Marketing an audiobook
Almost everything written about selling an audiobook is the book marketing advice with the word swapped. Post about it, ask for reviews, run a price promotion. Some of that carries across. The parts that matter do not, because the person buying is not doing the same thing the reader was doing.
The listener is a different customer
They are usually doing something else. Driving, walking the dog, cleaning the kitchen, at the gym. The book is not the activity; it is what accompanies the activity. That shapes what they pick — something they can follow with part of their attention, and something long enough to be worth starting.
They choose by voice and by length as much as by subject. Listeners have narrators they follow and narrators they will not tolerate, and they check the running time before they buy, because a fourteen-hour book is a two-week commitment to them in a way a long paperback is not.
Many of them are subscription members. For a member spending a credit or listening inside a catalog they already pay for, starting your book costs nothing and abandoning it costs nothing. That cuts both ways: they are easier to persuade to try you, and quicker to leave.
The consequence runs through everything below. You are not overcoming a purchase decision. You are winning a few minutes of attention from someone with their hands full.
The sample is your cover
Stores play a sample. It is the single most important marketing asset the audio edition has, and it is the one authors leave to chance.
Choose it deliberately. Do not accept whatever the first few minutes happen to be. The opening of a book is often the weakest place to start listening — the pages Epigraphs and dedications covers are lovely in print and dead air in a sample, and a slow scene-setting page is no better. Pick a passage that shows the book working: a voice with something to do, a scene with movement, or for nonfiction, the moment the book says something useful.
Make sure it showcases the narrator. A sample of flat exposition sells nothing, whoever is reading. If your narrator does something well — dialogue, a range of characters, warmth, dryness, authority — the sample should contain that thing.
Check what the store actually plays. Distributors differ in how a sample is generated and how long it runs, and some take it automatically from a fixed position in the file, which is one more reason the route you pick in Getting an audiobook into stores is a marketing decision as well as a commercial one. Go to your own listing on every store that carries you and press play. Listen to what a stranger hears. It takes ten minutes, and it is regularly the difference between a listing that converts and one that does not.
In the tools. Everything a listener sees beside that sample — the square artwork, the title, the author name, the series line — has to match the print and ebook editions exactly. Build all of it from one project so the strings cannot drift between formats. Start your book → · about the tools
The narrator is an asset most authors waste
You hired or partnered with someone who performs for a living, and then you market the book as though you made it alone.
They have an audience. Narrators accumulate listeners who follow them from book to book, and those people are audiobook buyers by definition — better qualified than most of the places you would otherwise be posting.
They have a professional interest in this selling. On a royalty share that is direct. Even on a flat fee it is a credit they want to look good, and future work they want to win.
So ask, before the recording is finished rather than after launch, so it can be planned. Ask for something specific and easy: a post on the day, a clip of a passage they liked, a mention in their newsletter if they have one.
And credit them everywhere — the listing, the announcement, the posts, and your own site, by name, next to the book. It costs nothing, it is what a publisher does, and it makes the next narrator easier to hire.
Reviews, and the one that is different
Audiobook reviews talk about the narration. Sometimes that is the entire review. A listener who did not care for the performance will say so in terms that have nothing to do with your writing, and a listener who loved the voice will say that first and the plot second.
Two things follow. Do not read audio reviews as a verdict on the book; they are partly a verdict on a performance you commissioned. And a listener who loved the voice is the most reliable repeat customer you have — they will follow that narrator into your next book without thinking about it, which is the strongest argument for keeping the same narrator across a series — worth remembering while you are still at the stage described in Finding and auditioning a narrator, because you are casting the series and not the book.
Some distributors issue promotional codes for review copies, and the mechanics, the allowance and the rules around them vary by platform and change — read the current terms where you are published rather than a summary written a year ago. The general approach in Getting early reviews without breaking a rule applies, with one addition: send a code to people who actually listen. A print reviewer given an audiobook usually never finishes it. Handing out a block of codes is not a promotion in itself, for the reasons set out in Giveaways, and what they are actually for.
Where listeners are
They are not in the same places as print readers, and posting into your usual channels reaches mostly people who will buy the paperback.
Audiobook-specific communities. Forums, subreddits, podcasts and review sites organized around listening rather than around a genre. Smaller than the book world, and far less crowded — and the people with audiences inside them are approached the way Working with book influencers and reviewers describes, not as an advertising channel.
Library systems. Digital lending is a major route to listeners, and library audio catalogs are browsed by people looking for something to start today. Make the audio edition available to libraries wherever your distribution allows it — see Getting into libraries and bookstores and, for how the lending market is structured, Getting your ebook into libraries.
Subscription catalogs. Members browse inside the catalog they already pay for. Being present and correctly categorized there is worth more than most external promotion, because the decision to try you is nearly free.
Cross-sell the editions
The print and ebook editions should mention that an audiobook exists — in the back matter, on the copyright page, on your site, in your newsletter. The audiobook listing should point back the other way for people who want the text as well. Readers who own a book in two formats are a real segment, and nobody tells them the other format exists.
One thing to settle early: the artwork has to work as a square. That is a design decision made at cover stage, not a resize you do at upload, and it is covered in Audiobook cover art is a square, and that changes everything.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: How an audiobook earns its money back · More: Getting an audiobook into stores · Should you make an audiobook? · The sample, and what it is selling · Tracking what actually works