Alyssa Berthiaume – Copywriting, Ghostwriting, Lady Boss and Owner of The Write Place, Right Time

How would you know if it’s the right time for you to start publishing a book? Tune in to this Pod to Publish Book and Audiobook Masterclass and find the answers.(Masterclass on Free Your Brand  Podcast, July, 2020)

For many reasons, podcasters are uniquely suited to publish books and audiobooks about topics that are of interest to their existing audiences. Not the least among these is that they already have an audience in place—it’s just a matter of channeling them to another medium. Not every podcaster is cut out for this, however. How would you know if it’s the right time for you to start publishing a book? In this masterclass, Tracy Hazzard is joined by Juliet Clark, the Founder of Super Brand Publishing, who gives tips on writing a book as a podcaster; and Tina Dietz, the CEO of Twin Flames Studios, who follows up with some of the basics of audiobook production and publishing. Each an expert in their own spheres, these powerful women are partnering up on a venture that seeks to put creative power back in the hands of creators. Listen in and let them help you amplify your message even further.

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Watch the episode here:

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Pod to Publish Book and Audiobook Masterclass for Authors and Podcasters with Juliet Clark And Tina Dietz

I’ve got Tina and Juliet here. Our subject on this episode is Pod to Publish. I want to cover a couple of things first for you. First, why Pod to Publish? Podcasters have a distinct advantage that published authors don’t—speakers and authors have the same problem I’ve come to find over time. We sustain our audience over here. We do week after week. We’re in the ear of our audience and that has a powerful effect. We want to use that to our advantage. That’s the angle of how we’re going to talk about going from Pod to Publish and what you can take from your show to create a wonderful, bestselling book and an audiobook, because there’s a match in our audience there.

When you command your brand and your audience, you get that audience focus and attention week after week. You also see the topics that are of interest, the ones that increase engagement, the ones that are controversial, people are highly interested in and want to learn more about. You can see that because you're supposed to see that and how your episodes are ranking, but you can also see that in the engagement that they’re getting on social after you air them. If we pair that with our website—we’re driving traffic back to our website—we have a distinct advantage over authors and speakers who don’t own their audience.

When you go out there and speak, you’re speaking in front of somebody else’s audience. They own the audience and very few of them share their audience with you. Very few events give you the email list of everybody who’s there. You have to pull, grab and try and get everyone in that audience to connect with you, but that’s not the case on your own show. Your own show, that audience belongs to you or they wouldn’t be subscribed. You still have to get them off of there and that’s why I talk about the website strategy because if we add in our website strategy, we’ve got a place to capture emails to get people.

We've got to get them off of Amazon if we’re already on there as an author. We have a lot more command over that audience connection so we know what to write about. We know what interests people, and we also know how to engage them and get them further through the process. For most of you putting out a book has a business purpose, and that’s what Juliet Clark is going to talk about. Making sure that we write the right book. I’m going to be honest with you: The very first one is completely the wrong book. I followed one of those models, hired one of those companies doing “speak to book.”

It felt all wrong the whole time I was doing it. It felt like totally introspective. It felt like all it was about me. I was like, “Is this what people want to read about? Are they going to be interested in this?” The questions were going through my mind the whole time that we were doing it, the whole time that we were recording this book. Plus, I didn’t love the whole record-to-book process because it felt contrived. It didn’t feel like it flowed, it didn’t feel organic for me. It didn’t feel like it was, “let’s explore these different topics and then assemble it together.” That was my process.

It didn’t work for me—I never published that. That has been sitting on my credenza for years. Of course, I didn’t need it, because I had a show and I was given an Inc. column. I was asked to write an Inc. column almost within 6 or 7 months of having my show. I thought, “I should be an author because I have a column. I should go out there. I’m a writer so there should be a connection between my audience who wants to read something—I should have a book.” Hence book number two, which got as far as getting a cover. It’s pretty edited and it has all of the relevant articles. I was starting to hit onto something that was working for me. It has all of the articles that were highly ranked and trafficked within my Inc. articles. There were lots of great connections and things going on here. The problem is that the longer it took me to do this, because of the way the writing happens? There’d be new articles and I felt like the book was constantly out of date.

Instead, I just started a second show on this and that’s how Product Launch Hazzards come about. That was my fast way of doing that, and also because it didn’t have a good business strategy. That was the number one reason I didn’t launch that book. I could have still launched that book, which would have been a great lead generator for audiences to my show, but I didn’t want to run a business. I wasn’t operating a business model that did anything but want to attract audiences. I didn’t want to sell them anything. I didn’t want to do any services. For us, it was an older business model. We were sharing our information to give it away and make sure people had it. That book didn’t make a lot of sense for me to put money into something that didn’t have a business purpose for me at the end of the day when the articles and all the other things were already out there. If it was my primary goal, this would have been the ideal book to write. It just wasn’t for me in terms of business purposes.

