Hi! This is Dale Beaumont and welcome to another episode of Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help you to write, publish and market your own best selling book.
Well thanks for tuning in for another episode. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to create an audio book but before we talk about the how, let’s talk about the why. Why would you want to take your book and turn it into an audio book? Well, there’s of course a number of reasons why you would want to do it. The first thing is it opens up a new potential market for you. There’s a whole lot of people out there that find it either difficult to read or they’re very, very time poor. So if you can offer your information in a different format, then you’re going to open up a whole new market in a whole new audience for people that would buy an audio book but wouldn’t actually buy a physically.
The other thing that you can do is you can use it to actually increase your average dollar sale when you’re actually selling it. And what I mean by that is if you have both a book and also an audio book as well, either on CD or mp3 that when you’re actually selling them, you could sell them together as a package. So if this book can only sell to $20.00, what’s interesting is that all the other books normally sell for a little more. They may be sold for say $25.00 to also $30.00 or sometimes even more than that depending on how specialized the information actually is. So if you’re selling them both together, you can actually sell this for say $20.00, and this for maybe 30, you can offer the two of them for $40.00 and many people will actually take both. So immediately, if you’re selling your books at live events or you sell it directly from your website, you can give people opportunity to either order physical book $20.00, this at $30.00 or they can get both for say $40.00 or $45.00. So that way, you can increase your average dollar sale, so there’s lots and lots of reasons why you’d want to do it. And there’s also another big reason and the holiest reason in my head right now and it’s the extension of hand held mobile phone devices, which also now double as MP3 players.
Now, most people would be familiar with of course the iPhone but now there’s a whole series of different phones, sometimes we call smart phones, Blackberries, the LG, Nokia is there. They all have in them MP3 players. Now, the biggest store currently at the moment is of course iTunes. So you can go to iTunes now, you can search for audio books and you can actually purchase these and if you’re not actually getting a physical product, then these are normally sold for a little bit less but there’s no delivery cost whatever and a lot of that is profitable than the fee that you have to pay to iTunes. And what that means then is that people actually are consuming a lot more information because they can, it’s going to be actually too long to actually read the book but I can access the book, whether that be fiction or non-fiction while they’re driving in their car or while they’re going in the bus to work or in the weekends while they’re walking the dog. So this is now before the hand held devices and MP3 players weren’t really mainstream. Now, because they’re in people’s mobile phones, they are mainstream, almost every person has an MP3 player now, and this is going to be coming more and more important to people to actually have their books in both written form and also in audio form.
Now, how do you actually go about doing it? Well, there’s two different ways that you can go. This video now is going to explore method number one and tomorrow I’ll come back and talk about method number two.
Method number one is quite simply, do it yourself. That’s right. So you are going to do it yourself. Now, how do you do it yourself? Well, it’s very, very simple. First of all, you do not need to hire a recording studio. In fact that would be one of the dumbest things that you’ll probably want to do because recording studio is so expensive. They’re always somewhere $150.00 to $200.00 per hour and quite frankly, you just don’t really need it anymore. So what you would probably want to do is invest in a descent quality microphone that would then plug straight into your computer, either into the microphone jack or what you could do is get one that is a bit more fancy that plugs directly into the USB port. So you can go down to your local electronic store or you can go to a specialized electronic store or you can search online either through EBay or just through Google about what’s often called a pod casting microphone. And a pod-casting microphone will just plug straight into your USB jack in your computer and sometimes they add a stand, sometimes they might even have a little cover and that will ensure the sound come really nice and clear. And the rest of it is basically just common sense.
Make sure that dogs aren’t barking, make sure you’re not doing it in the middle of the day if you live on a busy road, just find a quiet place and then you can start to read your book. Now, you need the hardware, which is of course the microphone, and you also need to have some software. So, if you have a Macintosh computer, then you have a program to your computer which is called Garage Band. You can use Garage Band as a program. If you’re working with a PC then you might need to get some software. There’s a whole bunch of different ones out there. The one that I’ve heard is probably the best, it’s called Audacity, and so that’s the name of the program. It’s called Audacity. I believe it’s free. Otherwise, it’s very low cost. It could be $30.00, $40.00, you own that software, and then that gives you the ability to air your own. So if you make a mistake, if you uhm, there’s a fighter jet that flies overhead and you want to redo the last 20 seconds then you can just actually delete. It’s as simply as highlight and then delete and then you just record it again. It’s very, very simple to do.
And then it’s just a matter of once you’ve read the whole book and what you probably want to do is actually do it in sections, then you got to do chapters at a time so you make those different files. So you just go through, read the chapter and then the next day read another chapter and maybe you can’t do it all in one sitting, so you probably got to break it up. and then once got all those there, then you can easily get to these files and basically stitch them back together, so then you got one piece. Then what you can do is you can just add a little bit of what we would call in-out music or top and tail music and that’s basically some royalty free music you’re going to put at the beginning and you might say, “Hello! This is Dale Beaumont, the author of such and such book and you’re now listening to an audio book of the title” and then you can just get into it and start reading. But that’s music that will go at the beginning, music that will go at the end and what you may want to do is put maybe five, ten-second worth of music in between each chapter just to break it up a little bit.
The best way to learn about how to do this is to probably go to iTunes and actually download one of the audio books on there to give you just a bit of idea about how they’re actually done. There’s another website you can go to which called audible.com and that website actually has whole bunch of audio books on there. Again, buy one or two or three maybe in your kind of music and learn something at the same time, see how they’re done and you can easily duplicate it yourself with a few basic tools.
You can get those microphones, I was telling you about for 100 bucks, maybe 200 bucks, they’re very inexpensive and the software free or next to free and then you are up running. Also if you want to learn how to actually use these audio entertainment tools, this audio entertainment software, then you go to YouTube, type in “How To Use Audacity” into YouTube and there will be tons and tons of training videos on there for people that are actually showing you what to do. That’s how I learned how to use software’s, I go to YouTube, I type it in and almost every time, someone’s created a video, teaching you how to actually use it, so there’s an inside tip there to save you a lot of time and a lot of money.
So method number one is do it yourself. Method number two which we’re going to come back and explore tomorrow is about how you could get somebody else to do it for you. Okay. So, depending on some stuff I’m talking about tomorrow, you may want to go the second way.
All right, so that wraps up today’s episode. I’m sure you’ve learned something new, how to create an audio book. It’s certainly something that will give you another product based on that same information which is great and by having two products, of course, it will position yourself in the marketplaces as even more of an expert or more of a prolific author and it will really help you take your writing and your publishing career to the next level.
This is Dale Beaumont from Get Published TV. Leave us your comments. Thanks for watching. See you again next time.
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