, which means you're gonna. If you don't like small enclosed spaces that have dead audio in them, and if you haven't done that before, I would say you're in for a surprise. They're very often very claustrophobic. You have to take a lot of breaks, and it is not uncommon for the process to take two to four days. So it's a week out of your business life, a week of losing money. More often than not, travel in an incredibly frustrating experience unless you're a professional speaker. How about you? What's been your experience from that point of view?

I've never done an audiobook because I didn't want to go through this. And this is a guy who likes to podcast. This is a guy who likes to talk. This is a guy who has access to, you know, voice boosts, that whole thing. That three or four days is just life sucking and life draining. And that's why I haven't done an audiobook at this point.

I didn't know that, Paul. I actually did not know that walking into this. Okay, well, so here's the big idea. And what we're going to share with you today is, and first, a little backstory. A while ago, when Zach, my son, started traveling with me and we started talking about this, I would always come up and I'd have some artificial voice actors, and I do audio demos from stage, and I'd. People come up and say, hey, do you think you could do an audiobook for me? And I'm like, I Don't really know. And that wound up turning into the business that we have today because Paul took it over and scaled it. So, full disclosure, yes, we're going to be talking about a service that we built as a result of this, but we're going to answer every question you could possibly have about doing audio books with AI as the backbone. And we're going to do some samples for you in a second, but also.

Expand the mind a little bit. I want to be really clear that this isn't spending three weeks, you know, three days in a booth putting something on audible. This is much, much bigger than that. And we'll chat about that. Ooh, the origin story.

Okay, so here's the backstory. Paul and I originally met. It's got to be Dang near 20 years ago now. Do you remember where was the first? Was it.

Oh, I remember, dude. I remember. It was a Joe Polish event. We're in line. And. And it was. It was the rich carpet thing. It was when they had the satellite feed with Brandon. Yeah.

And I'm like, that's.

That's Mike, that. That.

That.

That video guy. And you're like, that's Paul, that podcast guy. And then we went out and we had Italian food at some strip mall in Phoenix, Arizona. And that's fine dining right there. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Meatballs in love.

So it's also my favorite band.

Yeah. Oh, hell yeah. We should do a little song about that. Maybe we'll end this with meatballs and love a song. I've got an idea, Paul. All right, so here's what. What I liked right away about Paul is he's a big dreamer, and he's a. He's a getter doner and he's an iterator. So that means, like, he's. He's super fun because you can have an idea and he'll say, and I know how to make it better. And then it goes back and forth. So Paul very naturally has an improv soul and loves to make things. And that's one of the things, I think, that's kept us together as friends all these years. We've wound up creating a product that was author expert marketing machine. So back in the day when Amazon was brand new and you could start self publishing, we figured out how to hack it and turn that into an entire product and an entire course that eventually even evolved into publish and profit. But that was an amazing product where we helped hundreds of people write books, published books, become bestselling authors. And it was because Paul figured out how to hack the system, tweak the system, and, you know, our combined skills of technical, marketing, storytelling, and training really turn into, I think, a real transformational business. And we've always been in love ever since, and we wrote books together.

Is there anything that I love?

Well said.

This I love you story.

Okay, well, I do have to throw one thing, though. Let's. Let's talk about the progression of this just a little bit, because, sure, it made sense to do print and Kindle books when we started this. And then the audiobook game became interesting, and then the podcast work gave us the backbone, which led to the AI of this. So this is a progression. This is a solid progression of that same content. Some of you were with us from day one, and you're probably going to email us and say, hey, that book I did 10 years ago, can I release the audiobook version of that? Because that's the next step in the evolution. And the answer is yes.

Yes. And it takes about 10 minutes of your time. That's the best part of this that we should have brought up a little bit earlier. So an investment of 10 minutes, and you're going to ask, okay, well, what does it sound like? What's it like? And you got a whole bunch of questions. So part of our interview today, our conversation that Paul and I are going to have, is we want to get you exposed to this world and tell you what works, what doesn't work. But I think the best way to begin is let's place an example. So we're going to. Okay, well, it looks like we're going to play a little bit of Punch the Elephant, which is one of my favorite books I wrote. It's a. It's a sales process. So here it is. That's why Reagan Archibald was able to close almost a quarter of a million dollars in new business before we had our first coaching session. A few weeks later, he got on stage and closed $200,000 in sales with an offer we create. Okay, not too bad, not too bad.

