This week the book has shot to number 52# in iTune’s worldwide best seller list. To put this in perspective, the global sensation “Twilight” is #29, “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle (One of Oprah’s regular guests) is ranked #30 and “Ricky Gervais” is one behind Jamie’s audio book.

We are now coming to the end of our first year in audio publishing so to have a title almost in the top 50 world wide is an amazing achievement. Next month we will have sales results from some of our other well known writers including Michael Corbett who is the host of NBC’s Mansions & Millionaires and author of the best selling “Find It Fix It Flip It” and “Ready Set Sold!“, Peter Clement author of “The Darkness Drops” and many other best selling emergency medicine themed titles, and Katherine Deauxville author of “The Last Male Virgin”.

Personally I would like to thank all of our clients for their belief in our service and for trusting us with their work when we were a completely unknown company. Audio publishing is still a new concept (especially the way we do it) and without a certain degree of trust we would never have been able to get this business out of the blocks.

I look forward to a second successful year in service to you all.

Adam

Here are two real examples of feedback recently posted by listeners to an audio book we submitted. Keep in mind this book is actually an excellent piece of work in the written form – from a very accomplished award winning writer…

“I was not able to listen for longer that 5 minutes, the reader was awful, thought my ears would begin to bleed from the annoying sound coming through my headphones. DO NOT SPEND $$, or waste a credit to hear this book.”

“Audible has always given me quality entertainment. I was stunned at what I heard when I leaned back to enjoy this story. I gagged. My ears may never recover. This was horrible. I think everyone who bought this trash needs a refund and a freebie.”

Not exactly something you want written next to your name online forever.

As a result of this feedback (and several others like it for other books) we have decided to only accept audio books from clients where the narration has been professionally recorded. Nobody wins with feedback like this. We provide this service in house or you can go elsewhere. Because of the volumes we do you will most likely find it much cheaper to use us than anyone else.

On a final note, it is important to clearly understand that as a digital publisher we have almost no influence over sales of your audio book. We cannot arrange in-store signings, guest appearances, prime placement on shelves or any of the traditional offline activities that stimulate sales. We are fundamentally a service provider. That being said, it is critical that you pay close attention to the things you can control such as the quality of the recording, cover image, the book description and the title. If you try to skimp on any of these things you are going to lose sales.

Until next time – happy writing!

- preying on the ambitions of inexperienced authors
- scheming to rip people off
- profiteering
- vanity publishing
- deceiving people by calling ourselves ‘a publisher’ when in fact all we do is provide a service

and more…

It’s pretty tough to take but of course people are entitled to their opinion. What I want to do though is talk to some of the issues that are unique to the DIGITAL publishing world. Issues that most authors simply don’t think about. We know that what we do and the business model we present is very different to traditional publishing and as such we are working against some very strong perceptions of what’s normal or “how things are supposed to be”. To better understand why, it is first and foremost essential that one accepts that digital publishing and traditional publishing are entirely different universes.

Just an hour ago I had a conference call with an executive at Audible.com who are our main distribution partner. To be clear, we do not have an exclusive arrangement or we are not endorsed by Audible, we are just a content provider. We chatted about the realities of dealing with authors and their agents and shared some war stories of how this emerging digital space is still being digested by many folks in the industry. Some interesting things though came out of the discussion.

The first thing I want to talk about is the real differences from a business point of view between delivering and supporting digital products and delivering and supporting physical books. Audible come in for their fair share of abuse I am sure when they tell people they keep 80% of the sale price – I know we sure get it. Before you scream ‘rip off’ from the roof tops, just take a minute, cool your heels and think about this.

There are about 200 staff at Audible today. Of those, about 100 of them are manning the phones, providing customer service to end-users who are mainly unfamiliar with how to use an audio book. You can just imagine the calls…

“I have pressed download and it says that the file is on my desk top but I have looked everywhere, I even took my computer off my desk and there’s no file on my desk…”

While some of you more technical people would find it inconceivable that there are still people out there like this I can assure you there are – lots of them. We get it here all the time. People who don’t know what a JPG file is and so on. In one instance we spent an hour on the phone with an author explaining how an audio book could be listened to without any CD’s being made or delivered. But let’s look at the financial implications of people’s general lack of technical skill – something that doesn’t have to be figured into the consumption of traditional printed content.

