Podcast: Play in new window
In today’s market, it’s critical to be able to reach your audience directly. Let’s walk through two options for selling audiobooks directly, for maximum control and profit, via Soundwise and Bookfunnel.
Links!
AppSumo deal on Soundwise http://fbuy.me/v/laura_10643 (includes $10 off AppSumo for new users)
Soundwise standard pricing https://mysoundwise.com?lmref=dLrVgQ
Bookfunnel http://bookfunnel.com/
Bookfunnel and WooCommerce https://authors.bookfunnel.com/help/setup-woocommerce/
Findaway Voices https://findawayvoices.com/
Vote for Crown & Creed! https://www.realmmakers.com/realm-award-readers-choice-alliance-award/
Gamify your to-do list: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/todolistadventures/
Water: Selkies, Sirens, and Sea Monsters https://amzn.to/3eiqMQi
Sensation and riddle giveaway! https://amzn.to/3xk6NJU and https://lauravanarendonkbaugh.com/sensational-havok-season-four/
Video (from Twitch and YouTube):
<p>Writing is only part of a writing career -- no one warned us that we would need business acumen and entrepreneurship to be an author. Whether you're traditionally published or an independent self-publisher, it's good to have a leg up on accounting, marketing, time management, and other key skills.</p><br><p>These recordings of live discussion on craft and development, on business best practices, on explorations of fascinating and inspiring real life cool stuff, and more will help you along your writing journey and career development. Join Laura VanArendonk Baugh as she shares what she's learned and what she's learning. (Or join the weekly live discussion with your own questions!)</p><br /><hr><p style='color:grey; font-size:0.75em;'> See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://acast.com/privacy'>acast.com/privacy</a> for privacy and opt-out information.</p>
Transcript:
Good evening, everyone, evening for me. Good happy time zone, sun, moon, everything all right? OK. Hi, this is Tuesday evening. For me, this is To Write And Have Written, I’m a Laura VanArendonk Baugh.
We’re going to do fun stuff tonight. Yay, insert Kermit here. Hello, everyone in the chat. It’s quite lively already. This is great. OK, so.
Sorry, I need to move this extremely active window out of eyesight. I pulled something up to get started. I actually thought I had started the stream running like, you know, the get ready promo intro, like 10 minutes ago. And now I’m like, why is nothing working? Oh, I never pushed that button. So, hey.
Oh, yeah, everybody is here. Yeah. This is awesome. WorkAppropriateGoth is back. Yeah. Like a whole crowd. Awesome. This is going to be a fun night though. I hope. I hope it’s going to be a fun night. So I do have a collection of housekeeping things to run through before we get into the work part of tonight. Yeah, there’s a work part, probably just me but you can work along if you would like to.
So first of all, by the way, it’s snowing here. I have a tree full of heritage apple tree full of blossoms. Snow is accumulating on them. It’s probably quite poetic, but I have no idea what that’s going to do them.
“So that’s the Four-Letter S Word.” The whole chat’s like [hiss]. So, yeah, like I like snow. I just, you know, kind of didn’t want it on top of my apple blossoms.
Oh, Bridger like you’re allowed to be a functioning adult and have like income and stuff during the stream. Please, please, please, please get money. Yes. There we go. All right.
So some things to run through and share with you if I can get. Let’s see if I can step up. No, don’t don’t do that yet. That’s too much too exciting. Don’t look, that’s a peek. I got home late for my own client today, so my time that I was going to spend, setting up, getting everything nice and organized for this stream was a little compressed. So bear with me just a little bit as I’m doing a lot of this on the fly. Yeah, WorkAppropriateGoth a lot of snow, but you live in the south, it’s probably because you shut down after the sky thinks about it for like two seconds. Yeah.
One of the most embarrassing, like “I apologize for the locals” moments was, I had a friend from Sweden over here in the in the US and we were not in Indiana. We were together at a conference in I want to say, Maryland, Virginia, somewhere East Coast ish. I don’t remember, we’ve been to a lot of places. And they had like an inch of snow and the schools were shutting down, government was shutting down. And she’s like, is this normal?
And. Kind of depends on where you are when you ask. Yeah, so yeah, but she was from Sweden, she was like, it’s an inch of snow. Like what is that’s not a thing. So. OK, yeah.
Oh OK. Sorry. I know. Hold on, StreamLabs, just chill for a second. That’s coming up. So. All right. OK, news first up, Crown & Creed, which you see on your screen, which is number three in the Shard of Elan series, if you have read it and if you liked it, I’m going to ask you to please vote for it in the Realm Awards Reader’s Choice Alliance Award. And if you have not read it quite fine, stay here. You’re welcome. And all of that. But that award, the Alliance Award, is one hundred percent determined by reader votes. So if it’s something that you would like to throw me a shout for, I would really appreciate that. So I’ll put a link in the chat in just a moment.
Next on the list of fun and exciting things, today is a cover reveal day. So since I’m having a stream on cover reveal day, ba-daa! A cover. This is the fourth and final cover in the Elemental series, edited by Rhonda Parrish, who may or may not be, she’s occasionally in the chat, we’ll see.
But I love this. This is a selkie transformation. And how cool is this illustration? I like it a lot. So so that is available for preorder starting today. And yeah, I just I just sorry. I just have to like the cover for a minute. I’ve seen it before. I still like it. So thank you for sharing in my cover reveal.
And then one more thing. I am also in this anthology which is coming out on Friday. This is a collection of flash fiction. And I want to talk just a second about what’s going on with this. So we’re having a live streaming launch party on Friday. So if you’re interested and would like to come to that, please do, more than welcome. But here you guys on the stream tonight get the sneak peek of what I’m going to say at the live stream party on Friday, which is that I’m a nerd.
