In a delightful departure from what was rapidly becoming the norm, I have no rodent-related shenannagins to report this week. Well … unless you count having a tetanus jab, which I did … you know … just in case.
To be honest, I haven’t done much. Partly because it’s been very windy here, I’m not sure what we’re onto now, we’ve had Brian and Chiara who segued seamlessly into Dennis and now we have Jorge who is Spanish and has pipped Ellen to the post. Snortle. But the weather is chuffing bogging a lot of the time.
Ellen. I had so hoped they were going to call it Windy Ethel. Never mind, can’t win ’em all. Whatever it’s called, it makes sitting in the conservatory like being underwater in a submarine. It’s about as dark and about as wet. I have not ventured out today and I don’t intend to any more than is necessary. Needless to say I have a packed social programme with school parents’ evening and some corporate wifing to do tonight. Bastard Ellorg or should that be Jorgllen?
Apart from an ambivalent effort at metal detecting on Sunday – right metals, wrong objects, clay pipe fragments but a nice medieval pottery shard, I seem to have been running around like a blue arsed fly all week but can’t really remember what for. It was mostly crises of my own making, delivering the iPad to the Apple shop to be fixed, picking it up and then setting it up. I was lucky enough to have a lovely visit to Mum’s on Wednesday. The gardening team was there as well as the career and Mum was very switched on. We chatted and watched telly.
While we were there, I played her a couple more of the audio voices. There is one character, Big Psycho Dave, he’s called, who I just can’t listen to without giggling. As you know, because heaven knows I’ve banged on about it enough, The K’Barthan Series is currently in production for audio, along with Unlucky Dip, which kind of acts as a prequel to everything.
At some point, I need to talk about the process, or at least, do a kind of dummies’ guide for Morons Who Are Unable to Grasp the Blindingly Obvious (as I call myself in these situations). Blimey but it’s taken me a while to cotton on. I’m still not sure I have.
One of the problems is that many of the people doing and talking about audiobooks are big hitters. I’m guessing some have little people to do the being an idiot bit for them and spit out the things they need to know at the end. But when it comes to what they do, they don’t want to talk about it. This may well be because they’re still experimenting and have no clearer idea of a successful strategy than I do. Alternatively, it may be as a result of legal advice in case someone says, ‘I did what you said and it hasn’t worked’ and sues them. Terry Pratchett had to stop visiting his own forums because people were starting to suggest things and, worse, say, ‘so, you used my idea then?’ And he’d be thinking, ‘What?’ And his lawyers advised him to make a sharp exit before the ‘so, you’ve used my idea’ bit got to the point where they started adding, ‘how much are you going to pay me?’
Actually, that’s not my approach, demanding compensation if it goes wrong. I’d just love to riff with people about what they’re doing and pick up some pointers. That’s what I’ve always done with the ebooks but there’s not much riffing going on as far as I can see, apart from on two Facebook groups where I’ve picked up a lot of interesting information. But, ideally, I need more points of view.
You may begin …
Some of the muted nature of the debate may be founded in that, if you go exclusive with ACX you have no control over the price of your books, so there’s not much you can do to market them, really, other than tell people they’re there. Obviously with Findaway, you do have some control over the price, you can set it at zero and folks are able to download the book for free in some places, but other sites will set the price at 99c. It’s a different model, I suspect, in that the data transfer costs must be very high, so free is probably not great for business, even if it leads to more sales in the long run. The royalties are smaller too, no 70%, anywhere.
Whatever the reason, I’ve failed to uncover much of the information I’m looking for out there or at least, not in as much detail as I’d like. Although there is a wealth of technical stuff about making your own sound booth, recording your own books, how to set the levels etc etc. If that’s the way you want to go, you’re laughing. As for what I have discovered about marketing audiobooks … well … here are my thoughts.
Thing One: the conundrum …
It’s becoming blindingly apparent that there is no obvious ‘right way’ to sell the ruddy things. Or at least, not that I can see. There’s what works for a particular author and what doesn’t. The only way to find out what works is to experiment. Gulp. And even then it may only work for you. My issue is this:
If you are an unknown tiny fish in the authorial sea – I am – you want social proof on your books, also known as reviews. With ebooks you just approach reviewers, grovel a bit and give them free copies. After a while they read them, tell their followers what they think and bob’s your uncle, five star joy to convince buyers your stuff is magic. (Ideally, but the right kind of one star, I-fucking-hated-that can be just as effective to sell your books.)
The difficulty with audiobooks is that they are massive so you can’t just send them to someone. Except you can with tokens. Both the major players I am looking at; Findaway and ACX, will provide tokens so reviewers can download your books for free and review them. But Findaway won’t provide them to British readers, which may not be helpful to me. Although other authors report their efforts to give away British codes often meet with complete failure, anyway. ACX will only give tokens out if you sign up to them exclusively. ACX exclusivity is for seven years but … if you have uploaded a finished book, rather than used their royalty share scheme (where they find an author for you) they will let you out after one year if you write and ask them nicely.
On the other hand, with Findaway comes Chirp, their own platform, and access to a BookBub style promotion system, and BookBub is extremely powerful. Although I’ve never scored one for more than ‘international’ – that is, promoting a price drop on a book to Canada, India, Australasia and the UK but not America. I’ve never scored a free promo there either. And yes these are the audio versions, but they are still the same less-than-attractive-to-BookBub’s-selection-panel books. On the other hand, you can advertise on BookBub and I suspect that if I can get my advertising shit together, that is where I could get some love for the audiobooks.
