The Growing Appeal of Audiobooks with Tina Dietz [Podcast]

Did you know that the first audiobook was created in 1929? Today, audiobooks are a billion dollar per year industry in the US alone! If you want to discover more about the power of audiobooks, check out my guest appearance on the new episode of the VIP Access Podcast, hosted by Michelle Herschorn.(VIP Access Podcast with Michelle Herschorn, November 2021)

Tina had a fantastic conversation with Michelle Herschorn on the VIP Access podcast to talk about the power of audiobooks.

In this episode:

• How the audiobooks’ industry has grown exponentially
• Tips for authors who want to supercharge their book marketing
• The ways audiobooks uniquely meet our intrinsic need for intimate connections through audio storytelling

Listen to their discussion here!

Melanie HerschornHi again. I'm Melanie Herschorn, the digital content creator and marketing strategist and coach for women business owners, and welcome back to another episode of VIP Access. VIP stands for Visibility, Impact, Profit, and this podcast will get you inspired and fired up about content creation and marketing yourself and your brand. Each week you'll get marketing and mindset strategies, actionable tips, and the motivation you need to land more clients, nurture your leads, and position yourself as an expert in your industry. We also go behind the scenes with powerful women in business to discuss strategies, messaging and more. My mission is to empower you to stop spinning your wheels and to make your mark with your marketing. Ready to wow your ideal client and create a community of raving fans? Let's dive into today's episode!

Hi, and welcome back to VIP Access. I'm Melanie Herschorn. Today, my guest is an award-winning and internationally-acclaimed speaker and audiobook publisher and corporate podcast producer and vocal leadership expert. Her name is Tina Dietz, and she has been featured on media outlets from ABC to Huffington Post to Forbes and more. Her first podcast The StartSomething Show was named by Inc. Magazine as one of the top 35 podcasts for entrepreneurs and Tina's company, Twin Flames Studios, amplifies the influence of brands and leaders through high ROI audiobook and podcasting solutions. And you will hear from her mic how great she is with sound. So welcome, Tina. Thanks so much for being here.

Tina DietzThanks, Melody, I appreciate that.

I just, I have a background in radio, so when I hear a good mic, I get really excited. Totally geeking out on that.

We end up being like radio voice nerds and all of that. It's like, “Oh, listen to the sound quality.”

Love it. So okay, I don't even know where to start, because I'm just so excited to have you on today. Because not only are you a podcasting expert, but really audiobooks are so important. And I think that that's something that people who have written a book don't even necessarily think about, you know, in terms of a way to get more ears or eyes on their book, and to amplify their mission and their influence in the world. And so, I would love to know some statistics about audiobooks.

Oh, statistics about audiobooks? Well, it's a funny world. When I first started working with audiobooks, they'd been around since about 1930. This is not a new format.

You mean like book on tape, okay.

Book on tape. Before that, it was book on album, you know. Or I'll date myself and talk about, you know, when I was a little kid, we had those book and album combinations where it was, “When Tinker Bell rings her little bell, it's time to turn the page.” Or we used to get books on tape out of the library, which you can still do. Mostly they're CDs sometimes have these all in one little players, which are really interesting and cool. 

A lot of people don't know that the military uses a lot of those books. A lot of audiobooks are consumed by our servicemen and women overseas. It's one of the ways that they stay in touch and they don't have to use the internet. So audiobooks reach into some really remote places in the world. 

But what really happened, oh, let's go back about 10 years ago, audiobooks became truly digital. Audible, which is the largest audiobook distributor in the world–they handle about 60% of the market share worldwide–combined themselves with Amazon. For whatever you think about Amazon or your opinions about Amazon as a global company, one way or another, what they have done is made things more accessible for everyday people. And when everything went digital, audiobooks went digital, the cost of production for audiobooks dropped about 50%. That has continued to be the case. 

