Audiobook Marketing Secrets
Are you taking advantage of everything your audiobook has to offer? Five months ago we set out to see if we could get more out of our audiobook productions for little or no additional money spent on marketing. How could this be done and would there any beneficial results?
True Stories from the Files of the FBIis a non-fiction book that focuses on six infamous FBI cases: the story of “Killer” Kinnie Wagner, The Charles Lindbergh Kidnapping, The Kansas City Massacre, The Barker Karpis Gang, John Dillinger, and “Baby Face” Nelson. Our decision to select this book to test our theory was because it had a strong initial foundation, good audiobook recording, good cover design, and searchable content with keywords.
The author hired one of the best narrators, Corey M. Snow, to narrate the book. The goal of this project was to leverage his voice talent so readers could get a taste for the audiobook through the online sample. In addition, we also had one of the best cover designers, design the cover to catch our reader’s/listener’s attention.
Online Exposure
With these two powerful tools already available, we asked ourselves how we could increase the reach of the book. The answer came simply: we needed to get exposure. We decided to create a series of 3-5 minute videos that would be posted on YouTube.
Using Apple iMovie, the book cover and sample narrations from each of the major sections was imported. A few more pictures were added to each video to make them more appealing.
More research was then done to add facts and captions to the pictures. In the end, the time investment was minimal. The videos were then posted to YouTube with keywords used in the title. We then crossed and our fingers and waited. Would our investment pay off? The following five months shocked us.
For the first three months, it was difficult for the videos to gain traction. They were far down in the search results and not viewed very often. Then came months four and five. The views started to rise. What was responsible for the rise in exposure?
Google & YouTube
We did a Google search for one of the videos, “Lester M. Gillis”. The video was listed fifth on Google’s first page. A search for ‘“Killer” Kinnie Wagner’ was then conducted and again, the YouTube video landed in the fifth spot on Google. What was even more astonishing was when conducting a Google Images search, the video thumbnails showed up. The videos also showed up in the first pages of Bing and Yahoo.
Why Did This Work?
Creating video samples for True Stories from the Files of the FBI worked particularly well because it is a non-fiction book. We were able to also target various famous criminals in the book for people to take advantage of in searching for those names.
In the end, only the use of time was spent to create the videos and it was well worth it to get a top narrator and book cover designer. All of these videos led to an increase in sales and exposure that normally would have cost hundreds of dollars.