Sure sounded like you, Mike.

It did. It's a little bit up. Upbeat, for sure. But this is Krista Mashore, and listen to her. So this is a female voice. What I think the thing to pay attention to is the nuance in this chapter. I'll tell you exactly how to put the pieces together to get there. One thing I won't talk about is your tactical or strategic content. My expertise has been real estate. Pretty. Pretty good. This one is really impressive, too. Anything you want to add to that last one?

Well, Krista if you. If you hit rewind when you watch this video, you'll actually hear Christa's AI Take a breath. That. That gets captured in this AI process. And it's really obvious in this one. And it. It just doesn't sound fake.

No, you're. You're absolutely right. I'm. I'm blown away at how nuanced it is. And I think as you hear these.

When pursuing total fulfillment in life, it's not enough to just solve your money problems. Now, don't get me wrong, having money is great. I've never met anybody who complained about.

Having too much of it. Okay, that was great. And what's also awesome is most people who are not professional speakers make several mistakes. Like the. The. The cloned version of their voice is actually better sounding and more natural sounding because you don't realize just how many mistakes and breaks you have in your normal cadence. And audiobooks obviously don't have that problem. So here's Aaron Markham. Anything about him before we begin?

Well, this one's fun because this is the beginning of Aaron Markham's audiobook. And note who wrote the foreword to Aaron Markham's audiobook.

Oh. Entre Thrive, the Entrepreneur's eight Laws to Accelerate Financial Freedom While Creating the Good Life. Written and narrated by me, Aaron Markham. You're about to meet an amazing entrepreneur who's dealt with the downs and ups of building, growing, and sell. That's right. So I wrote the forward, but. But AI Mike did the voiceover.

And the reason that Mike doesn't remember this is because I think I texted you really quickly permission to use your voice. And done.

Like I'm like you. Smart. So, Paul, you did this gal.

This one. This one's so much fun.

You will learn as you go deeper in this world, sometimes legal things happen and things get really interesting. And official version of her book was having issues even though she owned it. And so she re recorded the book and she added a new chapter. And this is the new content from the new re record.

And I want to add one other thing. She has a very distinctive accent because she's French Canadian. And.

We caught.

I actually, I like her. So I really love Lis. Okay. And I love her AI voice. This map refer to the diagrams at the end of this chapter is the model upon which I base my work. It represents the way I look at the spiritual human evolutionary process. And it explains in a nutshell, the whole book. Okay. So she soothing, really captured that resonance of her voice which you don't normally notice in conversation. And then. And this one, Jim Shields. This is probably one of the most natural sounding audiobooks I've ever heard because it is spot on. Jim. Here goes.

When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, my mother kept a greeting card on the corner of her dresser. On the front, an attractive couple dressed in white walked the sand of a beautiful beach in the Virgin Islands.

I mean, he's just a great.

Sounds like an audiobook.

First of all, it's. It sounds like an audiobook. It really does. And then, Paul Colligan, listen to this.

You are now empowered to make all the right moves because you know what they are and you know what you want and you are empowered to act on it. And you can do this regardless of how loudly the world is screaming the wrong song at you when you know why you're doing.

First of all, that really sounds good. It's got a lot of bass, a lot of tonality and a lot of resonance. Again, just like I would not know that. Isn't you.

Anything else before we get into some of the main show? Because part of the breakdown here is we're going to answer your questions, everything you want to know about publishing, the process, the step by step process you go through, and then of course we'll talk a little bit about what it's like to work together.

Question number one, how does it sound? The answer is it sounds great. Let's keep going.

Yes, okay. And you can learn more, by the way, Audiobook in a week is the, the website that we put together. And we'll have a little incentive for you to go there in just a couple minutes besides getting some free stuff. All right, so in terms of the, the process, we'll go through the process because I think that's important to get your head around.