This is not really a surprise. And I like to hide reference jokes in my fiction. I do this a lot. Sometimes they’re geeky reference jokes. If you’ve read The Butcher of Scarlet Hollow, which is a story I give away for free on my website, and Tom the Baker is is trying some new new product. And so he’s walking around and he’s offering people, would you like a jelly–? And he gets interrupted, just, you know, a little nerdy Doctor Who references and stuff.
Sometimes I hide in things that are just like scientific or, you know, makes me makes my nerd happy.
There’s a terrible, terrible reference joke in my story in Sensational. The story in Sensational is a side story to the Shard of Elan series. You do not have to read Shard of Elan to appreciate the story, it’s a complete standalone, or to get the reference joke. The reference joke is not about my my fiction. It is a nerd joke.
The first person to identify my terrible, terrible reference joke and submit it to me by email (because the email timestamp will determine the first person) will get a five dollar Amazon gift card, which is not a huge amount of money, except it is more than you would spend for this anthology of forty nine stories. So you get the anthology for free, plus you get paid for reading the stories if if you find the reference joke. So there we go.
Okay, lemme catch up with chat here. Oh, come on. NightBot, seriously? Why is NightBot even here? Do I even have NightBot? Seeker if you’re on the chat, can you address NightBot? I don’t know what’s going on, but but I’m not even sure nightBot is supposed to be in my chat, and certainly shouldn’t be slapping Bridger for for posting things.
OK, yeah. OK. All right. Sorry anyway. Yes. OK, nerd jokes are the best jokes. Thank you. Thank you for that.
And I am going to post some links and hopefully NightBot won’t slap me down. I hear Jon talking, but I don’t know if he’s talking to me or to the Labrador. These things happen, OK? All right, well, Bridger, I appreciate you trying to link to the award nomination. Thank you. We’ll just figure out what’s going on. I don’t even know.
OK, anyway, let’s. Where where where do I keep things? I wish I’d gotten home on time. All right, look, here’s a big old pile of… NightBot is… Seeker can’t disable NightBot, but OK, look, here’s here’s things. I’m posting them. Come at me NightBot and we’ll see what goes down.
All right. So, yeah. So there’s your list of fun things to to catch up on.
Wow. Sorry, I got totally distracted. So after you check that out, if you look at the joke now, that fun, fun thing to try in the chat now. Exclamation mark chocolate. See what happens.
“Laura versus NightBot, placing bets.” Yeah, come at me, bro. Yay! Oh, the chocolate bar is working, I code like nothing, but I got this one. Very motivated for chocolate bot.
There should be more than one response here, though, chocolate, but there’s a collection. You worked when I tested you. NightBot, if you interfered with chocolate bot, so help me…
Wow. OK, well, anyway. There we go, we are getting some others now, OK? Yeah, all right, OK, there we go. Why we are here. There. Yeah, very exciting. Very exciting. Also, I have a reminder for you. Let’s see if this one’s working. Just because as you’re working for yourself, there you go. The data does not judge you. Keep that in mind. All right. Very proud that things are holding together OK.
You just come out, keep on top of NightBot, we’re good, OK?
Tonight, what we’re actually going to talk about tonight, I’m going to do a little bit of a walk through, first of SoundWise, then later, to a lesser degree on BookFunnel. To a lesser degree is for a reason. But I’ll talk about as we get there.
And I want to show you how you can host and sell your own audio books and then also your own ebooks. Make choices individually. You don’t have to approach those as an all or none thing. And there’s a variety of reasons you’d want to maybe do this. And this means what I mean by this is, your book is not being sold through Audible or Nook audio or, you know, pick a platform. Your book is being sold by you and then you can use some of these tools to deliver that book.
I guess the exception to that is SoundWise is a retail platform as well. But it’s not the kind of thing like like if I were on Audible, you would just go and you’d be like, I just want to browse through lots and lots of things until I find something I want. Whereas on Soundwise I can say I want Shard & Shield. So I’m going to go and buy it there or I’m going to go to the website, get a link to SoundWise or regular Laura’s website. I’m going to buy Shard & Shield and then it will get delivered by BookFunnel or something like that.
So reasons that you might want to do this, there are a number of them. We’re not going to cover all possible reasons, but definitely give questions or comments. Please chat with them. So the kind of the big funny looking gorilla in the room is Audiblegate. It is still continuing, ongoing, nothing new and exciting the last couple of weeks that I’m aware of, but is definitely far from settled. If you are not aware of what is popularly Audible Gate, it is the situation that Audible has not been paying authors properly is the very, very short version of it.
So I have books on Audible that are going to readers, but I don’t get paid for them. So yeah, boo Audiblegate. Yeah, thanks so. Anyway, that’s a huge thing that I’m not going to get into at this time, you know, Googling Audiblegate will provide you with more than enough reading material on the subject.
But you can see while all of this is happening, we’re not super excited about, wow, let’s put all my new material on audible. OK, let’s definitely not do it exclusively.
OK, so, you know, PJs, like, why am I not surprised? Yeah, it’s it’s a little bit wonky. Might be something worth looking up, too.
So the other thing we leave that aside, if I sell my own books, I get all that money. That’s great. So right now, like if I have a book that sells for, I don’t know, let’s say 19.99 because I like really easy math. So 20 bucks. On Audible right now, I might get two or three of that or zero. On other platforms, I might get half of that, I might get 70 percent of that. If I sell it on my website I get nineteen dollars and change. So that’s pretty nice. So that’s, that’s something to keep in mind.
Bridger says, and we like Laura more than Bezos.
