A Year of Audiobooks

A year ago I took Google up on its offer to convert the ebooks I had in their store to auto-narrated audiobooks for free. In the last year audiobooks have more than doubled my sales on Google, accounting for 65% of those sales. Their ratings match their ebook version. When I converted my newest novel at the end of March, the program was still free, but they had added the option of using different voices for different characters in the story. You select a narrator, and then select from the voices they offer to voice the dialog of the various characters in the story, giving you the option of having an ensemble narrate your story instead of one person doing accents.

Traditional publishers will not sign a contract with an author unless the author gives them the audiobook rights. It is that lucrative of a market these days. Google is a free way of getting a foot in that market, with the bonus of being able to offer audiobooks at a very competitive price.

Sales of e and audio books on Google accounted for 67% of my total book sales for my eighth year of publishing. There are a billion reasons for this. Millions of people read and listen to books on their phones. The Google Play Store is the built-in store on all Android phones outside of China, and there are billions of them. There is no bigger market for your books in the world.

Everyone’s books, audience, and goals are different, but I have to believe that if you are selling wide, and not selling on Google or offering audiobooks, you are leaving money on the table.