And you know, for us it's like head over to the website, push a button, and then the process we go through is like a 60 minute session with your engineer. So talk a little bit about what that experience is like. Paul.

Well, first of all, it's no pressure. It's not a 60 minute recording session. It's 60 minutes with the engineer to talk about the mic and talk about what you're going to do and answer any questions. Make sure we have logins and passwords, all that stuff is set up. And then what you do is you read approximately the first chapter of your book. But a couple of things. Number one, if you make a mistake, keep going because we can fix that later. And then the big thing is we want you to read the Book as you would read the book, you know, because Mike talking is a little different than Mike reading. And so to get a sample of you reading the book in your. You reading the book style is very viable. And, you know, that's where we get the breaths, you know, that's where we get the natural nuances. That's where we get the bass. That's where we get all that stuff. The Audi, there's no pressure, Nothing happens. If you want to change things later, you can. And it's a beautiful session set up at your convenience. We don't tell you, you know, Tuesday at 10, you click on a calendar, pick a time that works for you. No pressure. And it's the audio engineer who will be working with the entire process. So the one who records you is the one who will produce you, who will edit you, who will do all these things.

Yep. And I think we'll talk more about the AI component in a minute. But the challenge that most people have is it's like, okay, what gear do I have? If you don't have the right mic, we just send you one. And there's a lot of nuance to recording an audiobook, but it. I'd say 95% of the complexity or more is taken away when you don't have to do it. And that, to me, is what's most important. I can't tell you what a pain it was to figure out how to make this work. And we'll talk more about the pain part of the experience in a moment. But next I gotta tell you a story.

I can't tell you who it is. I don't have permission. But we had one client who did the process. And one thing you can do, if you record the first chapter and you like it, we'll just release the first chapter in your voice. Why not? We've already got it. And this one client called us back and he said, hey, Paul, I love everything except. Can I ask a favor? Yeah. Can we replace chapter one read by me with chapter one read by virtual me? And he actually liked the virtual sound better than the natural sound. Pretty cool.

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And that. That is. The next one is like, okay, what's it going to sound like? So our little elves have to go to work and basically tune the model. This is the nuanced part. This is why some people say, well, I can just sign up for one of these voice AI systems and upload my book. And it'd be like, God, I wish it were that easy. There's a tremendous Amount of nuance to tuning the voice. And then behind the scenes, the truth of the matter is.

The systems break a lot and they're inconsistent. And it does require a fair amount of manual tweaking and editing. So the first step is we just got to make sure your voice print is okay, and that gets either emailed or texted back to you, and you just go, yep, I love it. Let's let it fly.

And the cool thing is. No, well, the cool thing is, you know what? We do the voice model with chapter two. I mean, let's get to work. So you recorded chapter one like you like chapter one to sound. We did the voice model for chapter two. And you can go back. You can go back up to three times with adjustments and whatnot. And, you know, we get it right for chapter two.

Yep. And then step four. Yeah. So talk about what happens next. How long does it take to crank out the book? Oh, yeah, there's a website.

Yeah. Audiobook. In a week, once everything is approved, then we work with the engineer to assign the week when that happens. And I'll probably be pretty close to when you sign up, but sometimes people want, you know, you want to be around that week in case the engineer has a certain question or that type of thing. So don't be in Bermuda the week that happens. Because, yeah, you could be working. Don't be working in Bermuda. So, you know, we assign the week, we assign the engineer, and it gets done in one week. And the process, honestly, the cutting and pasting of your book, you know, how to cut and paste, that's not hard. It's the adjustment. It's those weird nuances. We had one AI model where the AI was convinced that our client pronounced tomorrow, tomorrow, and our. Our engineer had to go through every time the word tomorrow was in the book and change it from tomorrow to the right word. So it gets done, it gets approved, and then it gets qaed internally for us, all the stuff that's obvious. And during the process, we ask you how do we pronounce certain names? And, you know, anything that would get weird, that gets done, it gets done in one week. And then it gets sent to you in a system that you can, you know, give us thumbs up immediately, or if you want to review and listen, you can do it. It's sort of like a Google Docs kind of thing. Really easy for you to make a comment, but one week.