OK, so just investing the money and the time to get more money back is, what, we call that capitalism. Right. That’s business. So that’s good.
And I’m going to show you SoundWise, which is something that I discovered only within the last couple of weeks. And I have been moving my stuff over there. It’s not completely done yet, but it will be happening. I’m also going to show you BookFunnel, which is what I found first and BookFunnel definitely does work. Under normal circumstances, they’d be roughly competitive in price, but I found SoundWise on AppSumo and I’m going to share that with you.
So which means that’s a lifetime deal for a less than a year of book funnel, like well under a year. So I’m going to show you the things. OK. All right, so let’s get over what’s really hope that that my all my tech works out, yet thinks we’re done with that net, we’re going to we’re going to we’re going to bring up. We are for real. There we are. OK, I’m so professional. All right.
So this is my SoundWise dashboard. This is where I’ve been uploading audio books so far. And I am going to just finish one of them so you can see how how it works here.
This is not the hyper slick interface that you will see on some other platforms, but it’s a perfectly functional interface. I’ve got just a couple of gripes about it, but I’ll show you those as we go. Yes, Bookfunnel and sound wise both have fully functional apps for the listener, that they’re going to be just as good as any other audio book apps that you that you have going on. So, yeah.
And great point. P.J. says this isn’t something I need right away, but it’s something I want to learn about going forward. I kind of wish I had done some more advanced planning and I’m catching up. I’m going to be fine. But as like, oh, I could have set up this earlier. I could have I could have brought my readers along with me rather than now trying to talk them out of other platforms that they’re already using or those kinds of things. So.
So that’s why I wanted to show what we have and let me see.
Can I get this to fit in here? There we go. So “add new sound cast” is pretty darn straightforward forward. Just going to come in here.
Sound cast. I’m sorry. Sound wise is not specifically a. Audiobook platform, it is an audio platform. That sounds like a very small distinction and realistically it works just fine for audio books. But there are a few things that you’re going to see that if you’ve been thinking about Audible or, you know, other platforms, it’s going to look a little bit different.
So I’m checking the chat. Oh, good, Bridger has been picky with her audio experience, but did like the BookFunnel app, so yeah, that’s great. OK. Oh yeah. And WorkAppropriateGoth, yes. Excellent point. Libraries, guys, feel free to use the library! Like you get my stuff on libraries. Libraries actually pay their authors, making them a better option than some other platforms. And I will no author I know will ever be grumpy about you getting their stuff from a library. Like seriously and you can get it for free using hoopla or oh my gosh. Libbey and so many other great, Kanope, like so many great library apps out there. So. Yes, yes, please, please. Yeah, libraries work on two models that, either they pay more for a single copy that then has, what, one hundred or something borrows attached to it, and then they buy another one. Or they pay a lesser amount per copy per borrow. So there’s a couple of ways that can happen. It doesn’t matter. Authors get paid. Yay! So WorkAppropriateGoth works at a library. Oh, we love you. Yes. Please, please share anything you would like to share in the chat and get 100 percent libraries.
Absolutely. OK. And all my audio stuff is distributed to libraries as well. So I’m just showing you retail directly to the consumer at this moment.
OK, so up here, is my cursor showing? Yes, my cursor is showing. OK, great. So public and private. This is something that’s going to be a little distinct to to start with because, you know, this isn’t going to be on most audiobook platforms. Private is would be if you have a subscription model that you are dripping out like say you wanted to run something that almost like a private podcast and you’re giving out new material every day or once a week or whatever your your model might be. And you can actually set that up in sound wise as a subscription service and then only those people with that subscription would get it.
That’s not what we’re going to do here today. We’re doing it as a public sound cast, which means anybody can go to this and purchase it. Yeah. So, yeah, thanks WorkAppropriateGoth, feel free to volunteer any of your wisdom in the chat.
So title. Also, let’s pretend I can spell. Best book ever. And because this is not a audio book platform as much as it is an audio platform, when you’re looking at categories, let me get this up here where you guys can see it. You know, it’s not set up like like, oh, what what what are all my kinds of fiction and nonfiction? OK, they’re a little more broad topical and I usually just go with fiction because that’s it. And I’m not going to drill down any deeper than that because that’s not it. But it’s also this isn’t really a browsing platform. This is what I’m using for delivery. OK, so that doesn’t bother me as much.
Cover art. Let’s see what it can get here. There we go. Can you can you do this? Nope, it’s not going to show for you guys, OK? We’ll pretend I’m uploading cover art. It’s there. And. Then I can come down here and this is where I can start setting pricing. I can I can make it for an individual outright purchase, I can make it a subscription model. I can add coupons and discounts, all of the things that you would want on a normal retail platform here.
There are some cool things that you can do if depending if it’s the kind of thing you want to do. So comments and likes, you can actually people can keep a running conversation on your sound cast as you go. I don’t think I want that. I want people to be able to come in blind to the book experience and not have potential conversation about future events or whatever running in there. But if you were doing something that was not, as you know, not a straightforward audio book that could be fun. And ratings listener count, subscriber count, all the things.
So and that is the advantage of using a delivery platform as opposed to hosting all the files yourself. And not only like dealing with bandwidth and all the tech issues and everything, but. I don’t want to deal with everybody’s tech support. OK, so if you people — when I do this a couple of times a year, when I give away free stuff because I always have free, free stories available on my website, just as lane magnets and whatnot. And then like every every December I not every but frequently in December, I will give something away or whatever. And there’s always like I just have to set aside a few hours to deal with walking people through how downloads work. OK, you’ve got it. Got it. EPUB or MOBI. Here’s how you can open it. No, you can’t open the MOBI on your Mac. You have to get it, that kind of thing.