I’m onto my third book. This one is on its way to being published. I already paid Juliet for it—we’re on our way to doing that, and it is going to be our book for podcasters—for new and aspiring podcasters, not for existing ones. That’s going to be a whole other book that will come out and that will be the second book that we’re working on. We’re working on that from my show, The Binge Factor. These are the kinds of things—I’ve done it wrong, but lucky for me, I didn’t spend all the money. I stopped when I realized how hard it was going to be to market or that the business plan wasn’t there because I have a bigger view of the marketing programs. Also, the business plans, the things that we want to do, the flow and the lead generation that goes through my business and what’s happening here. I stopped myself before I spent the money to find out that the book did nothing for me and it wasn’t going to do anything for me.

I had great advisors and two of them are here. That’s where we’re going to lead into having Juliet Clark, who is an expert in profitable book launching. She’s a bestselling author herself. She knows what it takes. She advises authors, speakers, and experts who have a business, who want to promote, profit, and publish—which happens to be your podcast name—their book. They want to profit before they publish. They want to make sure they have a platform. They want to make sure they have an audience. She’s the Founder of Super Brand Publishing. She’s going to cover why you should or shouldn’t be a published author.

Following Juliet is going to be Tina Dietz, who is an audiobooks expert. She has a full-service audiobook recording studio called Twin Flames Studios. She’s going to talk about the audiobook opportunity and the match to us as podcasters. I love this. The thing about Juliet and Tina, and the reason they are both here on our Masterclass, is because like us here, we all believe in retaining your rights and doing the things that have a business return on investment. Returning new leads, returning your business, ultimately returning your profits. That’s why I’ve asked them to do a masterclass with you. First up is going to be Juliet. Let’s go on and have you give us your first segment on authors.

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Juliet:

I’m going to talk a little bit about authority books, but I’m going to talk about first, why you need to have authority before you write this book. We’re going to be pulling the curtain back on, are books still relevant? For the most part, a lot of us think they aren’t. What are the big book mistakes we’ve seen and why podcasters are great people to put books together, especially audiobooks. It’s about repurposing content with meaning, and having a plan to monetize all of this.

Books do matter. They are still relevant, but only when they’re done right. The one thing that Tina and I talked and laughed about all the time are all the bad books out there and that’s because people have written them for the wrong reasons. They didn’t have a plan, and they didn’t move forward in a way that was profitable for anybody. The first question you need to ask is, “to book or not to book?” This is where I proved to you that I’m the worst salesman on the planet because not everyone should write a book. We don’t take every book that’s brought to us.

There has to be a plan and a reason behind it, and I’m going to talk about some of those things we see that are reasons to not write a book because I want you to identify yourself in this. One of the things that happened for me on my journey to book writing— for those of you who don’t know, I wrote my first book in 2010, it was a mystery novel. I killed my ex-husband in it. I was going through a divorce. It was not only a fun and cathartic experience, but it was also the wakeup call—I had been in traditional publishing—to how bad the self-publishing model was, and how they were ripping people off. Those types of companies will take your book no questions asked, but that’s not always a good thing. Here are some of the things we’ve seen throughout the years of self-publishing.

We’ve seen a lot of life stories and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but for most of you, your life is not exciting enough to write a life story. You want to leave a legacy book for your family—that’s fantastic—but most of you, it’s just not worthy. Poorly written books—there are a lot of people out there that we have encountered that have not written great books. Not just grammar and all of those types of things, but the way the book is structured, it doesn’t make sense, it ends up being what I call a “barfa book.” ​

Some of the big mistakes we’ve seen throughout the years are experts who were writing books to make themselves experts. These are people who went to a business “ra-ra,” they indicated that they were online, marketers, their products and services weren’t selling and the guru in the room saw a moneymaking opportunity and said, “You need a book. You need to be the person that wrote a book on this topic.” That book, if you don’t have an author platform built—that meaning an audience—it’s going to be another failed product. We’ve seen a lot of that going on out there, and just writing it doesn’t make you an expert.

Another one we’ve seen a lot of is what I call the Life Story, but it’s people who wanted to talk about their journey, and instead of talking about their journey, they put out a “barfa book.” It wasn’t interesting. It had things in there that were too much information. Especially if you have a business, you don’t want people to know every little thing about you. These didn’t sell either. They were poorly written, and it wasn’t enough substance about the expert, and it was too much about the individual who was writing the book. I always call these “big ego books” too.

The other mistake we saw was: no structure, focus, or professional input. You started writing a book on your own one day and the structure was not where it should be. You didn’t have endorsements. You didn’t have an intro written by somebody who could help you sell the book. We see a lot of that. Probably the biggest mistake I see is someone who comes in with a book and when I ask who edited it, they’ll say, “My Aunt Peggy is an English teacher.” That’s not a professional editor. If you want to bust out in a professional way, your book has to look like a book that a traditional publisher would have taken on. Another big mistake is experts that are in search of an audience. Anytime you have a product, service, or book where you wrote it without feedback from your audience, you’re going to fail with that product. That’s what’s happened with a lot of these experts that are in search of an audience. You need to have that audience first.

