A writer's hardest work begins when the presses stop!
By John MaGuirk
Is the world ready for us?
I’ve watched Doris Kerns Goodwin sit in a drafty hall, sign books, and make small talk with strangers. She has won two Pulitzer Prizes.
This is the blog you have been waiting for: Number 3 in the series producing your audiobook.
We’ve bought the equipment, learned how to use and edited our effort. What happens next?
Journaling, Blogging & Podcasting are three sides of a single coin. If you think of a Podcast as a spoken blog, you’re almost home.
Every Podcast is three things: creation/writing, performing/producing & distributing.
I hope what you may have been doing is bombarding your friends, family & mailing list with promotional material. If our friends won’t buy our book, maybe it’s time for new friends. You’re stuck with your family.
I used my first novella as Christmas presents for some family & close friends and sent a review copy to a media friend. I also mailed PDF copies to friends who were confined to home by illness.
I posted installments on my website, but not the concluding chapter. Your first chapter should contain a further special offer. Every episode should invite feedback. For your website, get professional help to build a subscription offer and/or a sales funnel.
It’s possible to distribute any file through your website. The trick is to build a proper sales funnel to channel subscribers to your premium content. That’s a task for your webmaster; websites are always collaborative efforts. It takes two to tango, as they say.
A webmaster creates the site, and a content provider (writer) gives the site substance ie. Make a post! The webmaster should assist you by building the sales funnel or channel which directs visitors/users toward your premium content.
You may invite readers to subscribe via your website or through Facebook, for content to be delivered direct to their inbox by subscription.
An audiobook is just one more arrow in your quiver and if you have built your sales funnel properly you don’t have to share with anyone else, not even Amazon. But you have to do your share by creating the best content you can manage and demand equal performance from your webmaster.
FYI/iBooks author by Apple permits the inclusion of video, and audio along with the text.
Another promotional tool is to create a CD for mailing to friends and associates as a sample, be sure to include a “special offer” or mini sales funnel on the CD.
At the end of each production be sure to encourage feedback. It’s the audio equivalent of a “sales funnel.”
Yes, any MP-3 is indeed a large file, especially if it has a run time longer than 30 minutes. Exporting content to a Cloud server aids in compression.
Although we are unaware of it, radio personalities or newsreaders speak just a little faster than our normal speech pattern.
That makes it necessary to plan your work into as short segments as you can manage. Try to stay under a maximum of 45 minutes of reading time.
The message I write for is: “that was great send me more….”
John MaGuirk creates, writes & produces digital content by PodCast. Since his debut in 2011(December) he has produced over 1100 unique episodes.
