Audiobook Series (Part 1): Why Audiobooks?

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One of the hurdles that indie writers have to face over and over again is a way to create sales. Recently we have given you some advice on SEO that should help people find you.

One sales generating ploy would be creating an audiobook. The fact is that this format is growing. The UK market alone for audiobooks is growing by 30% a year.

HarperCollins says that in the order of 75% of their titles are now turned into audio-recordings. Before technology made it extremely easy to listen wherever you are, they only recorded about 10% of their titles.

Penguin has also recently appointed their “first audio publisher last September [2013].”

You cynical or worldly-wise writers out there will want to know if Amazon is doing something in this area. Well, they did buy out Audible for a mere $300 million back in 2008.

Sales are booming. Audiobooks are easy to listen to, in the car, in the bus, in the gym, perhaps even at work. At this point we feel that you will agree that it is a valid proposition we are making, and not just a crackpot idea we are cranking out for the sake of regular blog posting.

We could probably further shore up our case by pointing out why people are turning to audiobooks. But we are not going to. Rather look at this:

graph

Source: http://www.independentpublisher.com/includes/30_12/graph2.jpg

What we propose to do now is to set out a four- step strategy that will enable you to create a high quality audiobook in order to enhance your product and product range.

We follow Sun Tzu’s strategy:

Source:Wikipedia

Source:Wikipedia

  • Think – The Planning phase
  • Tinker – The Creation of your product
  • Transmit – The process of Publication
  • Out Think – Publicity, or thinking of a way to convince someone they need it
  • (OK, we admit, we created the bit about Sun Tzu saying this, but if he knew anything about audiobooks he would have!)

Yes, you could just press the record button and start reading, but that would be a mistake. Check out answers to some fundamental questions about how to create audio books in our next post in the Audiobook Series.

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