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Anyone here tried selling on Audible?

by SUPER Louie
12 replies
I have books published in Kindle and I was wondering if it's a good idea to convert them to an audio file and sell them to Audible (Amazon's audiobook partner).

Has anyone tried this? What were your results? How much of the profit do you get to keep?
#audible #selling
  • Profile picture of the author Frosy
    I'm thinking of trying this as well. I don't think sales will be huge but the benefit is being able to provide content in another format for your users. Not everyone likes books.

    Let us know how you get on.

    David
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  • Profile picture of the author SUPER Louie
    Anyone warrior at all who've tried this?
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  • Profile picture of the author vtotheyouknow
    Just to clarify... the audiobook arm of Amazon is ACX.com which distributes to Audible, iTunes and Amazon.

    I just submitted my audiobook to ACX today. It's a decently successful Kindle (and CreateSpace) book.

    ACX really seems to want you to hire one of the narrators in their community. But you keep your profits if you don't pay a narrator so I did it myself, which was significantly more difficult and time consuming than I imagined...

    This is a 40 page non-fiction book. Between recording, re-recording, editing per ACX's (strict) guidelines, it took me probably a total of 10 hours or so.

    I used a Samson GoMic (sweet little $40 condenser mic) and draped pantyhose over it for a pop filter. Recorded with Garage Band, edited with GarageBand and exported to 192 mp3 using Audacity. So there's a bit of technical and editing know-how that comes into play here...

    There were a few ticks in the final output so no guarantee it'll passed Quality Control, but my fingers are crossed. So if you have some money to invest, I'd pay somebody to do it. Otherwise, you're in for hours of tedious, frustrating work that may not even pass QC when it comes down to it. Hope that helps.

    As an aside - you can also do a text to speech feature on your book (not sure how, haven't looked into it yet), which syncs your audiobook and kindlebook and offers buyers of your kindle books the option to buy the audiobook from within their Kindles (!)

    +1 for any results anybody's had with this...
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    • Profile picture of the author mmiys
      Originally Posted by vtotheyouknow View Post

      Just to clarify... the audiobook arm of Amazon is ACX.com which distributes to Audible, iTunes and Amazon.

      ACX really seems to want you to hire one of the narrators in their community. But you keep your profits if you don't pay a narrator so [B]I did it myself, which was significantly more difficult and time consuming than I imagined...

      I used a Samson GoMic (sweet little $40 condenser mic) and draped pantyhose over it for a pop filter. Recorded with Garage Band, edited with GarageBand and exported to 192 mp3 using Audacity. So there's a bit of technical and editing know-how that comes into play here...

      There were a few ticks in the final output so no guarantee it'll passed Quality Control, but my fingers are crossed. So if you have some money to invest, I'd pay somebody to do it. Otherwise, you're in for hours of tedious, frustrating work that may not even pass QC when it comes down to it. Hope that helps.

      As an aside - you can also do a text to speech feature on your book (not sure how, haven't looked into it yet), which syncs your audiobook and kindlebook and offers buyers of your kindle books the option to buy the audiobook from within their Kindles (!)

      +1 for any results anybody's had with this...
      I've had great luck with this...my first book took longer than the next. Great idea with the panty hose! I use audacity and it was pretty easy and FREE.

      You can easily "hire" someone else to record your book so you can keep writing..they get 50% of your profits which is less than either one of you get if you don't produce the book!

      Whiser sinc is now done automatically IF your book is 90% compatible by the computer...now I get upsells from Kindle purchasers. Pretty cool!

      How did yours do?
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      • Profile picture of the author marciayudkin
        I have more than 10 audiobooks on Audible. One of them is selling like hotcakes, far surpassing its Kindle sales. This particular audiobook has also brought me several great clients worth more than a thousand dollars each.

        What's special about that particular audiobook? There were (still are) next to no audiobooks on that topic.

        Before investing the time to record an audiobook, spent a minute or two on Audible to look over the competition. You may be surprised how many topics have little or nothing for audiobook fanatics.

        Marcia Yudkin
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        • Profile picture of the author marciayudkin
          P.S. There is very little "amateur" material on Audible, so customer expectations of quality both in terms of content and presentation style are very high. Until the last year or two, the only products on Audible were from large publishers, and even they would bother only with their best-performing products.

          Marcia Yudkin
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  • Profile picture of the author HzCy
    Yes, Ive actually tried it a few months ago, but I think its worthless.
    In that whole time, you can write five ebooks and set up a page + marketing for them.

    So in my opinion, the time isnt worth it.


    Good luck anyhow
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  • Profile picture of the author SUPER Louie
    Based on your comments, Audiobooks doesn't seem to be worth my time. Spending more than 10 hours reading a short book isn't my cup of tea.

    Thanks for the feedback everyone, they helped a lot.
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  • Profile picture of the author ebusyness
    audio presentations are great for marketing but never seen audio ebooks for IM type books
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  • Profile picture of the author opalfx
    i think that podcasts on itunes is a better pltform as it's not such a small niche. i dnt even know anyone who reads novel via audible.
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  • Profile picture of the author TycoonRob
    I've got 6 projects going for audio. Three of them are my hot selling kids book series and I paid a narrator I found on oDesk to do the narration so I wouldn't have to pay an ACX narrator or split 50/50. If the Kindle book does well, then the Audible version tends to do pretty well, too.

    I've also got three more projects almost complete. All three of those are 50/50 splits on revenue, so we'll see how it goes.
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  • Profile picture of the author Azadelkhan
    I know this is old but thank you guys very much. Leave it to WF to answer my questions.
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