Yep. It's awesome. I promise you. This is such a pain in the butt. Gone. Bye. Bye. And then from there, yeah, you do the review, you approve, and then from there, if there's any changes, the team does a tweak and then the publishing process. So there's several different publishings and again, there's a lot of little details you don't have to care about or know about. But one of my favorite platforms, of course, is Audible, which is owned by Amazon. It's got massive distribution, but Paul and his team have figured out how to get even larger distributions. So talk a little bit about the publishing, the approval process, and when this thing gets rolling in terms of actually getting out to the world, we'll deliver.

The files to Google Drive folder you'll have access to immediately, and then we'll go through the process of getting the things submitted to Audible. Audible was not done by humans. I don't know who did it. They're mean, they don't like people. And we've just learned how to deal with them. So we'll get your thing on Audible. We don't recommend that you stop at Audible. Mike, how many audio. How many official audiobook distribution platforms do you think there are?

You know what? I don't have a dang clue.

38.

I have a guess. Oh, really?

38?

These are library systems. This is Google Books. This is Spotify. This is audiobooks.com. this is Scribd. And Be Everywhere. You know, back when Mike and I were kids, the cool thing was wherever fine books are sold, you know, this is the audio version of wherever fine audiobooks are sold. And that can be done. That's not part of the package. It's just a little more. If you want to get distributed everywhere, we just buy Audible on default. We can point you in the direction. Do it yourself or we can do it for you.

Okay. Yeah. And I think what. Let's just be really clear. Everyone ends up having us do everything for them. Because what's your time worth? It is a giant pain in the butt. Again. We've had people who are like, yeah, yeah, well, you know, I'm going to sign up for the service, I'm going to upload my book. And after they've fiddled around for, I don't know, 8, 10, 12 hours. And like, I am so frustrated. It's like sitting down with a CPM DOS floppy disk computer in the Ask Appearance. Yeah, boy. Yeah, it's. It is. I wish it were push button easy. It is not push button easy. The moment it's push button easy and it's just done automatically. Well, I guess we wouldn't have that side of the business anymore, but some people just never want to touch it. So you're the best thing we can do is just make you've got a plan that gets the book out to the world and starts making you money as fast as possible. And that's the next part of this interview. So I Paul, from your point of view, we've talked a little bit about this, but from your lens, why should someone consider doing this for their business? I've got my own litany of whys.

It's an instant value affirming asset, period.

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Everybody that you're selling to has an iPhone or an Android device. They can click a button and they can start listening to your book immediately. You know, on the way out of the hotel from the meeting they had with you on the flight home from the event, you know, at the after dinner walk after they visited your website. It is an immediate, affirming, high value asset.

Yeah, well, and it's one that closes deals. So what I would say in my experience, and this is after talking to and enrolling and closing a lot of business deals personally and also coaching other people who have an audiobook. Audio is the most intimate mode of communication. Where we used to jokingly say a book is something that people bring into their bedrooms, their bathrooms, on vacation. They bring you everywhere. And an audiobook is easier to consume than a reading book and.

Kindle is great.

But it's a distraction device. Audio devices demand attention and when people listen to you, they genuinely feel like they have a meaningful relationship with you. And what you'll find is you'll have people walk up to you and and say I Feel like I know you. And you'll start getting what seem to be perfect strangers who do not feel like they're strangers to you. And that to me is, is it's the intimacy that matters.

So next up, what do you need? So let's say someone says, okay, I have a book.

What else, Paul? Like, tell us about that.

You need a book, you need a voice sample, you need a production process, and you need a distribution process. That's it, you're done. There are no cops, there are no quality nerds out there who say yes or no. The second you've got a book, you can put it in audible, you can put it at Spotify, you can put it at Google Books, you can put it audiobooks.com youm don't need permission, you don't need a license, you don't need anything. And right next to everybody else.