I know all of you are podcasters—you’ve already done that. That’s what makes you an excellent prospect for this, because you have a built-in audience. Another big mistake is people who write books too soon. If your business is brand new or you haven’t monetized yet, it's too soon to write a book. That’s the perfect kind of book that we like to send on its way.

Back in 2015, I had a woman who came to us, who wrote a book. She worked with our writing coach on a “six figures to six months” book. When she got to chapter eight, which was Joint Ventures, she just got stuck. The writing coach came to me and said, “I don’t understand why she stopped.” I picked up the phone and called her and said, “What’s going on with this chapter? I met you at a joint venture event.” She admitted that she had never actually done joint ventures. She was writing this book without tried and true products and services that she had tried herself and been successful with. If you’re not successful with what you’re monetizing yet, it’s too soon to write a book.

The result of all this is that most independent authors will sell less than 100 copies of their book. You’re not going to get the ROI you’re looking for at all. The other result of this has been a lot of publishing on Amazon and if you only knew what the backside of Amazon provided you, you wouldn’t spend the $200 to do it. Amazon does not have true publishing services that are legitimate in the worldwide distribution or worldwide royalty capture. There’s a lot going on back there that because you don’t know what you’re doing as a first time or second-time author, you don’t understand what you’re getting into. The result is also what I like to call The Invisible Author. You write the book, you get it out there and guess what? People still don’t know who you are because you didn’t build that audience in advance. Why is this such a great platform for podcasters? First of all, you’re experts. You have episodes out there. You’re talking about what you do. Most of you have this monetized in some way. Your show is not your only monetization point. You have multiple streams of income through your company you are in a perfect position to drive traffic from your podcast into the book, and into other products and services.

Also, because you’re bingeable. It’s easy to take a thematic group of episodes and make them into a book that’ll be bingeable. Sometimes people don’t have the time to listen to every single podcast on a particular topic, but you can group a topic together and make it into a how-to guide. You can make it into an informational piece about, to give you an example, Seven Ways To Capture Expert And Expert Audience. You can put this all together in a thematic book that is helpful. Because you have the audience you need, you’ve already built what I would call an author platform through your expert podcasting. This also is because you have content. If you’re like me, I’m about to hit my 100th episode. I have more content than I ever envisioned I would have in my life. I can write a ton of books and be happy about it. You also have the credibility at this point. People already are listening. They understand that you are the go-to person in the area that they’re looking for help in. Also, you can create, easily, a thematic help book.

Another thing that a lot of people don’t think about is the learning styles. There are three different kinds of learning styles out there. The visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. With your podcast, you have the auditory covered and for most of you, if you’re using the Hazzards, you have your YouTube channel, you have the video. There are people who learn and enjoy content kinesthetically. The book provides that for people. They like to hold the book in their hands. I hear all the time that many people don’t look at it. They don’t use Kindle because they liked the feel of the pages and the book and Tracy’s one of those. She tells me that all the time because I tell her to do more Kindle and audio. You can reach a little bit different audience with that actual physical book.

This also adds to your brand. You’re bringing brand awareness. You’re expanding the awareness of your brand, not only from the show, but a lot of times we will use the free book funnels in conjunction with our book products. That brings you into a place where you can communicate with your actual audience that wants that book. You can send out the free book, you can upgrade them or have them pay for an additional product or service to get to know you a little bit better. If you have big programs like I do, sometimes people don’t know you, like you and trust you enough to take that big bite right off the bat. You’re able to give them small pieces that build trust. Also, clarity about what you teach. I know when we have 100 episodes or I know some of you out there I’m seeing some people that are on here, some of you have 500, 600 episodes.

Narrowing that down into those thematic books about what you teach, and driving your audience into a thematic workshop—also, why books? Books are a low-barrier product to get into your funnels. When you go out and you have a $20 book, that’s a low barrier product that people can hold in their hand and they can understand who you are and what you do. It doesn’t cost $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 to buy a book and find out more about you. The free shipping book funnels that lead into workshops, that lead into those bigger products you sell. This is the way to do it and have a direct connection with your audience. You not only have their email address, but they’ve been willing to pull out a credit card and buy something. That’s always a good sign.

I’m going to segue into what Tina’s doing here. Why audiobooks? Audiobooks have become the top way that people consume books. We are in a busy world. I know myself, I use audiobooks when I’m out running and I’m an avid runner. I consume easily 10 to 15 hours of audiobooks every week, car time as well. Audiobooks are becoming the new way to consume books.

People are used to hearing your voice already, but of course, you need that book to get to the audiobook. They’re more professional. One of the things that happen when you are with a traditional publisher is many of them will automatically sign into an audiobook contract. There are pros and cons with that. One of the cons is that they can choose the talent. When you write a book and you self-publish it and then go on to produce an audiobook, it’s in your own voice that your audience is already used to hearing. When you’re on Audible, people don’t think of you as a self-published author because you’ve taken that extra step to go into a prestige product like the traditional publishers would. Okay! Tina, I’m going to let you go.