So the advantage of having somebody else book funnel are sound wise, whatever handling that is. I just, I just send them the file saying hey here’s where your book is. Talk to them if you have trouble by hand and they have people who are paid to take care of that. Yeah. Not my issue.
So. All right. So I’m going to jump back here. And we’re going to finish out. Good Spell Gone Bug, which I started to set up, and I saved it for this. This podcast, so I’ve got everything set up here, I’ve set up some some discounts, you know, I can do whatever I like this one. It’s a pretty short piece, so I’ve got the price set at three seventy five. It’s not a big deal.
And then I’m going to come over here top left where it says add track. This is my complaint is probably too strong a word about sound wise. If you were purchasing the regular monthly subscription for this service, you would have bulk download. The super deal that I got — that’s on the AppSumo link that’s showing up in your chat right now. And if you’re hearing this on the podcast later, that will be in the show notes — Bulk Upload is disabled.
I have it right now. Let me tell you about that in just a second.
What this means is if you are doing something like. Sorry, we get back here to start Good Spell Gone Bug, that’s what I want, Good Spell Gone Bug. I’ve got, I think three tracks to upload. It’s a very short piece, so no big deal. So let me get that started while we talk.
However, if I’m uploading something like Shard & Shield with seventy two chapters plus intro and outro credits, all of that sort of thing, that turns into quite the project and that’s a lot of project actually. So I, poor Jon was watching me the other night, I was just… I dragged one file over, dragged one file over, dragged one file over, and manually renaming every one of those as we go, because as you can see here, sorry, I’m talking more slowly while I’m working.
So is the upload runs. And some of the other platforms that I’ve used are a little bit smarter about grabbing metadata of things. This one just uses the file name. Exactly. So that’s nice. That’s not what I want. I’m going to say it’s in short credits and so I have to manually rename that because it’s not going to grab that metadata.
So but, you know, there we go. That’s that’s not the not the end of the world. Here’s what you need to know. If you’re going to get the AppSumo deal, which is fifty nine dollars for a lifetime subscription as opposed to thirty nine dollars for every month, you can see the math! If you’re going to do that, they actually are running a behind the scenes promo that if you then give them a review, doesn’t even have to be a five star review, just review them on any of several platforms. They will give you temporary, you know, like a month or so, whatever upgrade which it does get you the bulk upload.
So if I want to come over here, Add Track, I can click bulk upload, I can grab these other two and grab them in here. And here we go. If I had discovered that before, uploading 72 chapters would have been great.
Hey, what happened? Try again. Why were you having a trouble? Huh? Oh, I know why you’re having to. OK, I’m sorry, I disabled my cloud syncing to avoid dropped frames on the stream tonight so I wouldn’t be competing for bandwidth. And I didn’t have that file locally. So we’re just going to leave you. Bye. So. So we’re just going to call this closing credits and there is no body to this story.
There you go. You can make individual tracks, public or private. I don’t know why you would want to in an audio book, but there’s just a lot of features that you have available with this. Also, that was the wrong. I just published that to the wrong. Let’s put this in the right book. There we go. The other thing you can do, come down here, you can give your individual tracks cover art. So if you want it every chapter to have its own picture, you could do that.
You also can attach files. I like this because I have a map for Shard & Shield that can go in the introduction track and now they have a map, a PDF or a JPEG or whatever you would like to do. For my nonfiction, I have some supplementary material attached to individual chapters. That is more visual in nature, and so, like sometimes when you get audiobooks from the library and they’ll have, you know, here’s the PDF that you can download with it, you can do that. But instead of a PDF per book, you can have a PDF per chapter. You know, you can do a lot with it.
PJZooFit potentially ignorant question. What if you use to record your audio? Not an ignorant question. I have a fairly decent amateur setup. I have a nice microphone. See if I can. Hey, what are we doing here. OK. Hello. My my nice microphone here. I have a. And I actually haven’t used it yet, this is my newer microphone, and I had a nice foam bubble that I used with my previous microphone. I haven’t done some testing yet with this one. And then I have some really nice software because video editing was a thing that I did. And so I collected other cool toys for that.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it because there’s a ridiculous amount of good information out there if you start just Googling, and I know you podcast. You’ve got a fair leg up on on that anyway. But any anything that you’re using for your better quality sound recording is going to be great for audiobooks. You do need to be very aware of room, your room tone, background noise. The there are minimum sound qualities, fire qualities that the various platforms will accept.
That’s actually one of the things I was going to mention about sound wise is there is no audio quality control. I could upload total junk and it would take it. So it’s on you to make sure that your stuff is good going in. Whereas like, for example, if I upload to Audible, Audible’s got a pretty strict QC check and they have on several occasions sent files back like, sorry when I taken this and they’re not wrong to do that. Like if if their listeners don’t like it, you know, they lose, they lose customer base.
But sound wise, because they’re not trying to run it as a retail catalog, just don’t have that same priority. I guess so. So, yeah, you need to be cautious about your own audio as you’re as you’re uploading this.
PJ, you’ve got your podcasting, you’ve already got a leg up on things. But in general, just whatever you would want, if you look up the recording, the minimum sound minimum file standards for uploading ACX, which is audible, just the uploading side of audible, and then just apply that information across the board.
So I’ve got these tracks, I may come back to the to the book here and I can see it automatically sets up a landing page for me.
“So pretty basic and low budget.” Hey, I’m not running the the highest thing over here, I just try really hard to make good use of what I have. Is Alena in the chat? I don’t think I’ve seen her go by and.
Oh, yeah, sorry, thanks. Hey, look, the landing page, how’s that? Thank you.