Also, there was a massive influx of audiobooks uploaded to ACX just before Christmas, and they are still wading through them. I could still be waiting for my books to go live in six months’ time, I know of authors who have waited five months, already, for their books to go live and are still waiting … At least if I am going direct to both, I have 60% of the market covered from the off … and it matters because it’s not just me, here, half the earnings are Gareth’s. It’d be nice if there were some after he’s put in all that effort.
Thing two: the options …
I think …. Yeh.
I have two cunning plans … although, whether or not you could, strictly, call either one cunning, remains to be seen. Basically, I reckon I need a few reviews for people to buy anything so I may need tokens. The books might get reviews from my lovely fans and friends, they might get reviews from Gareth’s. On the other hand, they might not. The choice is simple:
1. Get my advertising shit together and go wide. Run promotions, submit the books to Chirp, take advantage of being able to control the price, mostly. Give away Unlucky dip for 99c or even free to get them hooked. Use the tokens and try and attract reviews from Canadian, Australasian and American readers. After all, a review is a review, right?
Disadvantages … well … advertising might take more money than I’ve got. Also I might not find many British readers, and Americans might not be able to understand the British regional accents in my books. But, on the other hand, there’s a lot of British slang, and American readers have done OK with that in the ebook version. Also, while the audiobook market isn’t quite Audible-and-the-others yet, or at least, Audible is only about 40%, I believe, rather than the gargantuan slice of the pie Amazon enjoys for regular books, it’s still a big hitter and stymying my books there may cost us at the start.
or
2. Go exclusively with ACX for the first year to get the tokens and bribe people to review the books on the UK site as well as the US one. Get more sales organically because … more punters. Then ask them to release my books and go wide. Because ultimately, I want people to be able to be able to download my audiobooks at the library and in the long run, there is a lot more earning potential there for us. I also want to take advantage of Chirp and advertising and if I’m exclusive with ACX chirp is a non-starter.
The Advantage, ready social proof and the biggest UK market share (at the moment … I think). Also better chance of organic sales. Better royalty rates at Audible – like 40% rather than 25% – which is important if that turns out to be the only place where I sell any books.
The disadvantage of this strategy is that in a year’s time, when ACX release me, there may be a lot more competition for a Chirp promotion and more people advertising audiobooks meaning that traction wide is harder to achieve. In addition, while Unlucky Dip was approved relatively quickly, I have author colleagues who submitted books in December last year who are still waiting for them to go on sale. The upshot being that it may take six months to a year for my book to go live and it may be more like two years before I can go wide. In a market moving as fast as this one, a year feels like a very long time, but if it’s more like eighteen month or two years? Yikes.
And not forgetting that I loathe and detest the subscription model myself – it’s amazing how fast all those £7 a month for different things add up to something big, and cataclysmic, so it goes against the grain because I’d like to have my books available to people like me from the off; people who’d rather buy them outright.
Thing two: different books sell on different platforms.
There’s a suggestion that short books sell better on Findaway Voices than on ACX. The commonly held view is that this is because Findaway supplies more sites where people buy books out right and so those readers will want to try shorter, less expensive books before shelling out for the gargantuan ones. Conversely, readers on subscription sites usually are eligible for a set number of books per month, so they will go for the biggest possible books to get more bang for their buck. ACX supplies more of those, hence you would put your novellas and shorts on Findaway, but not necessarily on ACX (unless legions of your fans are asking) and then the box set – a nice big book for subscription site listeners – goes on both. But again, this would suggest that, if, like me, you’re an author of a novella series and a massive door stop sized books series, ideally, you want to be on both platforms. Or maybe some and some, I dunno. But yeh, I’ve had a brief chat with Gareth about him doing the rest …
Thing Three: there is No thing three.
Every fucking time Mary? Yep. I know. I’m sorry. I can’t help myself.
Thing Four: testing the market.
This is, kind of, where I am now. It’s taken me a very long time to work out how to upload a book successfully. Jeez ACX some coherent error messages would be grand. That said, I have now uploaded Unlucky Dip, the short series prequel to the K’Barthan Series, to all the sites I’m looking at; Kobo, Findaway Voices and ACX. I am also toying with the idea of uploading some snippets, or the odd chapter, up to Soundcloud for you to listen to. That does depend on what Gareth thinks about it. I can’t do it until the audio files are all finalised, anyway.
So we’re nearly set …
Gulp. Here begins stage one of our dummy run.
Unlucky Dip, is on sale. I think it’s about $2.99 and whatever that is in GBP pretty much everywhere, or as part of your sub on a subscription site.
Even more exciting, despite having zero sales reported on either ACX, Findaway or Kobo, I discovered, this morning, that it has an also bought on Audible, which would suggest that somebody, somewhere, has bought it. It’s a decent also bought, too; Jasper Fforde, whose readers sit squarely in my target demographic.
If you’d like to find out more, I have a lovely page, with links to look at it in store for a bunch of places so you are welcome to go and have a listen to the excerpt, or even download it if you like, here.
Unlucky Dip Audio Book