Creating audiobooks from your published books is a great book marketing technique to increase your income from your existing work, both fiction and non-fiction. Most self-published authors are happy just to leave the audiobook up on the site, trusting listeners to discover their books. But, as every savvy author knows, books won't sell without marketing. That goes for audiobooks as well as eBooks and paper.
One proven way to attract new readers to your book series or catalog is to create a short piece in the series, an introduction of sorts, and either give it away or sell it for a minimum price. Curious readers don't mind trying out a new author if the investment is minimal. This has been shown to increase readership by a significant amount. But what about audiobooks?
Create Your Short Piece
The same technique that works for the written word will work for the spoken one. If you write a small teaser story or an introductory volume that matches your series, it's a simple matter of getting it recorded and offering it at a huge discount. Many narrators love to take on short projects such as this. They don't take up much time, so they can be fit in between larger projects that many narrators prefer.
Getting the Word Out
Marketing your short audio work should be as important to you as marketing your written words. You're advertising to an entirely different audience, after all, and one that hasn't been bombarded with dozens of promotions all day long. Authors marketing their audiobooks is still a relatively new phenomenon, so readers won't all automatically tune out your promotions.
Place a link on your blog or website, and in every one of your email signatures. Make the rounds of blogs in your genre and offer to guest post. Put a link to the audiobook at the bottom of each post. Use social media to the best advantage, posting on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and anywhere else your ideal readers congregate. Infinity offers a 1 Hour Audio™ solution and a new offering called AudioGist™ for short excerpts from exisitng works.
Keep the Faith and may the Force be with You!