Now, we've talked a little bit about how AI improves this. So part of the process, again, think of it like this. There's the audio sample that gets captured. The engineer tweaks it, models it, and then verifies it by putting your basically uploading your copy and creating some chapters. The other thing that happens is the audio gets sweetened, so it's as though it's gone through effects. And it really does sound good, but it doesn't make mistakes. And one thing that can happen is you can determine if you want it to retain your own colloquial or not. Meaning if you have an accent, there are ways to make it non accenty soundy as well. Can you talk a little bit about some other improvements and changes you've seen, Paul?

Well, yes, and it's funny that Mike's going all tech and I'm going all personal. How AI improves it is it gets you out of the recording studio. You know, it gets you out of that painful, sweaty process where you judge yourself four days in a row. Yeah, you know, AI makes it go away. I like things that make it go away. At least when it's pain. Yep.

The convenience factor and then the sampling is really, really simple. Aside from you show up on the zoom, you read your chapter.

Is there anything else that anyone needs to know? I mean.

No, the one thing I'd say is voice sampling is. Are a lot of people out there. You and I, at the beginning of this, we tried eight or nine of them to find out the best ones. The one we're using is 11 labs. You know, it's the default. It's expensive, but it's worth it. And so Voice sampling is a process, but not everybody does it as well, you know, as. As 11 Labs does. But, yeah, you upload it, you adjust it, the engineers run the knobs, push things up and down. We get approval and we get to work.

Yep. And at any given time, we've tested out a variety of other platforms. If and when the platforms are better somewhere else, we'll start using that. But I'd say we are platform agnostic, but we're always trying out the latest. And in my experience, 11 labs, who's kind of the brains of the core of this, they change their model fairly frequently, so we end up retraining the system periodically as well.

Anything else about the sampling, record upload, sample return?

You're good. Will this work everywhere? Yes, this will work everywhere. Audio is universal format. We'll give it to Audible the way they want it, but we'll give it the way that you want it, and we'll give it to everybody the way they want it. And if some fancy new thing pops up at some point, there'll be conversion software that lets it work. This will work everywhere.

Yeah, the way I did. AI accelerator. When I give it away, I have a link that I send out, which I'll give to you at the end of the show. And.

I deliver the audiobook on YouTube. So it's an unlisted YouTube link, as well as a downloadable link and then a embedded player link, so you can actually play it on any device you have.

That's real easy. One thing that's nice about Audible is your Audible account. They give you coupon codes so you can actually give away your book. And it's a nice little incentive. And you can see when someone uses that coupon code as well, and Amazon just gives those to you. So I use it as a way to create a relationship. It's like, hey, would you like me to send you a free copy of my audiobook? And they get that coupon and they feel, again, a sense of reciprocity. And it's an intimacy builder.

And it works everywhere.

Yes. Timeline again, one week. That again, depends on. That's the scheduling, production process. One thing that to note is when the book gets published online, everyone has a slightly different timeline in terms of when things are approved. So I don't want to create confusion and overwhelm here, Paul, but what kinds of timelines have you been seeing lately?

We've seen one that Audible is still going back and forth on. We've passed day 22. It's up on the wall as day 22, because they're fixing it. We had another one that got approved in six days for Audible.

It's just the way it is. The cool thing is, is we're on your side, we're on top of it until the Audible release gets released. And now the audio version, those files that you got, if you want to start releasing to people, you have that immediately. And if you do the Spotify process, that usually takes three or four days, that's great.

Talk a little bit about the set it and forget it aspect of this.

You're not collecting money, you're not doing tech support, you're not checking up downloads. Everything's in the cloud. Once this thing is done, it is there. And the great thing is, is people will go to Audible, find it, download it, be happy about it, and you know what, Audible will send you some money for it. How cool is that?

Yeah, yeah, I get free money every month. It's kind of crazy. Talk a little bit about the rights. Who owns the rights to this and how does that work?

So on a high level, if you do it right, you own the rights, which is great because you want to give it away. Sometimes there are people that you do not want to bicker about. Just pay 9.99 to get this on Audible. You want to own the rights. When you sign up with Audible, it asks do we get excl rights or do we get non exclusive rights? You just tell them non exclusive, they pay you a little less for it, but then you have permission to do whatever you want with it, but then you own it. It's yours forever.