Tina:

Let’s dive in a little bit deeper to the audiobook experience. As Tracy mentioned, I’m the CEO of Twin Flame Studios but I’ve been building businesses internationally much longer than I’ve been in the audio world. An opportunity like this excites me to see the different worlds coming together in this entrepreneurial milange that is super exciting. I got into audiobooks and I became a podcaster because books and podcasting are low hanging fruit for people to start to change their lives. That’s what gets me up in the morning and had me deciding to expand my company out in the directions that it did. It’s specifically talking about audiobooks.

The audiobook opportunity is threefold. It is imagination, it is intimacy and it is income. I’d be willing to bet if I turn this back over to Tracy, she would agree with me that podcasting is also very much those three things, and that’s one of the things we have to delve into. How do podcasting and audiobooks fit together as an opportunity while you as podcasters have a much better advantage than somebody starting from scratch?

Let’s do a little history lesson first. There has been an audiobook renaissance. Audiobooks have been around since about 1930. They were produced during the depression on albums and records. I believe the very first audiobook was a series of Christmas stories. They’re a familiar format for people and that is one of the major reasons why they are incredibly popular. If you’re like me, and you remember growing up with audiobooks—maybe you had an album when you were a kid where it was when Tinkerbell rings her little bell, it’s time to turn the page, or maybe you had books on tape. I remember my first one was Deepak Chopra’s Magical Mind, Magical Body and there were fifteen cassette tapes that you had to manage. Later on, there were 5 or 6 CDs that you had to manage. They were always freaking expensive. When audiobooks went digital and in particular, when Audible and Amazon became under the same umbrella, there was a massive explosion.

Back in the day when we first started having the iPod and we could have a thousand songs in your pocket, which was the slogan, then you could have a thousand books in your pocket with the Kindle and now you can have a thousand audiobooks in your pocket with apps like Audible. We have this library that we carry around with us that feeds and nurtures who we are, and we get to be a part of that, feeding and nurturing other people.

What happened in conjunction with audiobooks going digital was that it lowered the production cost. No more jewel cases, no more pressing of tapes or CDs, none of that. With the advent of home studios, that lowered the cost of production even more. Unlike most things on the planet, in the last ten years the cost of producing audiobooks has dropped about 50%. Therefore, it makes it much more accessible for people on the retail side of things to consume audiobooks. It used to be $30 to $50 to buy an audiobook. Now it’s pretty much a flat $12 to $18 to get an audiobook, depending on the length of the book. Sometimes it’s longer. ​

But it’s available now to everybody. You don’t have to go to a store. You don’t have to have a lot of money to buy and the reach is much bigger. As a result, audiobooks are a $4 billion industry. Year-on-year for the last six years, the audiobook industry has experienced double-digit growth every single year, sometimes as high as up into the 20%, 25%. In one year, it hit 30% growth. Those numbers are outrageous when you think about how businesses tend to grow, 3% to 5% growth for a large industry is more average, not 15% to 25%. However, there is and has been for many years, an issue with the industry. Juliet mentioned the issues with the self-publishing industry. I would say even we take it a step further and say the publishing industry, in general, is a broken model. Taking your rights, taking your royalties for traditional publishing, the predatory practices, self-publishing houses, or experts—all of these things, you have to think about, what is your goal? What’s going to benefit you the most?

Years ago, when I was looking into audio, it was because I’d been building businesses for decades and I’d worked with more than twenty different industries, 9, 10 different countries and at the time I was doing some paid hobby. I’m an entrepreneur. We can’t have a hobby. We have to monetize our hobbies. That’s what we do, and I was voice acting. I was taking some masterclasses by one of the premier audiobook trainers in the world because I was thinking, “It’s a side hustle. This might be cool.” Pat Fraley, who is still teaching and an amazing man, introduced me and the other people in my course, not only to the narration side of audiobooks but to the industry. That all of a sudden created what I call my chocolate and peanut butter moment, which was, “Why aren’t all of the authors I know, all my clients, all of my colleagues, who are doing bestseller campaigns, why not with audiobooks?” That curiosity led me to discover that nobody knew that audiobooks were even an issue and that the audiobook industry was broken. I secret shopped 30 different audiobook publishers, and all of them did the same thing: They took away your control creatively, they made you pay for it, and they controlled your files and your intellectual property at the end. Being a creator myself, I got incredibly offended and said, “We can do this better.” That’s why we started doing what we were doing to make sure that we are advocates for our authors to have a high-quality product, to get out there and do what we need to do to reach a bigger audience.

That brings me to the connection between podcasts and audiobooks. How Tracy and I met was actually, we were both shared some similar podcasting stages. She has Podfest and some other ones; I speak to a podcast audience as well and I’m a podcaster myself. I love the medium and I love the pairing of podcasts and audiobooks together—because you’re already recording. You already have an audio setup. You already clearly, at least in some form or fashion, can handle the sound of your own voice—which a lot of people can’t—and you are in a situation where you’re producing regular content as Tracy and Juliet mentioned. Now what? There’s the opportunity to get out there and create upon your creation.

