Here are some facts about the audiobook market that really get you thinking…

• Audiobooks are the fastest growing sector of the publishing industry.
• There is currently a shortage of audiobooks worldwide as publishers race to meet demand.
• Only 0.75% (not even 1%!) of Amazon’s book catalog has so far been converted to audio.
• Last year more than $1 BILLION worth of audiobooks were sold in the US alone.
• Audible.com, a site that only sells audiobooks, gets over 350,000 visitors every day or about 2,500,000 people a week.
• iTunes has more than 200,000,000 registered users and is selling over 1 Billion audio files every month.
• Selling your book as an audiobook means that it can be instantly down loaded to any one of the Billions of iPods, MP3 players or mobile phones around the world.

Audiobooks offer some very exciting opportunities for authors – make sure you take advantage of it!

By-and-large most artists are fussy. They care about the details and go to great lengths to ensure that whatever has their name on it, even if it is a pen name, is first rate. They spend months and often years refining their work, they slave tirelessly over the cover art and work diligently through the typesetting process. It is this same level of care that is required if you decide to convert your work to audio and sell it in audio book format.

Just a few weeks ago we received a file from a sci-fi author who assured us that their “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) recording was up to scratch. When we put it through our standard screening process we were treated to cameo appearances by the family dog and at one point the neighbor’s lawn mower. It was a little hard to stay in the moment on planet Zorg with a dog chasing a lawn mower in the back ground.

On the other hand, we get submissions from people who are hesitant to submit their DIY recordings in fear of them not being up to scratch only to be presently surprised by their level of professionalism and attention to detail. Not surprisingly, the quality of their writing and the questions they have asked along the way are usually higher as well.

These days with a fairly affordable microphone and some very basic software you can make your own, very high quality recordings. Many of our authors do. That being said, you must consider whether or not your voice is palatable. Are you easy to listen to? Do you have an accent that will resonate with most of your buyers (North Americans)? Depending on the work, you don’t necessarily have to have ‘a radio voice’ but you do have to have good diction – that is you speak clearly. Quite often the author is the best person to read the work but only if you can tick the boxes above.

The main point of this post is to emphasize that consumers are fussy and they have every right to be so. These days competition is fierce. When publishing audio books you should take a slightly longer term view recognizing that once they are out there, they are out there for good. A lot of authors would rather save $1,000 or $2,000 by doing it themselves even if they are not suited to the task, but if your work is good you should get that money back fairly quickly through royalties on these platforms. Once it’s returned it’s all profit and it keeps coming. It’s just a mater of time to overcome costs, but to overcome poor quality…who knows what that may cost.

Quite often I get contacted by authors of short stories and they ask how buyers assess the value of an audio book. It’s a great question because unlike physical books or books sold with the now well known ‘Look Inside’ feature pioneered by Amazon, audio books only have a brief description and a short sound bite to sell them when sold through iTunes, Audible or Amazon.

From our experience, assuming that you are a relatively unknown author, there’s three value metrics that buyers use to assess audio books but only one that you can control. First there is the length of the audio book. This is the one that you can control. If you are trying to sell a title that is only 30 minutes long at the same price as a title that is 6 hours long, there’s a perception that the value isn’t equal. Ways to fix this of course are bundling a few short stories together. This works well. The key of course is to create value in this metric because there is no qualitative room for a potential buyer to asses your work – only quantitative.

The other two ways buyers assess an audio book is of course the popularity metric and the ratings posted by other customers. These things are largely out of your control but do help enormously.

In future posts I will be talking more specifically about marketing tips specifically around audio books, things like the importance of your thumbnail image and so forth but today I just want to share the three building blocks of value metrics – length, popularity and customer feedback. None are creative, but all are vitally important.

In dealing with authors and content owners day in and day out, the biggest complaint we hear is – “Why do iTunes, Amazon and Audible take so much of the pie?” By any measure, taking between 80% and 88% of the sale price for a digital product for simply adding it the platform, facilitating the transaction and enabling the download seems outrageous – especially through the eyes of the person who spent the months or years making the item being sold. What takes the author years takes the platform seconds yet the revenue share is anything but reflective of this.

I am not going to defend the profit share in this post. Personally I think it is not right and I would love to see a viable competitor in the space although I doubt this will happen any time soon. Personally, I think the only model that would come anywhere near to touching the astounding traffic numbers being achieved by the big three audio book platforms would be a platform that offered the content free and then somehow generated ad revenue that was shared with content owners – but again, I can’t see that happening. iTunes, Audible and Amazon are behemoths selling well over 1 Billion audio files every month (including music) – the horse has bolted and its unlikely we will see anyone well funded enough or crazy enough to make a serious play at these guys.

That being said, what I will try to do in this post is provide a more palatable way to frame the transaction if you choose to go through these channels, particularly in regard to audio book content.

Unlike print books or eBooks, audio books are usually not considered by most authors. For the millions of books Amazon carries, it only has around 60,000 audio books, a tiny fraction of the market. Since the iPod exploded onto the scene, a whole new era of audio downloads began and traditional writers are yet to wake up to the opportunity.

With this in mind, the sale of your content as an audio book should be seen as ‘additional to’ whatever plans you have for your work. I am yet to meet someone who has specifically built an audio book and then considered converting back the other way to print or eBook format. So whatever revenue you can earn through your work in this additional format should be seen as a bonus – and as far as bonuses go, it can be very worthwhile.

Our first client now earns well over a thousand dollars every pay period on each title she sells through these platforms. She is an indie author who prior to coming to us had made nothing from her work, even when she was marketing it herself and keeping 100% of the revenue. Now that she has four titles we are talking thousands and thousands of dollars per year, even after giving away 80% of gross sales to the platforms. Further, she is building a fan base at the rate of hundreds per month with no outlay and no marketing.

While the platforms do take the lion’s share, they also get the results we all ultimately want which is sales. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but with a royalty check it makes it that much easier.