Speaker 1: Audiobook publishing. How do we market and promote these dang things? I mean, good Lord, they make it hard enough on us as it is. Well, I'm going to give some very viable avenues for marketing and promotion for your audiobooks. You're going to want to make sure you stay tuned to today's podcast. This is episode number 52 of the Self-Publishing with Dale podcast. And I am tickled pink that you would take just a little bit of time out your day to listen to me ramble on about some of my favorite things, writing and self-publishing books that sell. And you know, normally I have a sponsor spot right about now, but we don't have any sponsors, but that's okay because going into the next month we will. But for the meantime, I want to let you know that today's podcast is brought to you in part by Publisher Rocket. Get your hands on my go-to resource. That's easy for me to say in keyword and category research. This research tool even saves me time when putting together Amazon ads with its AMS keyword search feature. Find out why I rave so stinking much about Publisher Rocket when you visit my affiliate link at dalelinks.com slash Rocket. Remember anytime you purchase a license for Rocket, part of the sale benefits this channel and podcast while never affecting your cost. Again, visit dalelinks.com slash Rocket to check out Publisher Rocket today. And of course it's in the show notes as per usual. Man, I don't know what is my deal today. I'm just tripping up all of my words, but that's all right. I'm not going to edit these things out. That's the way we roll in this podcast. And we're going to roll right on over into audiobook publishing. How about that segue? I deserve a banana sticker on that one. Audiobook publishing, how do we market these dang things? And I got to be straight up with you. There's so many ways we can market our books, but we're a little bit more hamstrung when it comes to audiobook publishing. And the reason is many, many reasons over. And I'm going to start it out with, you know, Amazon ads. Amazon ads, we can run them on eBooks and we can do them on print books. But right now we can't do it on audiobooks. What the heck, Gibbs? Come on, Amazon, give us some love. We want to use that. But we're kind of hamstrung on this one. And there's so many options we can possibly look into, maybe Facebook ads, YouTube ads, things like that. But let's look at some more cost effective ways of doing things because that's the way I am. I'm kind of a spend thrift. I like to earn money and keep as much of it as possible without having to blow it all one sitting. And also, let's go ahead and address the elephant in the room. That's promotional codes. And if you publish through, say, something like ACX exclusively, that's Audiobook Creation Exchange, you get promotional codes for your books in the US and UK. And then if you publish through Findaway Voices, one of my preferred platforms, you also get giveaway codes there. What the heck do we do with these stinking things? Well, I'm going to go ahead and tell you five ways to market and promote your audiobook. And I'm going to kind of expand on a few of these because a few of them actually, it bears worth and just kind of just sitting down, setting up shop and talking a little bit about it. Let's go ahead and talk about method number one, social media. Oh, goodness. You're like, Dale, come on. That's a given. That's a given, Dale. Dude, really? Seriously? That's what you're going to give me? You're going to tell me social media? No, no. Hang with me for just a second. There's three ways we can take advantage of social media. Sure, you know, none of the three ways. We can just go ahead and blindly post some links over to our audiobooks and share with our audience. That's too easy. Come on. Come on, guys and gals. You know I'm not going to just give that to you. Let's start it out with viral contest giveaways. Now, you might be familiar with different platforms like Gleam or Rafflecopter or my preferred way is KingSumo. And in these ones, what you can do is put together a campaign to where you share it on social media and someone can go and say share it or they follow you or they like you or there's different types of ways they can enter your giveaway. And by entering inside the giveaway, maybe your prize could be a free downloadable audiobook or a giveaway code of some sort. And you just want to make sure that you're sharing this out with your email list, your social following, everybody that you can really try to put your best of the best stuff. If you have numerous promotional codes, maybe talk about putting together a bundle of some sort. I'm going to give you three audiobooks for the grand prize or maybe I'll give you a audiobook, print book, and ebook. Either way, these viral contest giveaways are a great and effective way of getting things going. Just make sure that you're not just putting it together and hoping for the best. You're going to need to make sure that you're pushing this as much as humanly possible. So that way it's not just putting it out and like your mom enters and you end up giving her the code, which you're going to give your mom a code anyway, right? The other way in social media is ACX bounty links. So many times I've really just kind of, I've said ACX bounty links are pretty much like an easy way to promote your book and make a little bit extra money in the process. Now the bounty programs changed over the past year and a half to two years, but that's okay. I've seen rather lackluster results in promoting mine, but I'll be honest with you, I'm 100% lazy on it. I haven't done this, but I'm sure if I actually spent some time in promoting the ACX bounty links, then I'd probably get more. Now, if you're not familiar with the ACX bounty