You create the book from your podcast and then you create the audiobook from your book and this is what we call media matching from marketing. People who listen to podcast are more likely to be audiobook listeners because they’re already audio learners. They already have a leaning in that direction. They like audio and it becomes very fluid and interesting to be able to medium match and be able to market your audiobook, which we’re going to talk about on your show. Market your podcast through your audiobook and use both your audiobook and your podcast as assets to gain you more loyal followers, more leads, get your voice out to a bigger audience. When we create an audiobook, the other beautiful thing about it is that all of your formats on Amazon, in particular, show up on the same page. When you go to Amazon and you go to your book page, you can see the Kindle version, the paperback, the hardcover, and the audio version and this creates what I like to call “might-as-well-itis.”

A lot of times what we find is that people will download the Kindle, particularly if you’re running a free Kindle campaign or a 99¢ campaign. They’ll see the audiobook version and they’ll say, “I have Audible credits. I want to download that book as my first book on Audible.” Why not? Might as well. They get both versions of the book. Your audiobook is never going to hurt your sales on your other versions of your book. It’s always going to be on top of it. Particularly with nonfiction books, what we find is that folks want to have either a Kindle version or a hard copy to make notes. To get the book done, to read it all the way through, they listen to the audio because audio, as podcasters is the most portable, easy to access form of media. That’s why we do it. We can reach more people. Dovetailing your audiobook marketing with podcasting, and this gets very exciting. When you create an audiobook, you create what’s called a Five-Minute Retail Sample. That five-minute retail sample is a little a taster of your audiobook. You can use up to fifteen minutes of your audiobook in your marketing. Fifteen minutes of audio is a pretty long chunk of time. Guess how many different ways you can slice and dice that audio? You can turn it into a video book trailer. You can turn it into audiograms, and you may already be using audiograms as a podcaster.

They're those little video snippets that you can share on social media that are closed captioned. Maybe they have a little sound wave on them. It entices people who are on the video side of things who are just looking for a little snippet of information, “Maybe I need to go listen to more of that.” You can pair the marketing you’re already hopefully doing with your podcast, with your audiobook, to share on social media. Audiobooks also come with two lovely features when you publish them, and these are bounties and gift codes. When you publish through Audible’s self-publishing platform called ACX, you will get 100 gift codes. They give them to you in batches of about 20, 25 at a time. You can use those to promote your audiobook. You can use them as giveaways. You can print them onto a postcard and sell them as upgrades to your physical book if you’re in a live event.

You can also use them to give to trusted colleagues and friends, or clients to give yourself—as review copies. You don’t get galley copies of your audiobook necessarily, but you can give away gift codes for your audiobook that will allow people to leave you reviews on Audible. Because unlike on Amazon, in order to leave a review for Audible, you have to have that specific audiobook in your audiobook library. If you want to gain additional reviews—which of course reviews are always great—you can use the gift codes to help you do that, and you get a hundred of those. It’s a lot to work with.

The other program that Audible has is called the Bounty Program. This is a bonus for you finding Audible a new customer. How this works is that you get special URLs for the US, the UK, France, and Germany. You use those URLs to share your audiobook. Post them in your newsletters, send it out in emails, use it in social media. If that person downloads your book as the first book that they do on Audible, they’re a new audible customer.

They’ll get your audiobook for free. However, if they stay an audiobook customer with Audible for two months, then Audible rewards you for your sacrifice on your royalties by giving you $75 for finding them a new customer and that, of course, is way more than you’d get on the royalty of a book. I know authors who push those bounty codes on the chance that people are not yet an Audible customer because they’re out there even though it’s a popular format. That is a little bit about bounties, gift codes and audiobook marketing in general and how that’s going to dovetail with your podcast.

What do we do at Twin Flames? We are advocates for our authors. We want to make this easy for you, because the definition of an entrepreneur or somebody who podcasts for business, is somebody who won’t work 40 hours for somebody else, but you’ll work 80 hours a week for yourself. I know that—I’m the same way. What we all need are people who are going to take good care of us, the way we want to take care of other people. That’s why I’m partnering with Tracy and Juliet because we are all likeminded in how we work with the people that we make a difference with. We are here to care and advocate for people and create quality so that your message can get out into the world in a way that’s powerful in multiple ways. We need to be reaching more people to make this world a better place and make a great living doing it at the same time. It’s doing well, and doing good.

We don’t take your royalties and rights. You retain creative control and we make sure that your audiobook is both a marketing asset and an income stream for you. It needs to be both of these things, and much like Juliet mentioned before, we don’t take all the books that come to us. Some of them simply aren’t going to work. We also don’t let everybody narrate their own book because narrating an audiobook is not the same thing as recording a podcast. I will say that there is a 95% chance that because you’re an experienced podcaster and you’ve got some audio setup already going in, and you already have been working with your voice, you will be able to narrate your own audiobook, but we will let you know if it’s not feasible for you to do that and work another way through it.