Alena does both amateur and professional voice work, and she’s got her, her studio is literally a corner of her basement with foam and quilts and a collection of hodgepodge equipment. So if she comes by, we can we can grab her.
So, hey, thanks, Kate. I saw that. I liked it, too. It made me laugh. OK. Yeah, good, we’re fine, thanks.
OK, so here’s my here’s our landing page I’ve gotten to customize. You can see I have a logo, my name. I can set up my my storefront to a degree. It’s not super fancy, this isn’t like I’m styling a website or anything. This is their site. I just can can customize a little bit.
I’ve only got the two tracks because I don’t have the the body local to upload, but it also gives a little bit of upselling. Would you like some of these other things that Laura has written? OK, and then it’s got a little bit of tech support stuff built in at the bottom, so.
You can just start sending people this page, so if I if I had my social media, I could link just to this landing page, people can make the purchase from there and. Sound wise uses Stripe as a as a payment gateway, so you set up a Stripe account and then what? It’s like two point nine percent plus 30 cents for every transaction. So that’s you’re going to keep 97 percent of your purchase price, which is pretty nice. That’s way better than a lot of other platforms.
And I can. Let’s see. Come down here and set up so I have a discount, so I want to offer it for 50 percent off, I can either set up a this is actually a coupon code. I just need a discount because I’m not very creative when I’m doing my demos.
Or I could use a promo landing page specifically. And if I open that up, you can see it comes up with it on sale. So then I can send people that link instead to to have it on it on a discount. And if I come back here, you know, you can set it to expire. That promotion again, all all of those great things.
OK, Alena is here, sorry. She said she just went to yeah, yeah, well, maybe we’ll grab Alena later to talk about home audio setups.
Yes, PJZooFit. It’s all automatic. So it’s pulling from your own account what what books to suggest other books from your account and know this audio.
No, this audio is is an outlier. Audio price. Good Spell Gone Bug is a short story. So I’m selling it for super-cheap because it’s not a book, it’s a story. So, you know, it’s like it’s like more like a podcast episode than it is a book, so. Yes, so let me get back to the
Again, the the dashboard is not an audio book specific, audio book centric dashboard, so a lot of their people will be doing subscriptions or podcasts or, you know, those kinds of setups. So they don’t just have a column full of pricing. But my other items are much more typically audio book priced. To see if I can get to a landing page here for Shard & Shield. Yes. So this is a little bit more. And again, I can price this more competitively than it would be on, say, audible, because I get more money from the sale, so.
Oh, a video sound booth tour would be a lot of fun, we should do that at some point. OK, and there’s a Con Job audio book that was my very first audio. Baby’s first audio book, way back when.
OK, and I’m sorry. WorkAppropriateGoth, I didn’t see what was nifty. But I’m hoping I’m hoping that you got enough time to see whatever it was.
All right. Are there other questions before I move on or. Just making sure that we get this. So what I don’t like as much. Let me see if I can go here, where is this tracks? And I’ve said I gave a heads up that you have to watch and rename your tracks as they come in, you can play your tracks here on the individual track page where you can upload your attachments and your individual art if you would like that.
You cannot play your tracks from the book page itself, which, again, is something that I can do on other platforms, and I miss here. Because super paranoid Laura, who may have had a friend once upload an audio book with a couple of tracks flipped in order. Certainly not something I ever did. Definitely not. Just a friend.
And so I like to go through before I publish a book and just quick play just a few seconds of every track to make sure Chapter seven comes before Chapter eight and not the other way around.
And I just can’t do that quickly and easily on this platform. But every time I run into something here, that’s just it takes me a few extra clicks to do. I tell myself sixty dollars for life versus forty dollars a month and then it’s fine. OK, so that’s, that’s, that’s really where I am. Like I don’t have to sell that many books to pay for my lifetime investment on this platform. So yeah.
So Social Civil Savvy has had an audio book for a couple of years and Fired Up has had an audio book for two or three years. I did not do the Fired Up audio book. So this is a great idea that did, a side side bunny trail on “done is better than perfect.” Right?
So I had been intending to do a fired up audio book for a really long time and it was staying on my to do list as opposed to I got that done list. And then Tantor, who’s a big name in audiobooks, contacted me and asked if they could purchase audio rights.
And I looked at the contract and I had this actual conversation in my head, which was I could make more money if I did this audio book and retailed it myself. I know I could. But on the other hand, right now, I’m making no money at all on the audiobook because I haven’t actually done it yet. I keep meaning to, but that doesn’t count.
So I sold them the audio rights. They paid me a lump sum. I will get royalties after that lump sum, you know, so after I earn out that advance. And is as much as I can make doing it myself. No. Is it more than I made by not doing it? Yes. So I say a lot. You’ll hear me say a lot that there are many correct answers, and I think that’s an example of one of them. I did get around to doing the Social, Civil, and Savvy audiobook, but Fired Up, I just wasn’t getting it done. So take the money and let somebody else do it. Yes. This is this is what this is what traditional publishing is for guys.
So, OK, so once I get everything in, I can reorder the tracks, that sort of thing. You’re going to see on BookFunnel, that is something you cannot do. So this is something I like here and this is something I do. Findaway Voices is where I distribute my audio that goes to traditional retailers and to libraries as well. And they’ve got a great audio platform set up. But but most people know about them. So that’s why we’re not doing the walk through there. And and they are not going to give you, you know, 97 percent of the royalties either. So that’s why we’re doing the walk through over here. But I like them because that’s how I get into libraries. So not knocking them. You can do both. You can do all of the things.