Let’s assume that the average employee at Audible is earning $1,000/week before tax. For Audible this equates to $100,000 a week just for customer service wages so that there are people there to answer your customers issues when they call – live. Customer service employees though are only one line on their expense sheet. In addition you have:

- bandwidth
- technical staff to maintain the platform
- staff to handle meta data
- management
- advertising that they run – Google Adwords, TV etc – all to drive traffic to the store where your book resides
- rent
- insurance
- servers and other IT infrastructure

The list goes on and on. Show me another Audio Book site in the world that provides this level of financial commitment and service to their clients? The bottom line is that there isn’t another one that does and that is why Audible are now the largest publisher of Audio Books in the world.

That is just the Audible side though. The really difficult thing we have encountered is the explanation of the service we provide. Some agree we are a publisher while others scream at us saying that we are misleading people and should be ashamed of ourselves. In other cases people think we are making a fortune from ‘upfront fees’ or from commissions on the talent we arrange for those authors who want their work read by a professional. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me walk you through it.

The average author or agent first emails us to to do some basic due diligence. Who are you, what’s your business model, how do the royalties work etc. The first responses generally take about half an hour to an hour to cover. They then ask more questions, they ask for technical guidance, sometimes they want us to help with cover design or getting the book produced. In some cases I have personally spent two hours on Skype coaching fairly technical inexperienced people how to use Garage Band to record and edit their own audio books. None of this service is free to provide. Our staff get paid every week to help people down the very daunting path of getting their work into acceptable digital form and then into the platforms. We provide a bridge between the platforms and the physical book. Tick tick tick, the expense meter is running our side. On the income side though, we get zero until the first royalty check which is usually about 6 months later “if” the author or agent proceeds with us. Further, we only get it from royalties that were earned through the work we did – it is not billed to you. In other words – we put our money on the line but not in advances, we put it into our staff’s weekly wages and other operating expenses that are required so that we can serve you between your first contact and the day your first royalty check arrives.

When I tried to explain this to Mr Abusive yesterday he dismissed me as a “spin doctor”. I am sure if I sent him the bill for my staff’s wages he would soon see that real expenses are not spin, they are real dollars invested by a real person who is trying to earn an income by serving people – shame on us.

The main point is that “digital publishing” or “providing a service to help people publish digitally” (or however you want to describe the service we provide) is complex, time consuming and not free. Yes we understand that writing books isn’t free either and that it takes considerably more time and talent which is why the author get’s the lion’s share of the net royalties we receive after Audible, iTunes and Amazon have taken their cuts.

Pioneering a new idea is never easy. We are a small business and the numbers we present are the ones  that we think we need to make the investment we have to make upfront worthwhile. When the writing and agency community abuse our staff or write destructive discussion threads (which they have done) they discourage other new an innovative service providers to enter the market to help them monetize their work in new markets. Interestingly, 100% of the abuse we have received has been from people who are making ZERO from their work in digital audio book format.

Change is something that we need to embrace folks and holding on too tightly to old models or bad experiences from others does not serve anyone. I personally feel there is great merit in thinking deeply before jumping to ill informed conclusions and hammering ‘people’ who work in organizations that are adding value – or at least trying to.

Always remember that the sharpest weapon of all is words, and in the internet world, you can deliver lasting damage with little more than a key stroke and no human interaction at all. I have requested to speak with every abuser personally via a phone call on my dime. So far I have had a 100% refusal rate. I wonder how differently we would discuss new ideas if we were all forced to sit in a room together rather than taking the easy option of firing cannon balls down email pipelines or into blog threads where anonymous participants can say whatever they like at the expense of others. I guess I am an idealist. Oh well – on with the job.

Last year got super busy going into Christmas with the royalty share offer (where voice actors volunteered their services free in exchange for equity in the ongoing royalties) and lots of author interest. It was hectic to say the least. I have learned that one or two applicants slipped through the cracks and I do apologize for that – we are still a small company doing our best to keep up with the rapid increase in interest around what we do.

Really I just wanted to let you all know today that if you need anything at any time or if you have a question about how we work, don’t hesitate to ask. Working with authors has been very interesting and at the same time challenging. It seems that a lot of people have been let down or burned in the past and it makes for some very pointed and sometimes difficult discussions. We have entered this space with a genuine desire to create opportunity and so we are testing different ideas and different concepts. We admit that we too are fairly new at this but we are trying our very best to be open and honest – without overselling the upside. It’s tough because as a new business you need to stay positive in order to get through the day while on the other hand you don’t want to come off as someone who is trying to pump up people’s dreams of millions without grounds for doing so. We are finding the balance I hope.