So when, back in 2009 or so and earlier, to get an audiobook produced you were talking about at least $10,000 minimum. Now an audiobook can still cost that much, if you get a lot of bells and whistles: you've got a full cast, you're recording in a New York studio, you got Tinkerbell in there full costume makeup, ringing bells. But that is generally not the case. Now you can get your audiobook fully produced by a company like ours, or another high quality studio, generally for $3,000-$5,000. And that's full production, author-narration, professional-narration, really high quality work. 

It can be done remotely without our having to go into a studio. And audiobooks, you mentioned statistics, audiobooks outsell eBooks about three to one. And they're a $1 billion plus industry just in the US alone. And there are new markets opening up overseas every single day with audiobooks, so it is a growing market. It's been double digit growth year on year for the last eight years. So it is crazy pants what is happening with audiobooks and it's just a really reliable, familiar way too to get books into more ears and reach more hearts with your message. And that's what we're out to do.

I love all of that. So I want to just break it down a little bit more. Let's say somebody wrote a book a couple years ago, they launched it, it didn't do great, because they didn't have the marketing in place. And now they're starting to work on the marketing, because I always say you wrote the book, it's still published, so let's keep going and try to get some excitement about it. 

Totally with you on that.

Can you also couple that with an audiobook and make that an exciting launch?

Why yes, Melanie, you can. I'll go into my commercial voice there. Yeah, no, it's a great application for an audiobook. We call it a “Second Chance Launch,” and it is something that happens frequently. As you know, in the book world, particularly with first books and authors, you get very excited. It's almost like having a child. You do all this stuff to get the book ready and to get it out there, and then by the time you get it out, you're exhausted. 

Right when you need to be at your best is when you want to be taking a break. The marketing falls down or the budget isn't there, or just the persistence and the will isn't there to keep going with that particular book, because it's taken everything you've got as an author just to get the book out on the market. Launching an audiobook six months, a year longer, two years, three years down the road, is a way to revitalize that title and get it back out there again. Some folks also do a second edition with their audiobook, but more than likely, if the material really is evergreen, like many of our authors it is, then just getting the audiobook out there is enough to revitalize and get things going again.

What if you hate the sound of your own voice? 

Ah, yeah, I hear that a lot. Even in a room full of speakers, if I'm on a stage and I survey a room, and I say, “Who here doesn't like the sound of their own voice?” about half the room, even in a room full of speakers and podcasters will still raise their hand. And if it's a roomful of executives or entrepreneurs, more in the general space, about 80% of people will raise their hand to say they don't like their voice. A very common thing. It's a very human thing. You have to get used to it. 

There's two pathways through that. One is to basically suck it up and get used to it. Seriously, that, that's kind of the way it works. And to rely on professionals like myself, like my team, who are going to be honest with you and say, “Really, your voice is going to be fine for this book. And this is how we're going to work with you on it.” Or we'll be honest with you and say, “You know what, your voice is great for a podcast. It's great for a keynote. But it's going to be challenging to listen to you for four or five, six hours straight. And here's why.” That really just depends on the voice. But a lot of times, it's for reasons you don't expect. People have unique voices. I have this wonderful colleague who is totally Jersey–totally New Jersey–she has the most amazing, gorgeous New Jersey accent. I've been trying to talk her into doing her audiobook. She's got a great podcast, and she's like, “No, no, no, I have to have a professional do it.” I said, “Don't you dare,” because her voice is part of her brand.

Exactly what I was gonna say. It's part of her brand. And so she's taking people away from her brand, if she doesn't own that. That's part of who she is.

That's part of her voice. And her articulation is great. She's fun to listen to. Her voice is musical. All the things that are engaging about a voice. She has her accent, which she worries about, is not going to be a problem. She's very engaging to listen to.

Now, this is something even though I've worked in radio, I've been trained how to have a radio voice so to speak. I worked in classical music, which is like, “And now we are going to play Bach” and like, you really have to be like “The Sonata in B Minor played by…

The Philharmonic Orchestra. We hope you enjoy it.

Yes, exactly! Exactly. And then the people are dozing off while listening, which is fine. And news, which is also a different way to talk. But when people are gonna stand there and talk for four hours, five hours, how do they keep up momentum?