OK. So I mentioned let me see if I can get here. So this is the AppSumo offer, and you can see it’s fifty nine dollars for life or ten dollars a month. The guys a six months, take it away. The link that you’re seeing in the chat is my affiliate link. So that would be nice. I would appreciate if you use that, if you decided to go with that. Certainly don’t have to. The bonus of that is it does give you ten dollars toward AppSumo if you haven’t purchased them before, or through them before.
AppSumo, if you’re not familiar, I know I’ve talked about them on the screen before. They are, I get so much stuff from AppSumo. They do amazing deals on software for companies that are either trying to get a fast cash infusion so they can do a big level up or trying to get a bunch of word of mouth and buzz going or something like that. So they will have a limited offer for something like this. So that I will I will tell. Oh my gosh, you guys, this I found this deal and it helps them that way.
But it also really helps me because. Sixty dollars for life. Yes. I’ll take that anyway so you can see these other other deals they have.
And if I were, you know, selling a whole lot of regular subscription audio content, I had a self-help podcast and a true crime podcast and all that, all the top, top things going on here or not even as a podcast, but like a subscription content, because, again, you can mark this out private and turn it into subscription models and all of that. Then there’s some really nice features they have for those high tiers.
But until I am rolling around in my money like Scrooge McDuck, I’m going to get this fifty nine dollar lifetime access deal and then just click the few extra times to do those extra things that are not as slick in that lower tier.
So. OK. And I showed you oh, yeah, so you can also make it back here. Because I don’t remember if I showed you this, you can bundle things, so if I wanted to sell a collection of maybe a whole series together or something like that, Shard of Elan number two is in progress. So I could I could put together a collection of by the entire series as one audio collection, and then I could sell that for a bundle. Right. Make people get a good deal of that kind of thing.
So, yeah, I just like this. It’s got a fair number of features here. You will see here there’s a record tab. This is a higher tier option that is not available at the AppSumo deal level. I’m OK with that because, you probably shouldn’t be making your audio book here anyway, for all the reasons we were just talking about with, you know, sound quality and whatnot. This, me just speaking into a Web browser, is not going to be the kind of sound quality I want for my listeners to pay for. So just be aware of that.
There are other items that other features that are available only at the higher, higher tier things you can set. You can schedule. So if somebody makes a purchase and then you can drip content to them on it, automatically releasing content to them on schedule publication. So. And I can’t schedule. I can’t preload and then schedule a release date at the AppSumo tier. Oh, no, I have to stay up on the day of and click the button again for sixty dollars for life. I’ll stay up and click the button.
You know, subscriber notifications. That has to be manual as opposed to fully automated. Again, that’s something I’ll live with for the price. If you’re paying for the higher tier, you can not only have people purchase audio books, you could have them rent audio books so they could get it for a lower price, but not get to keep it, you know. So that’s that is a cool feature. I’ll get it when I’m Scrooge McDuck. OK, those kinds of things.
So anyway, if it’s something where, you know, you are doing a lot of audio, you are making a fair amount of money off of it and you’re thinking those upgrades sound pretty nice. You regularly upload books with 70 some chapters and you want to keep both upload forever. The behind the scenes promo that I mentioned will also give you a coupon for 30 percent off those higher tiers. So, again, if you want to do that, it’s a good deal. I’m just saying I can do a lot with AppSumo deal.
So, OK, and then for ebooks, you know, let me just hop over and show you audiobooks on book funnel as well. And this is going to be a little bit less of a walk through because the BookFunnel dashboard shows more information than I am comfortable putting on a livestream. For example, in order to show you some of the set up, it has a list of all of my recent customers email addresses that would be visible. And they didn’t sign up for me to stream that information. So I’m going to be a little more selective about what you see in the in the, what am I trying to say? In the BookFunnel Dashboard.
I’m sorry, I saw PJZooFit question, I got totally distracted. 50 private listeners, that is not for purchases. OK, so if the question was that low tier that that lifetime deal tier only allows 50 private listeners, those are for private. If you remember when we were setting up the audio book, we could choose public or private. And for audio book that I’m selling, I’m setting it public.
That would be if I have a pool. So, for example, for your page, for your podcast and you’re you’re talking to people in general about your your PJZooFit program, and then you have a inner circle of people who paid for a VIP membership, who get a special bonus collection of material.
And so they’re getting that audio content on top of your regular podcast. But it’s private just for them. You could have only 50 people in your inner circle. So if I hope I’m explaining that in a in a clear manner. So that is not your sales limit by any means. That is the number of private subscribers that you could have. And so, yeah, so if I were if I were Michael Hyatt or somebody, that would be an insanely low number for my for my VIP tier of private subscribers. I don’t have any. So it’s perfectly reasonable for me.
OK. All right. So let me get back to BookFunnel. Yeah, so here I am on Book Funnel. Now, book final is a monthly subscription or it could be an annual. I actually do an annual because you save a little money that way. And Book Funnel, I want I want to point out, first of all, has a lot of features that are not just a book delivery, so that is probably not even the primary reason to have book fuddle. It’s what I’m showing you tonight. Book funnels. Good for — Actually, this is kind of book delivery — sharing promotions with other authors. So a bunch of epic fantasy writers get together, we do a group promotion and then we share audiences or something like that. Lead magnets, distributing ARCs to to early readers. All that kind of stuff is stuff that you can do with book funnel.
Story origin also does a lot of that. Story origin is officially launching still right now and has some good pricing going on. So both of those are things to look into.
But one thing that you can do with BookFunnel is use it to deliver e-books and audio books that you sell on your own website. So when I do this, I use WooCommerce on my own site.
