Self-Promotion: I Have An Audio Book (That No One Wants To Sell!)

OK, that title was misleading. I'll back up.

Let's start with the good news. For those of you who enjoyed Pulchritude, there is now an audio book version available for download and it's sublime. I need to edit my Official Page to note the wheres and whens and hows and the many thank yous to the beta listeners, but in the meantime here is a link to the direct download. (ETA: Apparently you have to create a Sugar Sync account to view the files. Which is stupid. I'll try to fix that. In the meantime, here is a Dropbox link that doesn't make you do that.) I'll bug you all later in the month when I update my official author page with everything else.

The bad thing, however, is that I would like to sell this audio book to people who are in an ecosystem like Amazon MP3 Cloud Player or iTunes or Audible. I really wanted to do this audio book the same way as the eBook:

  1. Offer it for free to anyone who asks. 
  2. License it under a Creative Commons copyright for sharing. 
  3. Sell it through existing ecosystems for people who want to "donate" to the cause for the convenience of carrying it in their Audible/Amazon/iTunes account.

That's how I did the eBook. But I'm finding out, dipping my toes into the world of audio books, that audio book sellers are even more pissy about alternate sites with free downloads and Creative Commons than eBook sellers are. If that's possible. (Seriously, read that article. I cried, I'm so frustrated. Creative Commons and free content should be a choice the content-owner makes, not the content-provider. In my opinion.)

So I'm struggling on the business end of things and minorly demoralized. It's okay, we'll get past this. If you'd like to help, you can do things! Here are things you can do if you want to help:

  • Download the Pulchritude audio book using one of the links above! That makes me happy!
  • Tell me you like the Pulchritude audio book! That makes me happy!
  • Tell the narrator that you like her voice! (But not in a creepy way!)
  • (If you genuinely do enjoy the audio book and you don't mind it not being in your ecosystem-of-choice and you can afford it, then...) Feel free to donate via Paypal using the links at the top of this site! That means I'll be able to pay the narrator for my NEXT book!

4 comments:

Ana Mardoll said...

Has anyone had any experience with CD Baby? I've had a nice talk with them and THEY don't dictate what the author does with the book, er, "spoken word album" that gets uploaded to, among other places, iTunes and Amazon. (Not to Audible, though. *sob*)

They can afford to be magnanimous, though -- there's a $50 fee per title and they skim royalties off the top of each purchase, so it's awhile before the author profits from being in the Amazon ecosystem.

Silver Adept said...

Oh, that reminds me that I should probably actually read Pulchritude. I recently came into the possession of an e-reader that I could use for that. And since my first audiobook experience was Kevin Smith (pretty cool), now I'm wondering either I should go with the audio over the text... Decisions, decisions.

That said, I've got an idea why Audible and others might be a mite pissy about an author offering a free version elsewhere online - DRM. If you offer a free version, its probably also free of icky things that tire you to a certain vendor and software. You're making it so that people won't buy from them at their expensive prices and that, horror of horrors, people might share good works with each other without anyone buying.

What we're wondering is: if you realize that your model might not work, why not change the model?

Ana Mardoll said...

Oh, I've no doubt that Audible is all about protecting themselves in terms of maximizing their profits, no matter how much they say that it's "for the customers" (because customers don't LIKE to be able to sample or share works or download an MP3 copy if they ever leave the Audible ecosystem!). But I'm cynical like that. :)

What I hope to be able to explain to the ACX lady, if she does indeed call me, is that 99.9% of my buyers will be buying on Audible because they've ALREADY HEARD/READ IT and they just want to add the book to their Audible ecosystem so that it will follow them around on their smartphone/tablet/etc. of the week. I very very very much doubt I'm going to be an "impulse buy" on a site where the book-credits are $9.50 in bulk and my Unabridged audio book is less than 7 hours long.*

* I think that's what it added up to, 6 hours and change. Pulchritude is really not a very long book, all things considered.

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