A lot of our authors do narrate their own audiobooks, but a number of them don’t and they opt for other reasons to have a professional narrator do their audiobook. If you’re curious about that, please reach out and I’ll explain to you the process and the difference. For most podcasters, narrating your own audiobook isn’t an option. It is different than recording your podcast. I would never narrate an audiobook speaking this quickly. I would never use the type of breathing that I’m using and I certainly wouldn’t have my audio set up this way. It is a different animal and it is a different form and feel. This is why we do it the way we do it. We offer our author narrators the option of not having to go into a studio, not having to learn any technology or equipment. What we do is we have professional audiobook directors who are narrators and sound engineers themselves and we remote into your audio setup.

We make sure that your audio is perfect for audiobooks and then we live-direct and record you doing your book. You don’t have to hit a button except to get on the recording. You don’t have to worry about editing, stopping, or starting. You don’t have to worry about, do you sound okay? Are you breathing? Are you making any mistakes? We fully live direct you and record through the entire process, and if any of you out there are familiar with any kind of voice acting—we do what’s called punch and roll recording, which is the industry standard for recording an audiobook. This ensures that your audiobook does not sound like somebody who just sat down and read their book into a microphone. It’s going to be high quality audio. It’s going to be performance quality, and then we can make sure that it’s edited, proofed, mastered—perfect—before anything goes to publishing and distribution.

There are a tremendous number of technical details that go into an audiobook that you’ve got a lot more wiggle room with podcasting than you do with audiobooks. You get to tick off all of those particular details. If you want your audiobook to pass the quality control process to get onto Audible or other platforms. We make sure that all of that gets handled for you and you have all the information you need to maximize your audiobook experience and your audiobook as a process—as an asset—for everything that you do. I am super excited about this entire program that we’re all doing together. I’m going to bring Tracy back in and she can share with you and we can all talk together and make sure that we have enough time to go through our Q&A together.

—

Thanks much, Tina and Juliet. I appreciate you guys coming and sharing with us. What I want to do is just wrap up with a little thought on how you might structure this. Now that you’re thinking, “This audiobook thing sounds pretty cool. I could write the right book. I have some ideas. I’m getting some traction with my podcast already. I’ve got some great guest interviews, great people who would be associated with my book if I had stories about them.” As you’re starting to think about that, what does that book look like? What does that audiobook sound like? As you’re starting to think about this, I’ve got a couple of strategies I’m going to throw out to you, just for you to think about and see if this might be something that would interest you.

Let’s say you have a show that has a lot of guest interviews. It’s similar to the model I did with my Inc. articles. I was writing out great brands, great companies, great entrepreneurs and I’ve got all that going. I do the same thing on my show. If I’ve got a lot of great guest interviews—or that’s the only thing that I have in my show—it doesn’t make for the best book. Juliet will tell you that because there’s a lot of those out there where it’s like all the different chapters in that and all the different things are all these different stories from all the different people. It does help promote and market the book, because you’ve got all these people who are willing to share your book because they’re featured in it. It’s a great strategy from a marketing and outreach standpoint, like the same thing that you do on your show, where you invite these great guests on, and then they share your show because they were on it. You want the same thing to go on with your book. However, what we found over time is that we want to frame it just like we like you to frame your guest interviews and we likd you to frame your show with some content that’s about what you’re teaching, what your business is about. Giving it context and giving it transition. That’s always a good idea.

Here are a couple of ideas of things that we’ve helped build for people we’ve done for ourselves and we worked through these processes and we know that they turn out great books that are easy to read, but well-written in the same process because they are structured.

One of the things you can do is frame all of the interviews by theme. Let’s say you have different themes that you talk about. Maybe you’re doing health and wellness and you have a fitness theme, a food theme, and you want to frame them by themes so you could organize the best interviews that you’ve done based on those themes. You could also do it based on topics. I have a show that is the Five Things That Make You Bingeable, it’s on The Binge Factor. We talk about those five things and it’s one is get great guests. The other thing is, it increases your audiences, produce professionally. If I could take each one of those and create sections of some of the best tips, the best stories, the best information out based on those topics and subjects where I know those five topics are already of great interest because we receive a lot of engagement back and people are very interested in that already. I know that those topics are playing on my show, to begin with.

The other processes similar to what I did with Product Launch Hazzards: I have a seven-step process for how we design and develop products. What I did was I grouped and did my seven-step process and then built the stories that reinforced some great practices in each one of the different steps. Sometimes you don’t have those seven steps outlined out or on their own, or you just mention it casually on some shows—you may not need to go back in and fill in the gaps. When I’ve got all these great guest interviews and I’ve got some of the topics but I don’t have all of them, you may need to go back and rerecord or record some new ones and fill in the gaps of those. From there, I like to use a ghostwriter. That’s my personal viewpoint on how to do it—someone who’s more suited to writing in a style that is best for a book. I think I’m more suited to that casual online writing model, so I like to use someone to help me. While I record it, all of it is in my voice, I like to have someone write that concise chapter, that transition, that set up for the section of all the interviews.