Well, you don't talk for four or five hours. That's really the key. Even professional narrators don't tend to record for longer than two hours at a shot. It is vocal fatigue across the board. Even for our really, really experienced speakers, our speakers always come in and say, “Oh, no, I do 20, you know, gigs a week.” And you know, we work with great people who do amazing things out in the world, and then they get into the audiobook process, and afterwards are like, “Oh, that was different.” Not that it was bad, it gave them a whole new skill set, because we record our authors remotely from wherever they are in the world and we fully direct them through the entire process. 

Just as if you were to go into a New York studio and you were to have a director right there live in your ear, we are live in the ears of our authors, usually from their home office. So we're catching their mistakes, we're making sure that their energy is good, making sure that they're getting across the message and the intention that they want to get. 

When you're reading and delivering material at the same time, it's different than a rehearsed keynote, or even in the format where we are now, which is really casual. I'm not as worried about my articulation. I'm not delivering a particular set script. You know, when you're going through an audiobook, it's a certain type of breathing. It's much slower than most people are used to speaking at and it's usually a little bit more articulated. There's a couple of things that come into play and that's what we help with. But we work with authors, you know, if their energy level can't support speaking for two hours and getting a great performance, then we do it for one hour. We have another author, we're working on her second audiobook, Jennifer Brown, she's an amazing DEI consultant. She has opera training, and tons of vocal training, and she has vocal stamina like crazy, so she can go for three or four hours. But she is an outlier, so it works across the board.

I mean, I can only imagine how exhausting that would be. You're not just talking, you're “on.” I'm one of those people that after a full day of work, I need to just shut down and have complete silence. Because when you're “on,” it just takes so much out of you. Do you find that people falter in the middle? And you're just like, “Okay, we'll come back to this tomorrow.”

It depends on the day that they're having. We do a lot of prep work with folks. We have a whole document we deliver to help people understand the mindset, to prepare to do their audiobook, and that can move into the rest of their lives as well. You know, when any of us who have been in business for a while, as you're developing your leadership, you know, you have to maintain your energy management and your energy hygiene, I'll even call it. And that has to do with you know, introversion/extroversion. Do you need to be around people? Do you need to shut down, as you mentioned? I need to go out tonight and go to an open mic comedy night to recharge myself. I'm an extrovert. That's going to charge me up. That would be a nightmare for you, probably at the end of a long workday, if you needed to recharge your energy after so many things coming at you.

Not necessarily. I'm one of those people, I could just have like five minutes, put on more makeup, and go out and feel totally returned.

We'll have to keep that in mind when we meet in person.

Oh, I can't wait for that!

But the point is that, you know, you have to manage your energy. And that's a big part of what our directors and what we listen for, watch for, and talk with our authors about because it's a very personal journey.

For me, I, even though I've worked in radio, as I said, I am a visual learner. I think it's two-thirds of the population are visual learners. But audiobooks, they don't really go against that, I find. Like I can listen to a book on a long drive and take it in, take all of it in. And so do you find that there's ever any pushback about people who are like, “Well, I'm a visual learner, so I don't need an audiobook?”

It's an interesting world, because we're so wired for storytelling. It comes into a different part of the brain entirely, so the best thing about an audiobook is the intimacy that it creates between the narrator and the listener. And there's a neurological connection, even when you're in the car. Actually, 80% of audiobooks are listened to through earbuds. That's what the research says. 

You know, we're not in our cars quite as much as we used to be on long commutes, especially in the last two years. But at the same time, even if you are listening through, you know, your car speakers, or your earbuds, which are going to be the two most common areas, there's a relationship that forms you know? You almost find yourself or maybe you do find yourself, responding in the case of fiction, a character, just like you're watching TV, and you want to say, “Don't open the door!” Or if you're listening to a book on personal development or leadership development, you may find yourself pausing just to have a conversation with yourself about, “Do I really believe that? I think they are full of crap. I don't know about that.” Or, “Oh, I never thought of that!” And you kind of have to process through it. Because it is, to one extent or another, a conversation, just based on the way that we're wired neurologically. So it is an intimate experience. And that's why the quality of narration is so very important. That is what sells audiobooks. It's the quality of narration.