links, here's how it works. If you publish a book through audiobook creation exchange, they will give you what's called a bounty link. There are four regions you can choose from in US, UK, Germany, and France. Hopefully I'm not misspeaking on those ones. And when you send somebody to that link, they can download your audiobook for free. Hang in there. You're like, dude, come on, man. You're telling me to get my book away for free. This isn't marketing. Yeah, trust me on this one. If they get your free book by going through Audible and getting an Audible membership and they stay on for the 30 day trial plus an additional 30 days of a paid membership, you get paid $75. Not stinking bad. So that free audiobook normally charged maybe $4.99, we'll say $14.99, and you get a percentage of that sale. Yeah, that's all right. Or would you want $75 per? Hmm, I kind of like that. So you can share this stuff via social media. Now, third way. This one's a nice little one. Go into Facebook. What you're going to do is type in free audiobook codes or free audiobooks or free Audible codes or any of those combination of things. Inside the search engine, it'll pull it up and you're going to narrow it down to groups. And when you put it to groups, it'll show you all the groups that are available, that there is a connection between readers and authors. Readers who want, of course, get a copy of your book and authors who want to give a copy of the book. And these, I'm telling you, are probably the most untapped resource. Look into it. You will thank me later. There are scores of these groups and they want you in there. All right. So that was social media. Got another four to go here. Number two, vloggers, YouTubers, and influencers in your niche. It's important. You got to go after the people in your niche. So if you are an arts and crafts person, it makes no sense to reach out to a prepping YouTuber or a homesteader YouTuber. It wouldn't make any sense if you're a science fiction fantasy person who's reaching out to a YouTube content creator that is talking about, I don't know, home decor. You see what I mean? You got to make sure that you're reaching out to the right bloggers, the YouTubers, and influencers. And what you'll want to do is reach out to them. First of all, introduce yourself, let them know how you are related to their given niche. And also it helps, it's kind of a nice little thing when you stroke their ego and you tell them why and how you found them and what you find most interesting about them. Because I'll tell you, I get a lot of people as a YouTuber that I get emails and people always want to give me their products. But then they give me like this generic, like, hey, I'm a big fan of your channel. And I'll be like, oh, okay, what's your favorite video? I haven't, all of them. Like, really? Really, dude? Yeah. Really? So when you reach out to those bloggers, YouTubers, and influencers, make sure that you're doing a little bit of due diligence ahead of time. And let them know, hey, look, I've got a free gift code, a giveaway code that I can give to you. And all I ask is if you enjoy this, could you share it with your audience? And I'd be even happy to give you about five, maybe 10 giveaway codes that you can give away to your audience. What do you think? Way back for an answer. Don't automatically give it to them because they might say, nah, I'm good. Or they might not even answer at all. Either way, bloggers, YouTubers, and influencers, definitely, definitely, definitely look into it. Number three, current publications. Okay, this is a given. You're thinking current publications. Well, of course, I'm going to promote my books and my, what? Oftentimes, as you start to build a backlog of books, I see this happen so, so much where some people are forgetting that they can actually promote other things like their audio books. So for instance, you can promote your ACX bounty links inside an ebook or print book with that clickable link in the ebook. And of course, maybe get a pretty link of some sort, a redirect on the long URL for bounty links. You put it inside your publication. And, or you can also put in your free giveaway codes as an email lead magnet. When you subscribe to my email newsletter, you will get a free downloadable audio book of XYZ, blah, blah, blah. So this is really a good thing. And is it either or a situation? No, you can do both. Just fair warning, if you do offer to do giveaway codes, to subscribe to your email list, let people know. And this sense of scarcity will get people subscribing to your email list a lot quicker by letting them know, hey, I've only got 100 free codes. And it goes to the first people that actually cash it in. And then when somebody reaches out to you and gets subscribed, you go ahead and give them the code and let them know, hey, this expires in 48 hours. And I learned this one from my boy, Keith Wheeler books on this one. If you don't let them know about an expiration, they're just going to sit on it and never cash it in. And if they don't cash it in within two days, put that promo code right back into the pool and give it out again. People will learn to go ahead and take advantage of it. And I'll tell you if they don't take it in first two days and chances are, they're not going to take it at all, but use your current publications. And this is going to kind of sound crazy. As you do your audio books and you're putting it out, you can actually do a downloadable PDF through places like audible.com and, or your own website, get the narrator to mention the downloadable PDF and inside that downloadable PDF, promote your other audio books. Kind of crazy, right? Going to promote your other audio books and your ACX bounty link. Not bad, right? Right. Number four, audiofreebies.com. This