Your audiobook is ready and published. How to compete with thousands of daily releases in audiobook online stores? How to differentiate your work and get the attention of new customers? Not always the ways to monetize a printed book will work for the promotion of your audiobook.
With that in mind, making specific strategies for monetizing your audiobook is fundamental to raising the rank of your sales. From the moment you decide to promote your audiobook, you will be entering the world of online marketing. Transforming your stories into valuable products and services will help your future listeners find your work.
Making your audiobook catch the attention of new consumers is a challenge, but with the format getting more and more popular, there are numerous ways to increase your sales and tactics to promote your last work.
As an author, you should know how to promote yourself in the online world. Creating a website about your career and your publications is crucial so that people can find you and know a little more about your history. Sharing stories, behind the scenes of your audiobooks, productions and recordings, insert sample of your audiobooks, and giving feedback to your fans is an important way to promote yourself as an author.
Just as there are reviewers for printed books and e-books, there are people who specialize in audiobooks who will be available to review your work. Magazines and blogs specializing in audiobooks are not hard to find with a simple Google search.
Keep in mind that if you produced your audiobook with the Audible Creation Exchange (ACX), you will receive 25 promo codes to send to people of interest and digital influencers in this market. Make a promotion strategy focusing on your fans who are most engaged in your work, and especially potential reviewers. Below you can see a list of the top reviews for audiobooks:
Promoting your work on the numerous social networks that we have available is mandatory for any author. Use hashtags wisely on Twitter and Facebook so people find your books out of interest and affinity. Facebook also allows you to promote your posts by filtering the audience and interests. Find the right niche for your audiobook and make a promotional post directed to that audience. Make contact with your fans and be sure to answer the most frequently asked questions. Audible has launched a new iOS app that allows listeners and authors to create small clips of parts of audiobooks. This is the perfect opportunity for you to highlight a part of your work, create a link to this clip and share on your social media profiles.
Hosting events for influencers, writers and listeners is an important tactic to promote your audiobook. These events can happen either in a bookstore, in a hotel hall or even in your living room. Inviting the right people to spread the words and new releases is a very useful tool to promote your latest work. Events of this type are common to promote printed books, however, making a specific strategy to promote your audiobook will be a differential to increase your sales. Invite the narrator of your stories and share situations and events of the production of your audiobook.
Look for other authors and collaborate on their websites and social media to promote each other. Engage in an author community, join clubs, search for influential bloggers, be interviewed by literary podcasts, promote your audiobook in the right podcasts. That way, you will reach your audience on a much larger scale.
The Audio Publishers Association (APA) is the only not-for-profit organization of the audiobook industry in the US. The association hosts the Audie Award every year, recognizing outstanding audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment across 30 different categories. Known as the Oscars of audiobooks, it sure is a great investment to submit your work and get a recognition that will promote your audiobook like no other platform.
Making a small trailer for your audiobook is a great strategy to promote your story in a much more interesting and appealing way. You can send your audiobook trailer to influencers on your email list, embed it on your social networks and on your personal website.
Keep in mind that trailers to promote books and audiobooks should be well-crafted and go straight to the point, making an interesting and visually pleasing introduction of your audiobook. Do not make a long video revealing important storyline information, but instigate your client to buy your audiobook. Want to discover other ways to improve the production of your audiobooks? You might consider including background music and sound effects on the reading.