Give versus Take

Give vs. Take: "What Have Readers Done for ME Lately?"

Are You Asking the Right Question? Content creation - no matter the type - can often feel like a one-sided relationship. You seem to give and give to your audience, but no one's taking. Before you nod in agreement, ask yourself one question: Is what you're giving worth taking? You know what you're giving is worth it when your audience is engaging and you're networking with the right people. You may find all of your writing efforts have been worth it when you look back at your year and see the changes in your traffic and exposure. But more importantly, you know it was worth it when you can look at the connections you've made and the feedback on how your articles, big or small, have positively impacted the lives of your readers. But wait! Before anything else, ask yourself, "What have YOU done for your readers lately?"

Losing Readers?

Losing Readers? Keep Them on Your Website By Improving User Experience

Your Website Needs More Than Curb Appeal Spammy looking websites are a HUGE turn off for visitors. Let's say you're looking for a new home and you find a house that has amazing curb appeal. The description depicts a welcoming neighborhood and all of the amenities you need and want. In fact, it's so inspiring that you begin to envision plans for each room: dinner parties, cozy reading nooks, and more. You excitedly arrange a tour to inspect the house with the realtor. As you enter the house, your reality shatters like a brick thrown through a glass window. You wonder if somehow someone has stolen your promising vision and exchanged it with a house with leaking windows, a roof that's badly in need of repairs, a cracked foundation, a condemned furnace, pests - lots of pests - and you can only imagine so many more unseen issues. If you're like most people, you head for the exit as fast as you possibly can. Like buying a home, it often takes much more than the curb appeal of a great article to maintain a visitor's attention on a website. An article can build up your platform by promoting your authority as a leading source in your niche, but your website needs to maintain their interest.

climax leaves breathless

Here’s how to write a killer climax that leaves readers breathless

Every reader has had that ‘wow’ moment when they put down a book. The moment when a story’s climax is so stunning that it can’t be absorbed right away. Such stories are few and far between but when they come along, they stay with your for days.

How to Create Audiobooks via ACX

Reaching Readers: How to Create Audiobooks via ACX

by Roz Morris on April 26, 2014 in Reaching Readers (Sat)

British author Roz Morris describes how to turn self-published books into audiobooks via Amazon Audible’s ACX service – a great way to reach new readers and to take advantage of the growing global market for audiobooks.

British author Roz Morris

Do you want to release your title as an audiobook? If you live in the US, you can go through ACX, the DIY arm of Audible, but ACX wasn’t open to UK authors – until now. For the past month, I’ve had both my novels in production as a test pilot, and now I can tell you what I’ve learned so far about offering a title, choosing a narrator and working with them.

What’s ACX?

Good question. ACX is a network where narrators and producers can meet authors who want their work released as audiobooks. Once you’ve hooked up, you can then use the site as an interface to create the book, keep track of contracts and monitor sales. In short, it’s genius.

Setting Up

You know how tedious it is every time you set up an identity on a new site? All that form-filling and profile-making? ACX requires minimal faff. Once you tell them who you are and what book you’d like to offer, it pulls the detail off Amazon.

Getting Voices

Roz Morris’s debut novel

You can:

• opt to narrate and produce the audiobook yourself, but to do this you must have professional-quality equipment and experience of sound editing, or the book won’t pass the quality check
• pluck a willing narrator/producer out of the ether (this is what I did)

Pitching your book

Next to your book info, you can add notes to make your book more attractive to collaborators – your platform, sales figures and anything else that will convince them you’re worth working with. Which brings me to…

Costs

Making an audiobook isn’t cheap. An average novel is about 10 hours of narration (roughly 90,000 words) and is likely to cost $200 or more per finished hour. You have these options if you’re seeking a narrator/producer on ACX:

• pay up front
• pay a royalty share (which I did)

All the ins and outs of this are much better explained on the ACX site, so check them out there.

My ACX Journey – Mistakes Made and Lucky Discoveries

Roz Morris’s second novel

So those are the basics for using ACX. However, in real life there were a few things I needed to learn (more than a few!):

• Choose an audition passage that will give you an accurate feel for the way the narrators will handle your material.
• Be careful what qualities you ask for in your ‘ideal narrator’ specification and with the guidance notes you give them, or you might get a lot of unsuitable applicants.
• Once you’re in production, there are tips on working with your narrator and what your role will be.

Head to my blog for the full version of this post and the voice of experience! Like to share this post with other author friends who may be interested in learning how to turn self-published books into audiobooks? Here’s our suggested tweet: “How to turn your self-published books into #audiobooks with #ACX : http://www.selfpublishingadvice.org/reaching-readers-how-to-create-audiobooks-via-acx via @IndieAuthorAlli & @Roz_Morris”

Use Power Sharing to Multiply Readers of Your Blog Posts

By Carole Jelen

 

The easy path to gain more blog readers? First, give the gift of social sharing buttons right there on every post. Make it easy for readers who like your post to share it with their network right from their mobile devices or laptops. Exposure and findability count for authors: your blog readers who share your post with their networks then open a path to  multiply readers via additional networks of others. We’re living in an era of power sharing: passing along news and items of interest to people quickly in a way that multiplies posts. You can ride that wave of readership interest if you do it right. Readers love quick, easy sharing of interesting information with their networks.