Speaker 1: Hey, you, total stranger, you want to buy my audio book? Huh? Yeah, I don't think that's going to work. So today we're going to be talking about how to use relational marketing to sell your audio book and other formats of your books, too. Stay tuned. Hi, I'm MK Williams. I'm an author and independent publisher. I love sharing my insights about all things self-publishing with you. Before I get into the details about today's topic, don't forget to hit subscribe. That way you can be here every week as I put out new videos on self-publishing, making a career to being an author, and now being an entrepreneur. And today we're going to be talking about marketing your audio book. And keep in mind that many of these tips will apply for other book formats as well. And before I dive into those tips, I want to give a big thank you to Findaway Voices for sponsoring this video. I'll have more from them later. So keep an eye out. Now when I talk about relational marketing, I'm talking about the way that you can build a relationship with your audience, your readers, and your contemporaries to help sell more audiobooks. It's about building a genuine relationship, not a transactional one. And you kind of know what it feels like when somebody's trying to engage with you in a transactional manner. They're kind of like, oh, hey, how are you doing? That's awesome. Can you do this for me? Okay, bye. And then you never hear from them until they need something else. You don't want to be the person who's putting that out and trying to be transactional. And you also don't like being on the receiving end. You want to build some genuine relationships here. So here's some things to keep in mind. So building your email list. Now I've done a long video on emails, and I know that there are a lot of gurus out there that are going to tell you how you can build your email list overnight. But let me tell you, there are no shortcuts to getting a quality list of truly engaged subscribers, right? You can get just a bunch of leads, because they're not people, they're leads, who are just going to be on your list and never open it. But if you want to really provide value to your subscribers, then they're going to, okay, they're going to want to open your newsletter each month. Then they're going to recommend to other people that they should subscribe to, right? You want to build that quality, that trust, and you need to keep your promises. So if you say you're going to message once a month, only send once a month. And if you plan to deviate from that, give advance notice, right? If you're like, hey, I'm going on hiatus, you're not going to hear from me next month. Okay, cool. Hey, I'm going to send you something extra this month. Okay, cool. Your list needs to trust you, and you need to keep that trust, right? So that's how you're building more of a relationship with that audience. Instead of just buy my book, buy my book, buy my book. Who are you? Why do you keep spamming me? What's going on? So definitely keep that in mind. It's gaining their trust and keeping that trust. And stemming from this is building your ARC list, okay? So not everybody on your email subscription list is going to be a great ARC reader or listener. So someone who gets an advanced copy of your book, they need to be able to commit to reading the book or listening to the audio book prior to launch and leaving an honest review. So the people who make good on this get to stay on the ARC list, okay? So be sure that you offer those interested the chance to get an ARC for the audio book too. If you want more reviews of your audio book on audio specific platforms like Chirp or audiobooks.com or even Audible, then you need people to listen to the audio book and leave a review. So as you're building that ARC list, you're figuring out like who's really engaged, who's going to do this, you're building that relationship with them like, hey, I trust you're going to leave this review. I trust me to get you this early access to my content. Figure out who on that list is somebody who would prefer an audio book because you need audio book ARC listeners as well as you need like ebook and print book ARC readers, okay? Now keep in mind that getting a solid audio review will also include a review of the narration, not just the story. So with Findaway Voices new marketplace, you as the author can find the perfect voice for your audio book and all you narrators out there where you can find more books you would really want to narrate. Check it out.

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Speaker 1: And just as you'll be building a relationship with your narrator over the course of producing the audio book, you can and should connect with other authors, right? Like like actually connect with them and support each other's launches. So I tried the one for one newsletter swaps, a story origin, I did a video on it. And in general, like those authors don't know you and their audience doesn't know you. And they're just kind of looking for you to post about their book. And like, they don't care if they're going to get great results for you because they just want their book posted in your newsletter. You know, it's not about this genuine connection. It's not this genuine like, oh, I've read this book, like I've heard this person talking about this book for months. It's kind of like, okay, bum, like, switch done. So like a friend, like a true author friend will endorse your book, they'll buy it, they'll tell their friends in their audience to buy it, they'll leave a review. And so you want to have those true author friends, not just for the sake of like reviews and marketing, like just people to talk to and commiserate with and say, hey, like, let's encourage each other for nano or like, hey, like, that's awesome. You have a release coming out. I can't wait to read it. I know you've been talking about it. I know you mentioned those redline edits were really tough. Like I'm super amped to read this. You've been talking about this book for so long. Like you want those people who are going to encourage you as an author, they understand what you're going through. But also, yes, like they can share your news with their audience too, because they're just as excited for you genuinely. You know, they're not gonna, you're not going to be like, hey, hey, hey, leave a review, leave a review. They're gonna be like, oh my gosh, I'm excited for you. I want to do that. I wish I could give you some like magic recipe to get the results fast. But building these relationships takes time. Now you don't have to go out and build 200 strong, lasting, genuine relationships like a handful of good relationships will do and building that trust with your audience and your email list like that just comes from you being consistent and showing up and keeping their trust. And that takes time, right? But you're gonna have to promote each of these books and audio books for a long time on your backlist, right? So start making these relationships today, because that's going to have outsized benefits over time. Like there's no shortcut to getting anywhere worth going. Sorry, there just isn't. And so building these relationships is super, super important. Okay. Now, again, I want to thank Findaway Voices for sponsoring this video. And if you found this information helpful, please give it a thumbs up. And don't forget to hit subscribe. That lets you to know that you get value from this information and can get it in front of other authors like us. Now you can get back to writing your book.