I run a WordPress site. Woo Commerce is a free shopping cart software that is amazing. It’s incredibly advanced. And the way their business model works is, their core shopping cart software is free, and then they have some really cool add ons that cost money. Probably you don’t need most of those add ons or any of those add ons. I don’t think I pay for any of my Woocommerce material. I have the core WooCommerce shopping cart and a couple of free extensions. And the only thing I might add to that is they have a subscription plug in, which if I decide to go into a Patreon or other subscriber path, anything, that would be one way that you could do it, keeping everything on your own website.
We’ll talk about that next month when we do our crowdfunding and monthly subscriber talk, because I do have people coming in to talk about that. And that will be very cool. I think that’s May 18th. I don’t know, check the calendar.
So what I’m saying is getting around to actually saying, this is what the back end of my website looks like and I have it showing up there. Yeah, you guys can see it. So I have a product that is the Good Spell Gone Bug audio book, and then I just treat it as you can see here, a virtual downloadable product, which I can set up all inside of. That free Woocommerce software, and then I connect that to book funnel. Let me see if I can get over here and do this.
All right. So here I have the Good Spell Gone Bug audiobook. I think I can open this here without displaying anything yet. OK, again, I’m trying not to share people’s information online. And BookFunnel also has a couple of interesting choices where some sensitive information is not is not obscured on the screen, on your own dashboard. And besides, I don’t mean other people’s credit card numbers. That’s never going to be the issue. I mean, like my own API key, which I do definitely do not want to stream out onto the interweb. And that is visible on the dashboard where often that is obscured on a dashboard. So these are things that I’m just trying to be a little bit cautious about.
So I’m sorry. That’s why we’re going slowly through BookFunnel. But here I, I can see I’ve set up my book page. I can have a landing page and everything just as much, just the same way here. And. Then if I went to. See, because it’s already set up here, I would have to open a new, and this is one where I can’t show you the process, I’m sorry, because it does show you things that we’re not going to see.
But I would create a new delivery action, is what it’s called. And there is a nice walk through of this on the BookFunnel site, which I will link to actually. Let me see if I can link to that right now. Where did it go? Huh? It’s gone. Oh, here it is. Look at this. So let me just drop this in the chat to be easy, easy access.
All right. So this is a nice, nice step by step walkthrough if you have to, or set up what you can do very quickly. If you have a WordPress site, which I do recommend, anyway you can get this done in a couple of minutes. So it says five minutes here. That’s including reading the directions. OK, and that is that is one time set up, as it says here. You set it up, but you only have to do this one time. Then you’re then you’re good for as many books as you would like to do.
Then you’re going to go into BookFunnel and you’re going to create what they call a new delivery action. So this new action name, I’m just going to call this Good Spell Demo, because I can.
And I can select, I want this. You can actually bundle here, too, if you wanted to. So you’ve got these these options here. You can set up a preorder. And again, you can do that on SoundWise, but not at the AppSumo lifetime tier.
So that’s just what you’re willing to pay for. Bookfunnel, I want to say, starts at one hundred dollars a year. And then right now, audio is in beta. They said the audio beta would end in the first quarter of 2021. So technically I’m on grace time right now.
When that beta ends for the audio books, it’s going to be, what is it? I’ve got the numbers here somewhere. Yeah, it’ll be between one hundred and twenty to six hundred dollars a year additional on top of that one hundred dollar base subscription cost, to do the BookFunnel audio delivery. Now, that sounds like a lot of money, but then we go back and you look at the SoundWise monthly monthly cost, you’ll see that it’s not that dissimilar.
This is why I really liked the lifetime deal. I wanted it. That’s why I wanted to do this. Even though I’m I’m not that, I’m still getting set up with this thing. I haven’t sold any of my products on SoundWise yet because I’m still transferring them all in and getting everything set up. But I’ve only been using it for about a week. I know that I like it and I wanted to share it before that that deal expired.
So that’s what we’re doing with that anyway. So I can set this up as a preorder. And then you have here the Woocommerce SKU. And an item like this is actually pretty straightforward, even though it looks — if you’re not if you haven’t been doing a lot of shopping cart software, don’t let it bully you. You can handle it.
Your SKU is what you set up here in your inventory. And that’s literally whatever you decide to name it. So I’m calling it GoodSpellAudio1. Actually, you know what? I’m going to call this GoodSpellAudio2, because I’m setting up something new and I think it needs to be distinct and different, unique, so I’m going to come here and I’m just going to copy paste that in.
Your item link is going to be wherever this appears on your store. So if I have a product page on the front end of my website, this is my link right here, my permalink. So I’m just going to copy this. Oh, sorry, that menu is not showing for you guys. I’m using. I’m right. Clicking and copying it. So it just I thought I was being so helpful by by doing it that way so you could see what I was doing. And then your item link, you’re just going to paste in here.
As long as this is paused it will not be delivering books. So make sure that you unpause it. I haven’t talked to anyone, but I’m going to guess that’s the number one complaint that — I haven’t done this myself. I’m just saying it’s default paused and it’s got to be the number one problem they run into.
And again, they handle all the tech support. That’s a great reason to do this through a platform rather than — I mean, I could just have a bunch of MP3 files on my website. Then it would be my problem and I’m not into it being my problem.
OK, and so then I can save it and boom, that’s it. Now, what happens over here when someone checks out, when they purchase my book, because I have this set up with as a virtual and downloadable, because we’ve connected Woocommerce to Bookfunnel, it should automatically fire, they make the payment on a website, on my website and BookFunnel launches it out.
Just in case, I have a text file that is their downloadable on my website. And it’s just a text file that says, Hey, thanks for purchasing. Here’s the link where you’re where you can get your book. If you don’t receive this email automatically, here’s where you can get help with everything. And it’s just all spelled out there so that nobody comes and says, hey, Laura, I can’t get my book. They’ve gotten it both in an email and an edit and a downloadable file when they make the purchase, that tells them exactly where everything is coming from.