How about someone who's published with a publisher? Are there workarounds for this? What have we been telling people?

Yeah, yeah, it depends on the contract. We actually have. We actually have one client, really funny, who didn't get an audiobook in their contract and they went to us to produce the audiobook, they actually sent it to their publisher and then they negotiated the for it. You know, I mean, I can't tell you what your contract is, but the cool thing is with Chat GPT, we can run your contract through it, figure out the loopholes and go from there. But if you, but if you start doing it, it's you, you own it.

I will just say. So this all comes down to again, in the ideal circumstance, we can definitely introduce you to some of our book partners who if you just want to create another book, that's another solution. Another thing that we have had some people do is they just add some additional content and effectively re perform.

Their content. In a different package. So there's alternatives. If this feels overwhelming or confusing, my greatest piece of advice is it might be easier to create another piece of work than worry about the negotiating. Sometimes it takes more time to negotiate and go back and forth than it is just to create something new.

The only thing worse than being in an audiobook recording your book is dealing with the lawyer. Lawyers, I love you, but publishers are worse than lawyers.

I will just say that that's true. So quality, we already know. We've listened to it. There's samples on the site at Audiobook in a week. In my opinion. It sounds remarkable and clean and consistent. Royalties. Talk a little bit about how the royalties work, Paul.

Royalties are yours. When you go through Audible. It's your Audible account which is a little bit nuanced to set up. We send you a video on all that process and then every dime that comes from Audible is there. The company that we use to distribute to the other 37 platforms, company called Findaway, they get 5% for doing all the process for you. It's totally worth it. But the royalties goes, that's a good deal. It's your account on both. And by the way, there's royalties, but there's also giving somebody your book and then converting a six figure client as a result of it. But you know, royalties just kind seem kind of silly at that point.

Yeah, I don't care about them. My attitude is from a pricing perspective, I, I make them as low as possible. Although here's what's interesting. I changed the pricing on my Kindle books recently and made them a dollar more and I sold more. So I haven't seen any evidence, at least in the B2B space of price resistance. And sometimes there's the perception of value increases with a price increase and you actually sell more.

If I buy your Kindle, Mike, I have to sit down and read it. If I buy your audiobook, I listen to it on the way to work.

Exactly. Yep. So we talked about the giveaways. One of the things that we we'll share with you as one of our bonuses is we have a whole launch process and I will give you our my launch emails that help propel my book to bestseller status and also got me over a hundred reviews. So that's something important is you can actually become a bestseller by giving your book away.

So it's not on the slides, people. Mike just came up with that as we did this. So.

Yeah, well, I was thinking about how could I add more value? And I know that drives you Nuts, Paul. But I'm like, like, okay, that's an easy one to say yes to.

Absolutely.

And one other thing that's popped up before, and I talked to someone this past week who said, yeah, I've got an audiobook. And I'm like, really? Because I, I knew that this is kind of a big, valuable personality. And I'm like, really? When did you record it? He goes, I didn't record it. I had someone else do my voice for you. And I thought, now this is my strong opinion. I would never, ever, ever, ever do that. Because.

Where'S the intimacy? Why would you share intimacy with someone else? And the only reason to do that if you. Is in the past, if you're just a terrible speaker and a terrible reader and you didn't have time, it was like, I can't do it. But now you don't have that excuse anymore. But what would you say, Paul? Why AI versus someone else?

Well, the other narrator model has been around for a while. The AI model is new. And so, first of all, I'd say it's just a timing issue, but if your book is selling you and it's not you and your voice, who is your book really selling?

Yeah, totally. Yet again, it gets back to intimacy. And my style of reading when I do my audiobook samples is my speaking style. So I, I. And when I say that my intimate with one person speaking style, it's not my stage voice, I think that is a very, very important nuance, is when you work with the engineer. They'll help you capture that this isn't anything you have to study or learn about. It happens in real time. Next up, Paul, we talked briefly about this, but you know what? If I don't have an existing book? You've got some really smart ideas, hacks, workarounds with your improvisational mind.

