Here’s a great way to get new visitors to your site to read your book: Let them hear an audio excerpt!
An audio excerpt from your book is simply another medium that your potential audience can consume. Why not let them have it?
Many bestselling authors offer at least one audio presentation of their books. While you may not want to create a complete audio version of your book, adding the first chapter or pages of your book in audio form is easy to do.
Here’s an audio excerpt from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.
If you have a blog website, it can be as easy as creating a separate page and adding media to it in the form of an mp3 audio clip.
How do you get the audio clip?
The process is fairly simple. (Or at least it can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.) The free, quick and easy way is the best place to start. Once you get the hang of creating an audio clip, you can spend a few more dollars if you want to and add a few bells and whistles.
This example starts with two notes from a music clip and then begins the story: The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold.
There’s a certain magic in hearing a book being read out loud. Hearing the author’s voice creates a connection between the author and the “reader” that printed words otherwise cannot.
Several free services allow you to simply record your voice over the phone or through a microphone. You can read aloud the first chapter of your book and simply post it to your website.
You can use a program such as Audacity and record your voice using the microphone on your computer. It may not be sterling quality, but for voice it will be good enough. Don’t worry about little hiccups in your reading; unless it is a serious cough attack, the listener will hardly notice and, in fact, it will make it more believable that it’s the author reading rather than a professional voice talent.
If you want to edit it, you can do that with Audacity easily. You can remove pauses as easily as you would change a misspelled word in your word processor.
At Wheatmark, our work with authors does not stop once their books are published. In fact that is just the beginning. That is why we place an emphasis on educating our authors about book marketing.