“So I’m not into it being my problem is my life motto.” Hey, yeah. Like like SEP Field, someone else’s problem. Fantastic.
OK, so is this making sense? And am I explaining this well? Does anybody have questions about what’s going on here? You can do this with e-books as well, so certainly come back here to — so I don’t want to, I don’t think I want to click over, and I’m trying to decide where I can click with book funnel without showing things.
So here I have Con Job as an ebook and Con Job as an audio book. And then I can set up that exact same kind of delivery through Woo commerce.
I can of course, if I come back here, instead of this being a text file that says, here’s where your book is, I could just have that be a downloadable ebook. Right. I could have that be in EPUB or a mobi or PDF or whatever you wanted here.
I don’t really like piracy. That’s a whole nother topic we can get into another time, but I just don’t like it makes me angry, because I know what — I found Shard & Shield on a pirate site the week before it released, which is when I realized it was time to clean out my advance reader list. So these are things that that I just want to be really cautious about.
I have a plug in on Woo Commerce that will watermark a PDF with the purchasers email address. I don’t have any way to do that with the EPUB or the MOBI because it’s not processing those files, that already packaged.
Book funnel, if I give them an EPUB or a mobi to deliver, will watermarkwith the purchaser’s email address. So then when it shows up on whatever pirate site that I’m not going to advertise right now, I can see clearly who purchased it. And then maybe they would have just a little bit of hesitation about putting it up there with their email visible on it.
So. “I don’t really like piracy” is also a good life motto, right? Yeah. Pirates and ninjas, they’re great when they’re pirates and ninjas. Not with my work.
So, OK, ShyRedFox says done a bit with e commerce and this all makes sense so far. Great. Awesome. So anyway, so that’s the advantage. That’s why I would use an external delivery service for things like ebooks, which you could have totally host on your own website. And e-books aren’t even an enormous file sizes for bandwidth. It’s going to be as much of an issue. But, you know, I just like having that extra layer of it’s someone else’s technical problem. You know, somebody else can play tech support all the time, which is great. And then also having that watermarking option is nice.
So. Oh, I’m sorry, I did want to point out. I skipped a thing, it’s not that critical. But when I am uploading tracks. See if I can get here. Let’s go this way, if I wanted to add a track and I’m just going to upload any old track again here. So I’m uploading this one again, I don’t know, it might tell me, but this is already up here. No, it let me do it again.
OK. If I come back here. These will upload bottom to top, so if I come over and I start this new chapter one, let’s do Chapter two, let’s do Chapter three. Oh, I’m going to have to reshuffle all of these to make sense.
OK, so just be aware, if you are uploading one at a time, start at the end of your book and slide them over one at a time to stack it up. You can save yourself some time that way. And you’d figure that out on your own. But now you don’t have to.
So. What else do I want to mention? That’s most of it, actually. Oh, and we’re it we’re after eight already, so I’ve been going longer than I thought I did. Are there any other questions remaining for this? Both of these, as I said, sound wise takes stripe as payment. Book funnel, they’re making all of their purchases on Woo commerce where you can set up any number of things. You can take Stripe. You can take, I’m set up with Square. I’m actually set up with both square and stripe at this point.
And you can set up with you know, I don’t know why you’d want to do direct account transfers for ebooks, but you could. You know, you’ve got a lot of options.
So if you’re going through, if you’re selling directly on your site through ecommerce, you can take a huge number of payment options. Sound wise, it’s going to need to be Stripe at this point. That’s the only payment gateway that they use. But Stripe is pretty straightforward.
Yeah, PJ says, PJZooFit says looks like shuffling order isn’t a huge deal. It’s really not like, again, for the epic fantasy with, you know, seventy seventy five chapters, that’s going to be a pain. For a cozy mystery, it’s probably not going to be more than a minute of shuffling. So that’s fine.
So OK. All right, well, let me get back to here, so, yeah, and if we are going to have at some point, I’m going to have some people on to talk about audio books. That date is not nailed down yet, but I have been doing some advance chatter with people to come on and just talk about production of audio books, both recording them yourself and hiring them, done things that I have both done.
And then we do also have some people coming on to talk about Patreon and other subscription fundraising Patreon kind of services. I need a word for that. There’s a word for that. So. All right.
Well, hey, guys, thanks for hopefully that was a little bit useful as a walk through.
I do not know when that AppSumo deal ends. Sometimes they stick around for a month or two and sometimes they’re around for a few days. So I would say if it’s something you’re considering, you know, don’t don’t sleep on it for a month. You know, you don’t need to set anything on fire and burn over there right now. But but don’t wait around too long, because if I don’t know how long I don’t have they don’t post expiration dates on this for the most part. So, yeah.
Crowdfunding. Kickstarter. Well, less Kickstarter. It’s not really an ongoing subscription model and we’re going to be talking about subscription models. So there we go.
So, fun like Moose Burpees. Hey, I got that email. I haven’t had a chance to see it yet, but if it’s if it’s good, we’ll talk about Moose Burpees later too. OK, the podcast is gonne be what the heck just happened, because that was audio out of context.
All right. Hey, thank you guys for joining me. I if you have questions more on this kind of thing, you know where to find me or I can, happy to clarify via email or something like that. Or we could talk about more on this kind of topic later as we go forward.
So this was the Learn With Me because I am still learning SoundWise because it’s relatively new to me. Thank you guys very much for hanging out. Yes, you’re more than welcome, ShyRedFox. And yeah, I will see you next week. Is next week the Create-in? I think next week is the Create-in. I think that’s right. So I will see you next week for the Create-in.
Thank you, everybody. Take care. Good night.
