Your audiobook playing in a stranger’s living room? Crazy, I know.
- What if you could offer your audiobooks for free while you still earned royalties?
- My Studio in the Woods
- The future of the audiobook market is wide open because it is device independent.
- The Birth of an Audiobook: What if you just tried one chapter?
- Want to really become an expert at something? Write a book about it.
- Is your audiobook worth a credit? In other words: $14.99?
- Could audiobooks be the secret media to reach your kids’ minds?
- 5 Reasons Nonfiction Authors Should Narrate Their Own Audiobooks
- Because I’m not going to read your book like this–but I’ll listen to it.
- Looking for Audiobook Reviews? Audiobook Boom
- Your audiobook playing in a stranger’s living room? Crazy, I know.
- 5 Reasons Nonfiction Authors Should Hire a Professional Narrator for their Audiobooks
- How $14.38 confirmed my future audiobook publishing strategy.
- When the narrator is deeply connected to the author’s material.
- Why my “Every Single Day” book as audiobook is even more exciting than the print or ebook.
- If your book was available on audio, this might have happened to you.
- You read your books out loud for editing anyway, right?
- Free online tool to add meta tags and image tag to MP3 file
- Add Audible book to your purchase for just $1.99
- Possibly the easiest $50 you might never get. Introducing the Audible Bounty.
- One of my goals for my “Audio for Authors” book and course: Short, Sweet, and Done
- Which microphone to get started recording audiobooks?
- My first test with transcription and how this is going to change … everything.
- The Writer’s Guide to Training Your Dragon (Review)
- How’s that audiobook studio coming along? It might be time to get out of the house.
- Is this the next chapter of audiobooks?
- Audio for Authors: What does this teach? What does this solve? What am I giving?
- Do We Listen? (And an excellent example of newsletter marketing.)
- Audio for Authors: Can we successfully market our audiobooks?
- The Pop Pop Pop audiobook editing method
- Podcasting is the new Blogging
- Audio for Authors | Using Headliner to get your audio onto Instagram
- Audio for Authors | Even remotely thinking of recording your audiobook?
“Alexa, play an audiobook.”
Imagine this scenario.
You’re at a friend’s house and they want to show off their new Alexa Echo speaker. They ask it to play an audiobook.
Your brother’s voice is reading his latest nonfiction.
Right there in your friend’s living room.
It’s not The Twilight Zone.
But close.
Let’s gather up the ingredients to recreate how this possibly happened:
- You, dear author friend, create and publish your audiobook.
- Your sister pesters everyone she even remotely knows to buy your book.
- Same sister (see #2) visits a random friend and friend has new Amazon Echo.
- Friend wants to show off–as friends tend to do–and commands Alexa to play an audiobook.
- Your book sees the light of day and enters into the eardrums (and probably permanently into the psyche) of strangers.
What’s the hardest step above?
If you haven’t done Step #1 yet, then Step #1 is the hardest.
If you have done Step #1 above, then you might need to adopt a new sister.
Other than those two, it’s up to chance, random number generation, Amazon algorithms, and love.
Oh wait. Did I hear that whisper under your voice? You don’t have your audiobook ready yet? Oh, I’m sorry. You’re disqualified.
Let’s do the new scenario:
- You, dear author friend, create and publish your audiobook.
But then it stops there. Because you haven’t done it yet. It doesn’t even matter if you have the coolest sister of all time and if she has friends with new Amazon Echos. Nothing else matters until you do #1.
Yeah, so there we are.
My books are playing in the living rooms of complete strangers (to the shock and amazement of dear sis) and you are, uh, trying to figure out how to get Step #1 done and check your genealogy to see if you’re possibly related to my sister.
Family and Echos aside, how can you get #1 done? It turns out that it’s getting easier and easier. I’ve now done it 4 times and it’s getting even easier. Would you like to know more? Let me know.
Until then, try this: If you have any Alexa device, ask her to read any audiobook. Can’t think of one, here’s one: “Alexa, play audiobook The Secret of Kite Hill.”