Okay, I love that we got to that point because it is true. It's like, if you have grainy video or pretty terrible photos that's not going to excite your audience and grow your audience, but you need to have quality sound. And what people might not realize is you can hear lights. You can hear a dog barking in the distance, and that ambient sound can throw off so much other than just the sound of your own voice reading your book. So how do you account for that in somebody's house, if they don't have their own studio?

Well, I’ll tell you a little secret: about 85% of our authors record from a walk-in closet. And this is a very common thing, even in the professional narration world. It's very cozy. The atmosphere of a walk-in closet with the clothing around you very specifically buffers the sound. And usually there's a spot where you can set up a little portable desk, or a table and a chair and your microphone and record your audiobook with a director in your ear taking care of the recording for you. And that's where a lot of voice acting happens is in those small spaces. You absolutely can create things on your desk, as well. The other thing we recommend a lot that's a really easy setup for people is to take a plastic storage box, the kind that you would put a bunch of, you know, Christmas decorations and things like that. The Rubbermaid, Sterilite kind of containers, you'd get.

A giant Tupperware 

A giant Tupperware container and then you take a piece of foam that you would put on top of a bed. Bed topper. Get it at Walmart or Target for $20, put it on the inside, stand it on end, and toss your microphone in it, and then you've basically got a little portable sound booth. I actually had one of those when I was living in Costa Rica that I did some professional voice acting from and the sound quality–it was great.

That's amazing. Yeah, and you got to live in Costa Rica, which is even more amazing.

It's a whole other story.

That's great. Okay, so I love how you're bringing this to more people. You know, where I sit as somebody who's currently working on writing a book and I work with authors, sometimes we feel like audiobooks are a little bit out of reach. You figure out whether you're going to be self-publishing, working with a hybrid publisher, or going the traditional publishing route, and then you're so focused on the launch, and “Am I going to be an Amazon bestseller? I don't know” and all that stuff. And then you're like, “Okay, well, now nobody knows about it. So I need to do the marketing. But wouldn't it be great if people could listen in their AirPods to me?” It almost feels like it's, it's just high up on this pedestal that we can't reach. So I love that you're bringing it to more people. So what you're saying is, pretty much everybody should do this.

I think if it's something that you can carve out, the budget for and the time for in the great scheme of things and also survey your audience. Do they listen to audiobooks? A lot of our authors come to us because they launched their book and the number one question they got was, “When are you doing the audiobook?” I hear this over and over again. We have lots of conversations with authors every single week, and it's either, “My publisher said I needed one,” “I have to have one because I love audiobooks,” or “I've launched my book and everyone's asking me for the audiobook. How quickly can we get it done?” So those are the things that we hear on a daily basis from authors, which is good news for everybody.

That's great. So how long does it take from start to finish? Because I've heard there are delays and it can be like a really long time before Audible says, “Okay, here you go.”

Audible, particularly on the self-publishing side of Audible, there can be glitches. There can be some issues. We produce a very pristine level. We do not get rejected by Audible. We [have] t's crossed, i's dotted. But there's very, very specific technical specs that your audio files have to meet for Audible. It is not like podcasting. It is not like doing any other kind of audio. The audio that I'm recording right now for this podcast would definitely not meet Audible standards. There would be background noise, there would be a noise floor issue, all kinds of stuff. And even the, the amount of space at the beginning and the end of the file and what's included–so many technical details. But we do this every day. We meet all those technical standards, so our books go through in generally about 10-15 business days through their system, which is average. It can take up to 30 business days to make it through Audible's system, if there's no mistakes in your files. So what happens is if there are mistakes in your files it gets bounced back to you. They'll tell you what the issues are, you have to fix it, and then you got to start back at the beginning of the queue again. And that's usually where the problems come into play because somebody has worked with someone that tried to do it themselves, or they worked with someone who isn't highly experienced. The author can't tell. They can't test it. They don't have the, the technical skills to do that, and then it becomes a problem. That's where people run into the most issues. And they come to us and say, “Can you fix these files?”