You might want to write it yourself, but at least you’ve got the audio that you recorded in the transcript to start from. You can start from there. That’s one of the ways that you can go about doing it. You can do transitional intros to each of the guest interviews that you’ve done. You do new introductions, not the ones that were originally on your podcast, but you’re transitioning from one story to the next or one interview to the next.

My next recommendation to you is heavily edit it. No one wants to read your entire transcript, or the entire thing of your interview with the guests. They want the best three questions and answers. Heavily edit those interview sections down to the heart and the meat of it. Also, make sure you do a proper introduction for the person. You’ve got a proper bio going on there and all of that. Make sure that that’s in there. These are some strategies and some thoughts.

If you’re at the stage where you’re thinking about strategically, “How do I want to write a book?” I want you to contact Juliet first and I want you to have Juliet walk you through and talk to you about what this book looks like, from your podcast—how you might structure it. Is your podcast ready yet? Is it too soon? If you already have a book that doesn’t have an audiobook yet, I want you to go first to Tina. If you are sitting back going, “I wish I restructured my show. I wish I recorded my podcast with this in mind,” you can talk to Juliet, but you can also book a call with Tom at Podetize. He’d be happy to help you coach you through how you might restructure your show so you can prep it for doing a great book model in the future.

Irene says, “I have a book but no podcast yet in the works. I do need to put it in as an audiobook.” The $4 billion industry is just calling to all of us podcasters here. On Facebook, we’ve got Dorsey and she says, “I’ve coauthored three books and want to do my own.” Dorsey, it’s time. Do your own thing. It’s time for you. Ladies, I thank you much for bringing much great information on. I appreciate that. Another question is, “Juliet, what did you mean by paying $200 for Amazon publishing? I have a Kindle and paperback and did not pay anything.”

Juliet:

I don’t think you have to pay now, but you used to have to pay for that paperback to upload it. There are some problems with Kindle but the actual paperback publishing with Amazon has a lot of drawbacks, and I don’t know if you noticed, if you went for international royalties, you lost a chunk and there was no reason for you to lose a chunk of it. There are a lot of things that happen with Amazon that don’t truly make it a legitimate publishing company. The self-publishing and the hybrid and the others out there.

Barrett Matthew says, “What type of podcasts that should not be books?” I think the ones that are a little bit infomercially, those books aren’t doing well. If your podcast is infomercially, it’s not teaching something, it’s not educating in some way, or the interviews are like, phone in the same thing again and again. If you’re doing interviews where you ask the same five questions every time, and they’re the same thing over and over again and they’re too generic. When I do my five questions on how you get great audience increases, how you get great guests and increased audiences, it’s a tiny segment in my show. The rest of the show we’re exploring, what makes their show bingeable? Why they started it? There’s still story there and people still want story. They want something interesting in their books. That’s the kind that don’t lend itself well. Juliet and Tina, your thoughts?

Tina:

We’re wired for stories and what we want is stories. When I was the lead interviewer for a documentary called The Messengers, which was about independent podcasting, I interviewed about 40 different podcasters—all different topics. None of them knew each other for the most part, and what came up in every single interview was the word intimacy. Podcasting provides tremendous intimacy and building your book, your platform, and your audiobook on the back of intimacy is always going to serve you better. We create intimacy through the human experience and that is where we share stories.

Thank you so much for making that clear, Tina, and I think when you’re speaking, it’s even more important to be in that storytelling mode. That’s where the audiobooks can come in handy to have that. If you’re doing where you do wrap in some of these interviews in there, you’re likely not to use the audio from your original interview. You’re going to use some like a supplement. They’re going to be the supplementary chapter. It will be you speaking the audiobook throughout the whole thing. If you’re narrating it or you’re a narrator, and those things will become the supplementary and they’ll go to the whole podcast. Where your book when it’s written out, it has a question, answer and it’s in a different style. The audiobook will be structured differently. Keep that in mind and that’s where you’re going to have to have some good storytelling, good transition, and good information in there, or it’s not going to be worth it to pull it all the way through that process as well.

Paul mentions, “No audience.” Here’s the thing. That’s a very common thing with authors—a lot of times they don’t have an audience. That’s the number one thing that Juliet highlighted at the beginning. They’re going to publish a book thinking it’s going to drive an audience. It doesn’t work like that. There are cases where your guests are your audience. We had that happen very frequently where many of our clients have a guesting strategy, which is that they don’t care how many audiences  they have. It’s about making those guests feel important, making them feel highlighted, making them feel special in the process. In doing that through a book and through all of that, you’re creating a richer authority value for them. While it’s an expense for you, it’s in building up those guests as important to you and bringing them out to the world.

It’s not necessarily going to drive more listens to your audiobook, more traffic to downloading the book on Amazon or wherever you might be selling it. That can be a strategy. Don’t worry about that. That’s one where you want to talk to Juliet and let’s make sure though you have a good book at the end of the day so it doesn’t feel like an embarrassment to put it out. Especially if its purpose is to drive an authority. Paul, if you don’t have a podcast yet, maybe this is time to think about one. Think about how you want to write your book and then structure a podcast so it supports it too. It always can go strategically every way.

