Take a look at the picture below. We’ve all been there right? Standing in a video store isle about to pick a movie that we will invest both time and money to enjoy (or not). Really try to think about what you actually do when faced with the isle below. Try to imagine you are there right now. What is the process you go through before picking your movie?

When you get to the store, you probably have some idea of what kind of movie you want or you may have even gone to pick up a specific movie that friend has told you about. So you shuffle over to the right isle and when you get there you start scanning covers. Immediately and without conscious thought, you pass over dozens of videos purely because their cover doesn’t grab your attention.

Before we go on, I think it is important to stop right here and think about what just happened. In seconds, you dismissed the creative passion of dozens of film makers, tens of millions of dollars of invested capital and millions of hours of people’s time that went into making those films – all because of a cover that didn’t work for you.

The simple fact is that you, along with the rest of the human race, have developed a highly attuned filtering  system called your Reticular Activating System (RAS), that spends most of its time eliminating anything that is not going to add value to your experience of life. It drowns out the unnecessary and creates blind spots so that you can actually survive a day in this crazy world. If your RAS wasn’t there you would hear every car, every plane, tune in to every conversation within earshot and pay attention to every advertising message that is shot your way. When you go video shopping, it immediately sorts out the crap from the quality through nothing more than a glance, and you don’t even know you are doing it.

So how important is the cover of your book or the thumbnail image of your audio book? It is MORE important than the book itself! The biggest issue we see with Indie authors and the reason why most will only ever be small unknown authors, is because they think and act small when it comes to commercializing their work.

For many, they think nothing of spending two years working on their manuscript but it pains them to spend even a few hundred dollars on getting a professional to design their book cover or audio book thumbnail. With that mindset you will be automatically eliminated by shoppers because their subconscious will immediately spot your book as an amateur title and within a split second all of your hard work is for nil and you find yourself blaming the publisher or the platform or the buyers – the truth is, you suck at marketing.

There are some really great sites out there now that can help you get your audio book thumbnail in shape – one of them in particular is really cool. 99Designs.com runs a site where you upload your job and designers from all over the world will not only bid for the work, but they will actually finish the job and then you award ‘the prize money’ to the designer who produces the best cover. This flips around the risk scenario so that you are no longer hoping that after paying you get a good product – you actually see what they can do before you start.

Here’s a screen shot I took of a current contest where the client is an RnB singer looking for a CD cover design. She offered $300 prize money and so far there are 212 entries. Look at the quality of these designs. For $300 she has created the impression that she is a pro – it is likely that if you were shopping for a new RnB talent that you would at least pick up her CD to have a look.

Aside from that site though, there are dozens of others that can help you. Just Google “Book Cover Design” and see what comes up. Another great site to source talent is www.elance.com but you don’t get to see the work in advance.

The main points of design are:

- It must be done by a professional. Unless you are formerly trained in design, do not trust yourself or a friend who dabbles in design.
- The cover/thumbnail must appeal to your target audience.
- The cover/thumbnail must capture the mood or essence of your book.
- The cover/thumbnail does not have the description on it. Just the book name and the author name together with an image.

So the first reason that crappy movies still get rented (and why bad books still sell) is because people buy the cover before they buy anything else. If you make that short list – the next thing you must have is a great description that sells. So what exactly is a great description?

In marketing there is a well known acronym – “WIIFM”. What’s In It Form Me? If I spend my money and invest my time – what do I get? Your description must draw the reader in and make them want to buy your audio book. If you are selling non-fiction, then talk about the problem your book solves and exactly how it solves it. Think benefits, benefits, benefits and forget about wording that is overly complex or ambiguous. Tell the shopper exactly how the book will benefit them in plain English. Too often non-fiction authors describe their work in way that simply doesn’t make sense. Just take a big step back and ask yourself – “If I knew nothing about me or my subject, does that description make me want to buy this audio book?”

If you are writing fiction the same thing applies. The description must draw the reader into the richness and color of your work immediately and spark an interest within them that makes them want to know more. The key is being objective. Bounce it off others or even create three or four versions and do a little survey among your friends. There’s a great little website called Survey Monkey that enables you to easily create free online surveys that you can email to your contacts and get votes on the best description. Author of New York Times best seller “The Four Hour Work Week” Tim Ferris says that he tested the title through his blog community rather than going with the title he thought was best – and that certainly paid off!

So there’s a two main things in this post that I hope I have hammered home hard! First, the cover of your book or the thumbnail image for your audio book is actually more important that the book itself. Second, if your cover or thumbnail is good enough to get clicked on, then your description is the next most important thing. How good your book actually is, how long it has taken you to write or what those who love you have told you about your work all count for ZERO to the random shopper clicking his or her way through iTunes, Audible or Amazon. You must think and act like a pro in order to get paid like a pro.

Earlier today I read this article about Sony and Smashwords inking a deal that will allow authors to self-publish their e-books through the Sony publishing portal. The deal allows authors and small publishers to go straight from manuscript to e-book publication in a matter of minutes.

So why is this important?

In the past, e-books have been viewed as the poor cousin of ‘real publishing’. They lower the barrier to entry and as such they have been viewed as the method for those who can’t really cut it or get a respectable deal. This story about Sony is just one of many warning bells that should be ringing in the minds of authors and big publishing companies – that is the bell of change.

In a recent story in Fast Company Jeff Bezos is being framed as the next Steve Jobs – probably the most visionary and disruptive figure ever to enter the music industry and now more recently the mobile phone industry. In both cases, Jobs lowered the barriers to entry for content producers and opened the flood gates by offering content in a way that nobody thought would ever take. Jobs has reshaped how we buy and consume music and he has reshaped how we use mobile phones. Is Bezos reshaping the way we will read books?

Ask yourself this question. What did you really think of the Kindle when you first learned of it? Most authors I know laughed out loud and said – “It will never work. People love their books.” The thought of reading a book on a machine to me still doesn’t feel right but look at this shot of Bezos earlier this year where he is talking about e-book sales purchased for the Kindle through Amazon:

Since the release of the new improved Kindle in February, e-book sales have jumped to 35% of Amazon’s book sales. What should stop you dead in your tracks is not just the number, 35%, but even more than that, how quickly that change occurred. We are talking a 20% increase within months. This coming year, Amazon alone is predicting e-Book sales to top $1.2 Billion. This is not some small website selling a few books, this is a website with around 4 million visitors a day dropping by.

The simple and sobering truth is that we are now living in a time where change occurs fast. When the likes of Amazon and Sony are moving in, with the media writing articles that compare what is happening in the book business to what happened in the music business, it is time to take stock. Are you preparing for a new business model? Is your work ready for global distribution in all formats? Tomorrow – the distribution costs will be almost nothing and the only game in town will be reach and marketing.

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.