“Help us!” I get that. Now, is there ever a book that doesn't make sense to become an audiobook?

There's some that do better than others. Books that tend to be at least 35,000 words tend to do better in audio. Most audio platforms like Audible, our audiobooks are sold on a membership basis. So longer books have a higher perceived value, because you get a credit every month and you can buy any audiobook. Are you going to look for an audio book that's eight hours long, or two hours long? So there becomes a perceived value issue.

Okay.

Also, audiobook pricing is different than other book pricing. Audiobooks are priced on length, which irritates a lot of authors, and I completely understand that it is an issue in the industry. Having a book that's a little bit longer–30-35,000 words, at least–gets your pricing up into a range that you're going to be much happier with. That's one issue. Another one is books that are highly technical, highly visual. They're going to need an audio edit to make an audio version of and when we evaluate books, we go over that if there tends to be more of a technical guide. 

Cookbooks and poetry–it really just depends on the market that you're in. We don't work with fiction. We are a nonfiction house, but we do often get people asking us for poetry. And we don't tend to work with those because you're better off working and getting that done kind of on your own in terms of price points, and things like that, because those poetry books are shorter books. And I almost think that you're better off releasing those as an album, like almost as music, so that you can control the pricing more, rather than as an audiobook. And that's not something a lot of people think of. Go get it audio designed and really make that book juicy and worth your while to do if you're working with poetry. But technical guides, cookbooks are another one that require some changes if you're going to do an audio version. And that's more from an accessibility standpoint. Most cookbooks are not going to be listened to as a traditional audiobook, but if you're looking to reach an audience of say, folks who have visual impairment, then that's another animal. So accessibility is a whole other part of the audio industry.

There is so much that we have unpacked today. And I feel like we just scratched the surface, truly.

It’s true.

But I love that when I asked you about statistics, you rattled off a number of them. So I really appreciate that. Because so often we hear about things and it's like, “Oh, is this the next shiny object that I need to go after?” And, you know, as entrepreneurs, as authors, it's often like, “Well, what if I don't get it? If I don't do this, as I going to miss out?” And so this really sounds like something that is worth investing in because of just the sheer number of people that you can reach in a way that is going to help them better because maybe they really want to read your book, but they just don't have time to sit and read their Kindle app, or they just don't have time to sit and leaf through the pages.

Now well, and the one beautiful thing I'll tell you is that a lot of times what happens with audiobooks, particularly in nonfiction, people get a nice case of “mightas-well-itis.” They'll get the audiobook to listen to so they can make it through the material and then they'll buy the paperback, so that they can go back and make notes and the salient points. We've had it happen all the time. So, many times if you are selling your audiobook and then giving away a Kindle version that can be annotated for free, it's nice to bundle those together. Or you'll see an uptick in your paperback or hardcover sales when you release your audiobook because people are buying both versions. There's all kinds of things on the marketing side of things we don't have time to get into today. But maybe another time. There's there's lots of cool stuff.

I love it. Alright, so how can people find out more about you and Twin Flames Studios? 

Oh, you can check out our audiobook library, our kind of gallery of information. Find out more and reach out to us at TwinFlamesStudios.com.

I love how you articulated that.  

I gotta have all the S's in that url.

TwinFlamesStudios.com.

That's a tongue twister in and of itself.

But a worthwhile one. Well, Tina, thank you so much for being here today. 

No, thank you, Melanie. This is great. I really appreciate it!

You've written a book. Now what? If you're ready to implement a simple content marketing strategy to create buzz around your book and your brand, schedule your free Sparkles and Strategy Call with me, Melanie Herschorn. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of VIP Access. We can't let the fun end here. To find out how engaging your content is, take the content quiz at MyContentQuiz.com. Plus, you're invited to join our private Facebook group at VIPDigital.live/community where you'll get live trainings and other great tips all about digital marketing. And if you've enjoyed listening to this podcast, head over to iTunes and leave me a rating and review. This tells iTunes that you found the show helpful and they'll share it with more women business owners just like you. Thank you so much for listening.