one's a new one to me. My boy Mark Brownless actually had shared it with me and I tested it out and was actually pleasantly surprised with it. And I checked it out again today to see how a specific campaign was going and it was going really, really well. In fact, so this is how audiofreebies.com works. You pay $10 to them to list your book for the free audio codes. And what happens is people will go to their website, they'll see a specific ad for you and there are readers that are looking for you. And I think they say they get about a thousand unique visitors per day. At any rate, they'll go ahead and request that for you. And the request will come over to your email inbox and you can send that to them. Now they've got a couple other ways you can do it, but I was really happy. I'd actually put an ad in for $10 on my brother's book, The Live Streaming Kit. You may have seen it on my YouTube videos. And on it though, I went ahead and I just tossed it in there, $10, see how it went. And I actually think I got about 10 different people that wanted some of the copies. And I've got about 100 giveaway codes through Findaway Voices alone. And here's the nice thing is they will list your book for up to two months, but they said for right now it's set up indefinitely. So it seems like they've got enough bandwidth and enough memory on their website that they can store a ton of audiobooks to attract in more customers. So I'm really, really happy. I saw that it was still up and I think it's already been up well past two months. So that's really good to know. And I believe I put out the audiobook maybe in January. It's slipping my mind. I know the ebook and print book had went out in November on Black Friday. So audiofreebies.com. And I'd stumbled over another service or two. What I would recommend is if you're an author, just go ahead and just do a quick search for free audiobook codes. Be very selective with where you go. I found another one that was called audiobooksunleashed.com. There was a number of them, but there's going to be some sites that you can do this and it will help market and promote your book. Now before we get into that very final step, I think it's important that we address the whole issue of free promo codes. You're like, Dale, I thought you said you were going to market and promote. The whole point of getting those giveaway codes is to market your book so that people will go ahead and leave a review. In return, by having that social proof on your books on the various platforms, that's going to increase your exposure, searchability, and likelihood of somebody purchasing your book. Because when there's proof of concept, when there's social proof, people are more apt to want to spend money on your book versus one that's not with it at all. All right, before that very final tip, I just want to kind of just give a really quick plug here. The Self-Publishing with Dale podcast is officially available on YouTube. Yeah, that's right. We're on YouTube now. Across the various platforms of iTunes, iHeart, Radio Stitcher, Blueberry, and beyond, we've now added YouTube. Actually, I'm releasing all of the backlog of podcasts. I didn't catch all of them off of Twitch, but you can get them all down to just the podcast by visiting dalelinks.com slash YouTube podcast. Get subscribed there right away so that way you don't miss a single one of the videos. I'm releasing about two per week so we can kind of catch up to the podcast episodes. Final tip. This one's a good one. This actually comes as an ACX recommended one. I knew about it before ACX even mentioned them on the blog. It's Audiobook Boom. Now, Audiobook Boom kind of functions just like AudioFreebies.com, but it's a little bit more expensive at, I think, $12 for a listing. They've got a wider reach and it's more niche-specific in which someone's looking for a specific type of book, they can actually search for it and find that more easily than the other platforms. It runs about $12 for a promotion and they will send it out through email. Unlike AudioFreebies, AudioFreebies, everything lives on the actual platform. They don't do any email newsletters at all, whereas with Audiobook Boom, there is an email newsletter. People subscribe to it based on their specific niche and they get it sent out and then they can be able to request the codes that way. Big bonus here. Big, big, big bonus. They actually just rolled out something in beta. It's called FreeAudiobookCodes.com and it's a little bit different. I have not tried it out just yet, but from what I can see is there's no signing up necessary. There's no newsletter, so it's almost like an AudioFreebies version of Audiobook Boom to where it's just available on the site and people can kind of grab the codes from where they want to on there. But I highly recommend try out Audiobook Boom. I saw mixed results. There were some times I did a campaign, did really, really well, and other times I got like a few reviews. I think one of them I got a total of like a dozen reviews, which is not bad at all. So definitely worth looking into for sure. Hey, as we start to wrap up today's podcast, do me a huge favor. Subscribe or follow me on your preferred podcast platform, including on YouTube if you're watching me there, and leave a comment or a review. It is greatly appreciated. I keep an eye on all comments over on my YouTube channels, and of course I keep an eye out for all reviews across every platform that I can. In the meantime, I just want to say thank you very much for taking time out of your day to listen to me jib jab about the thing that I enjoy most being self-publishing, being episode 52. Wow, it's a hoot. We've made it this far. Who would have thought? But in the meantime, I will talk to you very, very soon.