Well, first of all, logistically, when you sign up to Amazon, when you send up to Audible, it says, what book is this the audiobook version of? So if you don't have an audiobook to match with, you got a problem. Now, the other logistics, though, is these two things could really have nothing in common with each other for the first 25 years. The audiobook version of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was a speech that Covey did talking about the seven habits. So the thing is, you have to have a book at Amazon to match with to be on Audible, but those can come from a lot of places. Some people know me for my podcasting work. If you've got a podcast, pick the 10 best episodes. Get yourself some transcripts, get yourself some AI images and graphics. Publish that as a book. It becomes the audiobook version of this. All of Dan Sullivan's quarterly books. If you buy the book and you download the audiobook, the audiobook is not the reg book. It's just them talking about the book. So you can quickly make a book. And here's the other thing. AI is pretty good. And you can begin to design this pretty quickly and you can get a book out the door pretty quickly. One of my favorite things is record 20 episodes of a podcast, track what the most popular 10 episodes are. That's your book. It's research, it's designed. It's all these things at the same exact time. So you got to have something, but it doesn't have to match perfectly. Play.

Yep, I'll plus this because I agree with everything you're saying, Paul. And back when we created our first books, what Paul and I would do is we create the outline and we meet the equivalent of a zoom call and we would perform chapters together and we just literally improvise and transcribe it. And this is before we had any of the tools that we do today. My last book as of now, AI Accelerator. I had the outline for this, I performed the content, I got it to my editor and they turned it around from start to finish in.

13 days. By the 17th day I had physical copies delivered. In this case for an Abundance360 appearance. I had perfect fit audience. So here's what I will leave you with. If you don't have a book.

Reach out on audiobook in a week and we'll refer you to the best partner because we've worked with some of the best book teams I think in the country for sure, probably in the world. And there's different styles of teams for you depending on your services. But one of the things that they have in common is they use us for their audiobook production services. So we do have relationships with some of the smartest and best people in the in the business.

Yeah, right on the front page there's two links. There's get now and there's also. I have a question. If you want to know. Click on the button I have a question. And the question will be what do I do since I don't have a book? And we'll go through a quick process to help you figure that out. So it's all built in.

Right on. So we'll have a little call to action. Then we got a couple little bonusy ideas for you. One of the things that we wanted to do in this particular episode is give you a 500 off coupon that's good as of right now until the end of this month. So the Coupon code is POD500. And when you go to audiobook in a week and you actually click and set up, what happens next? Paul?

Well, the investment is the thousand dollars for the voice capture model. That's that first call process. And what happens is if you enter coupon code pod500, that goes down 500 more to 500 bucks. And so instant, the very first step of the process is where that's taken off of.

Right. So why did we do it this way? We wanted to make it non risky, but we also wanted to avoid having conversations with tire kickers. Now I know if you're on this podcast listening and watching right now, you're probably not a tire kicker. So what we want to do is reverse the risk. So it means we build the model, we give you your voice sample and build the voice sample and give you that back and then you can decide to continue on from there into the full production process. So again, this is our way of making sure we're working with people who are motivated and want to get this done. But I will tell you, this is a remarkably affordable product. All the pricing is on the website. So we had somebody call us anything.

Oh yeah, we call us and said, hey Paul, I'm having nightmares about the audiobook process. I'm like, well, please tell. And there's some book where you could have it read things in different celebrity voices. And she apparently had a fake Gwyneth Paltrow read her book, book and she said it was so terrible, it was so bad that it gave her nightmares. This is not that process. The thousand dollar sound engineer, by the.

Way, you can get yourself in really, really, really, really deep stuff if you're using a celebrity voice with others.

Well, that's a whole nother issue. Yeah, yeah, but, you know, but, but the fact of the matter is it's not send, forget it. You need a sound engineer. And it's a lot more than that initial price on the investment on our side, but we just want to make sure it's worth it. And it's just that process to be there, the whole thing. It's, it's not send us the book, we make something come out later. At some point you are, you process, you know, where you're like, you know what you want changed, you know what's going to happen. This whole education process is here for you as well. This is, this, this is custom for a reason. You deserve it.