Anyway, thanks for tuning in in 2010. I hope it’s a great year for you and that we find the middle this year.

Kindly,

Adam

I started by making three $25 loans ($25 is the maximum to you can lend to any one entrepreneur) and my $25 was grouped with other lenders from all over the world. Contrary to western thinking where the richer you are the lower the credit risk, these poor people all re-paid my loan on time and in full and they even reported to me and the others in my lending group in respect to how their business was going. I was blown away. I have since relent that original $75 over and over and today we have lent money to more than 40 entrepreneurs with not a single default. This is what I call sustainable charity and is at the heart of ‘good’ capitalism.

If you are looking for something great to do this Christmas, check out Kiva.org or click on the banner below. I have actually asked my friends and family to make a loan as my Christmas present this year. They pass 100% of your money along to the entrepreneur and pay their bills solely on donations you elect to make over and above any money you lend. PayPal have also come to the party and waived all fees related to Kiva transactions.

Voice over folks – I am sorry but we can’t accept any more applicants for the royalty share deal at present. We are absolutely overwhelmed with willing participants and we don’t have enough books to go around.

I really want to complete this test project before opening it up again to see how it pans out for all involved.

Again, a big “thank you” to the Voice Over community for your kind support of what we are trying to achieve here. Hudson Audio Publishing is a young company and we are finding our way by trialing new ways of doing business in the publishing space.

I will keep you informed as we progress.

Adam Hudson

I have to say that of all the communities I have been involved with, the Voice Over community from around the world are among the finest. They are extremely willing to work, they are nice people and they seem to take a real  interest in the people they work with as well as their communities.

Just recently one of our readers finished a book for a client of ours who is also a personal friend of mine. The reader really liked the book so I sent a couple of photos of myself and the author so he could put some faces to the names. The photos were taken on a boat here in Australia two weeks ago. It was a steaming hot summers day with not a cloud in the sky. While I was at the gym this morning I got an email back with a photo showing the reader’s lovely house in the snow in Canada – it was MINUS 13 degrees. That’s what I love about this business. Real people coming together in a real way to create digital products that will be bought by people from all over the world. This tactile engagement with people in business is surprisingly rare but a great feeling.

But here’s a something else I love… A couple of hours ago I received another email from professional voice actor Bob Jordan, who together with some 120 voice actors from across the country volunteered to read and record the massive 2,074-page Senate health care reform bill into indexable audio files for the nonpartisan Web site HearTheBill.org. The goal is to make the proposed legislation more accessible to everyone, from interested citizens strapped for time to the visually impaired.

What a great initiative on a very important issue. It is a great reminder that we all have talents and that if we think hard enough, there is always a way to be of service to others.

The first is this. We cannot guarantee how any one book is going to sell. We simply don’t know and we haven’t been doing this long enough to give you a depth of data to analyze it. Clearly we believe that every book we handle has a market otherwise we wouldn’t participate on the same basis that we have proposed to you (100% risk with a 30% profit share) but it is largely unknown – but then that is the nature of the publishing business generally. Please, only read these books on the basis that you understand that it is a risk.

Secondly, please take a moment to read the post below this one about the timing of royalty payments. It is important that you understand the cash-flow side.

What we will be doing this side is making sure that the audio book is well presented in terms of price, image, descriptions, keywords and all the finer points of digital distribution, but ultimately it will be the market that decides on the success or otherwise. To date, on all books we have put into the platforms that are now paying out royalties, readers would have recovered their fee in the first or second payment – but it’s early days.

So what’s next?

Courtney in our office is handling this project and she will be in touch with all of you in the next few days that have either written a blog comment or emailed in. She will provide you with a short script to submit your audition and then we will distribute the work to as many readers as we can – however we now have more readers than books.

This first tranche of books are male voice-over roles and I forgot to mention that when I made the original post – however we already have several female voice over books in the pipeline where the authors want to engage on the equity share arrangement – so please submit your interest to Courtney irrespective because we will have work for you too.

Once again, I want to thank the voice over community for their willingness to try this concept. I really hope we can deliver a valuable outcome for you and I want you to know that we don’t take the gift of your time and expertise lightly. I really hope we can make this work for all involved.