Melanie Parish says, “I have a book, no audiobook yet. I used a hybrid publisher who told me audiobooks are expensive to produce.” I think you should have a chat with Tina because that may not be the case. You’d be surprised at the return on investment for that.

Tina:

I spent a surprising amount of time educating publishers on audiobooks. It’s just not in their expertise, It’s not in your wheelhouse. Juliet knows more about publishing than I will ever know. I like it that way. I like getting into the weeds and being a deep expert in one area and then having colleagues that I can share back and forth with because your brain explodes after a while. Before you believe anything a publisher or anybody else in the book industry tells you about audiobooks, confirm that bias in the actual audiobook industry. I can promise you, they’ve had one, maybe two experiences, and they don’t know the actual industry.

This is true that many of those publishers and whatever their model is, whether it’s a hybrid or a traditional publisher, all that they know is their own model of how they operate. They don’t have a broad industry experience in it. That’s where someone like Juliet and Tina who seek people who come from all different publishers and who come from all different models of book creation, programs and other things out there. They have a broader view on what’s working and what’s not working.

Juliet:

I took on a client who’s publishing with a hybrid because she wants to get her book into institutions. The publisher she’s using doesn’t use the free shipping model. There are a lot of things that a hybrid publisher is not great at. They’re good at getting things in bookstores, the shelf life is three weeks. That’s a tough one too. They’re good in some particular areas, but not great in other ones. If you’re an entrepreneur, you need to explore some other avenues. The great part about hybrid is that most of the time you own your own rights with it; you’re free to go to someone else to do the audiobook. You’re free to do the free book funnel as well.

Anytime if you have any questions, Melanie Parish is asking you to reach out to her, Tina, and I’ll connect the two of you on Facebook you can make sure that that happens. Juliet, I connected you up with Dorsey on Facebook, you guys should be connecting there. Also I wanted to remind you, Juliet and Tina have a podcast. You can also follow because you’ll learn a lot from us talking about these things and how people are utilizing them and what’s working successfully for authors, what’s working successfully for entrepreneurs—so you’ll be able to catch and follow us there in case you’re just not ready yet, this is a little thought in the back of your mind.

We invite you to connect up with all of us and find out more and decide if this is right for you. One of the things and the reasons why I partnered up with Juliet and Tina to bring them here to you is because I know they won’t take someone who’s not ready yet and that’s an important thing for us. They will turn away people before they will sell them when you’re not ready yet.

We don’t have a fully formalized offer here. There is nothing because we know it might not be right for all of you and there may be only portions that are right, like doing just the audiobook with Tina or taking a pre-strategy session with Juliet. Making this occur over your podcast over time. We want to give you an open-ended opportunity to be able to discuss what this looks like for you. Reach out to any one of the three of us. Thank you for joining us. It will also be posted in the Podetize resource area. We’re getting a brand-new dashboard. You can go to Podetize.com/masterclasses, and you’ll be able to access all of them at any given time. You’ll be getting an email reminder on all of that for those of you who are looking for the past episodes. That’s also another place in which you can find them at any given time. You’re like, “I can’t find it on Facebook. It was months ago, but now I’m ready.” Thank you all.

Important Links:

• Product Launch Hazzards
• The Binge Factor
• Super Brand Publishing
• Twin Flames Studios
• Magical Mind, Magical Body
• Podfest
• ACX
• Bounty Program
• Podetize
• Podetize.com/masterclasses

About Juliet Clark

Hi. I’m Juliet Dillon Clark, Founder of Super Brand Publishing.

Over the years I brought my expertise to corporate clients like Mattel, Nissan, Price Stern Sloan Publishing, and HP Books. While I enjoyed the work, and was good at it, I felt like something was missing. I realized that what I really wanted to be doing was helping individuals, not corporations, further their success and find fulfillment.

Since then, I have helped more than 600 entrepreneurs and authors share their work with the world and have published more than 60 books, turning more than 190 authors/entrepreneurs into best-selling experts! Let’s cut through the clutter and get your message across so that you can cultivate your fan base, increase sales, and reach a level of success beyond what you thought possible.

About Tina Dietz

Tina Dietz is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed speaker, audiobook publisher, podcast producer, and influence marketing expert who has been featured on media outlets including ABC, Inc.com, Huffington Post and Forbes. Tina’s first podcast, The StartSomething Show, was named by INC magazine as one of the top 35 podcasts for entrepreneurs.

In 2016, Tina was the recipient of the Evolutionary Business Council MORE award and in 2017 she received the award for Outstanding Audio Company from The Winner’s Circle. She is also a member of the EBC leadership body and a founding member of the Forbes Coaches Council. Tina was also the lead interviewer in the podcasting documentary “The Messengers” and featured in the film.

Tina splits her time between the US and Costa Rica where she’s part of the leadership team building a community of conscious leaders called Vista Mundo.

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