Yep. Okay, so a couple other bonuses besides the book promotion material. One of them is Paul and I always buy your book. So we, we're going to be your, your buyers and then we promote your book on our personal social networks. So that alone is easily worth the entire investment.

Paul has put together an audiobook social feed. Talk a little bit about that, Paul.

So social's future is fascinating and we'll see what happens. But the one thing that social is still good for is for feeding the search engines. And so what we've got is we've got a special audiobook social feed that just rotates through our clients books and just lets the search engines know that they still exist, lets the AI, you know, algorithms know that it still exists. And so just quietly in the background happening might pop up on your Google search if you have one preset. Won't happen. But it's a quiet little feed that makes sure that everybody knows that you still exist.

Yep. I think my rule is you want to make sure that.

Anytime someone searches for your name, what they find is something that's controlled and created by you. And I will tell you that first of all, books and Amazon will show up on the first page of Google guaranteed. And your bio is a very, very effective mechanism for social proof. You immediately increase your status, your authority and your perception of being an expert. And again, audiobooks are so intimate. I just want to repeat that one more time.

You know, you know what's cooler? You know what's cooler than your, your Amazon book showing up the first page of search. You know what's cooler is your Spotify book also showing up on that page and your book also showing up on that page and your audiobooks.com also showing up on that page. And my God, this boy is everywhere. This gal is everywhere. Bonus number three.

Yes. Okay, so we're gonna, we just started doing this. We're actually putting your book on our site if you choose to do so. Not everyone does that, but that's just something that we wanted to make available to you as well. We want to share in your success and talk about you. So this is our additional way of giving you something extra. So Paul, this here's the little call to action audiobook in a week dot com, $500 off, get started. Anything else that you want to add before we wrap this up? Are there any other questions that I should have asked you that I didn't or anything you thought about creatively as we Were going through this process, you.

Know, the giving away your book thing.

It's not always a giveaway. It's. It's a transaction. You get a name, you get an email address. If you have a product about a very specific service that you are offering, and somebody wants an audio book about that service that you're offering, and they give you your name and email address and whatever you ask for in the process, that is what is called a hot lead. And so, yes, it's a royalty game. Enjoy the checks when they come. Have a good time. But also, you know that they got this really, really cool asset out there that can begin to build your list and be. Can, you know, begin to bring you the audience members put in the book as well. But that initial process is there, and if you know how to build that grade, if you need some help building that, we can show you that too. But it's. It's. It's not just an audiobook that sends you a royalty every once in a while. It's a machine that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 39 different plat platforms to bring you business. Not a bad deal at all.

No, I think it's spectacular. And the other thing that I will give Paul big kudos for, which is when you start working with the team. Paul is a very, very creative partner, and he has his finger on the pulse of everything that's going on for podcasts, promotions, books, and audiobooks. And he's paying attention to whatever is best. So at any given time, there's always going to be a new strategy, a new tactic for increasing your exposure, the effectiveness of the tool, but also building your audience. And, you know, just this is a way to open up that door and start a relationship with us. So, Paul, I want to give you the. The final word here. Is there anything you want to add on.

On that list, your audiobook and your voice, without you spending a minute in the studio published everywhere. Come on, let's do this.

There you go. Good call to action. All right, well, here's the way I'm going to finish this off. First of all, thanks for spending some time with us. I am absolutely in love with and we built this business because I needed it. And I also want to give a shout out to my son Zach, who really started it and got this thing. Rol. He spent an enormous, enormous amount of time fine tuning and figuring out the engine just to make it work and how to tune it, but also how to feed the books into the system. And Paul's team has figured out how to scale it, professionalize it, and turn it into a end to end process. But Paul, anything else?

No, man, I'll take those kind words. Yeah, Zach was great. The research he did. It's fun to go through the emails and see that process and learn from that guy. You. You did well with him. My friend. Did well.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Well, so we're going to officially bring this episode to a close. I'm looking forward to my next book, my next audiobook, and also seeing what you do with it as well. So next step is yours to take. Head on over to audiobookand week.com sign up, learn more, and listen to those samples. Talk to you soon.

Bye now.

Sam.