In this months royalty statement cover letter Audible let us know that they are now running TV spots in the US which is great news. Here you have a company that is spending dollars to promote the audio book space. Sure they are doing it to build their business but none-the-less, they are promoting this channel and in my view that’s a great thing for all of us.

I have done a couple of blog posts in the past on how to set a price but the most important one is to look at what others in your category are selling their work for in iTunes and Audible and how long (time wise) is the audio book.

OK – moving on to the timing of royalty payments…

Getting your work from a printed or eBook version and into the platforms for sale and then producing income, even through us, is not a fast process. What I want to focus on though is how long it actually takes to get your first royalty income from the day that you submit the audio files to us (or the day our readers finish them).

Right now, we are running at between 3-5 days to process new audio files and prepare the applications and meta-data for the platforms. So that’s one week. Then it takes the platforms about 8-12 weeks to process the titles that we submit – in other words 2-3 months will pass between when we send the files and applications and when they appear for sale in the stores worldwide.

The next part is the timing of the royalty periods – the first payment can take a while. Here’s why…

The platforms pay quarterly and they only pay on FULL royalty periods. What this means is that if your work goes live in mid-January then you are in the first quarter royalty period which ends on March 31st. Even though you have been there “most” of that royalty period you have not been there for “all” of it so those royalties will accumulate against your first FULL period which will be the April – June (second quarter). You will then get your royalties from mid-January until June 30th. I hope that makes sense?

The last issue is the time it takes from the end of the royalty period to actually getting your money. On average we are receiving the royalty check 8 weeks after the end of the period. So July-Sep royalties 2009 only arrived here in the last week of November 2009. It then takes a week for us to clear the check and turn around and distribute the royalties to our authors because (believe it or not) Audible still has a paper-based system with no portal access.

So, in short, if you were to submit an audio book right now on December 10th 2009, you would most likely not get your first royalty payment until August next year – that’s if the book goes live sometime before the end of the first royalty period in 2010 (which is cutting it fine). The good news is that the first check will be the biggest and then they come regularly every 90 days (or so) after that. It’s a pain but it is just how it works at present.

I actually met with a senior VP of Audible in New York City a few weeks ago and they are working on providing online and real time access to sales reports etc and for me, that day can’t come soon enough.

“This book encompasses various aspects of the Avatar, Sathya Sai Baba’s teachings that put us on the Spiritual Path. By judicious repetition and timeless emphasis, consolidation is fostered. Living at a time when the Avatar walks this earth is our great good fortune. Robin Bamber and DR. Rajen Cooppan’s contribution in this book to enhance the Spititual Journey is to be welcomed.”

It’s factual but it needs more benefits to the potential buyer. Why should I listen to this? What will I get from it? Even spiritual books need to be sold. Here’s the description of Dr Wayne Dyer’s latest book “Excuses Be Gone” – a book that I just love by the way. See how well it describes the book. Is it any wonder Dr Dyer is a best selling author!

“Within the pages of this transformational book, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer reveals how to change the self-defeating thinking patterns that have prevented you from living at the highest levels of success, happiness, and health. Even though you may know what to think, actually changing those thinking habits that have been with you since childhood might be somewhat challenging.

If I changed, it would create family dramas . . . I’m too old or too young . . . I’m far too busy and tired . . . I can’t afford the things I truly want . . . It would be very difficult for me to do things differently . . . and I’ve always been this way . . . may all seem to be true, but they’re in fact just excuses. So the business of modifying habituated thinking patterns really comes down to tossing out the same tired old excuses and examining your beliefs in a new and truthful light.

In this groundbreaking work, Wayne presents a compendium of conscious and subconscious crutches employed by virtually everyone, along with ways to cast them aside once and for all. You’ll learn to apply specific questions to any excuse, and then proceed through the steps of a new paradigm. The old, habituated ways of thinking will melt away as you experience the absurdity of hanging on to them.

You’ll ultimately realize that there are no excuses worth defending, ever, even if they’ve always been part of your life—and the joy of releasing them will resonate throughout your very being. When you eliminate the need to explain your shortcomings or failures, you’ll awaken to the life of your dreams.”
If you are stuck on trying to write a description for your book, jump into Audible.com or iTunes and read the descriptions of some of the best sellers in your category. You must learn to sell your work!