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| Photo courtesy TCK Publishing |
For certain,
this will be one of those No D’uh, Zandri
moments for me. Do Kids actually say No d’uh
anymore? Seems there was a time in the late 70’s (I’m dating myself) I used
it just about every hour on the hour.
But I
digress.
For the
longest time, I ignored audio books. That is, audio was one of those items I
checked off when publishing my own books via my imprint, Bear Media LLC. You
create an eBook…check. You create a paperback…Check. You create an audio book in
conjunction with voice talent. Check-a-mundo. You then pretty much forget about
the latter two while you concentrated almost entirely on selling those nifty
little Kindle Books on Amazon.
Even the audio
versions of the books I’ve sold traditionally to numerous publishers went ignored.
For those I usually received an advance which I would pocket and move on. Slam
bam thank you mam.
But only
recently, did I start researching the topic just a little bit more. And when I
found out that ACX, Amazon’s audio partner, offered terrific promo
opportunities that could actually be converted into cash-in-the-bank, did I
become hooked. I also never realized the income stream opportunity I’d been
giving up.
ACX offers
all authors and the voice talent they partner up with, a certain amount of
promo codes which can then be redeemed for free by listeners. The voice talent
who narrates my Chase Baker Action/Adventure series was the first person to
bring the codes to my attention. I believe his precise words were, “It’s pure
gold, man.” I like gold.
I decided to
dig deeper.
Checking
into my ACX account, I uncovered a whole lot of that gold, just sitting there
waiting for me to dig it out (I have over 30 audio books and box sets at
present). I immediately set up a new newsletter with a whole bunch of US and UK
codes and sent it to my subscriber list. Not that I was still skeptical, but I
just couldn’t imagine anyone choosing audio over an eBook or even a paperback for
that matter. The written word was meant to be read, not listened to.
But when the
codes disappeared within seconds (I kid you not…seconds), and I started getting
emails from distraught fans, I knew I was on to something. This was only three
or so months back, and since then I’ve given away hundreds of codes (codes are cash don't forget) and sold
dozens of audio books, and my author ranks reflect it. There’s no doubt in my
mind, that readers love to listen to books and that’s a good thing. No D’uh!
So what will
the future bring? Perhaps I will create books for audio first, and then check
off the boxes for eBook and paper secondarily. Or maybe I’ll just continue to place equal weight on all three. In any case, I’m going to take advantage of the
promo codes ACX offers as well as other promotional opportunities.
“Go listen
to a good book.” That has a good ring to it.
Vincent Zandri's new novel is THE EXTORTIONIST
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