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.
Tags: amazon, audible, audio book, audiobook, itunes, marketing, mp3, publish, publishers, publishing companies, publishing houses, self publish, sell audiobook