How to publish your audio book?

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Nowadays, audio books are becoming more and more popular and their sales are increasing every year. So many people like to listen to audio books while working out, jogging or driving or even before sleeping. Many published authors may wish to re-publish their book as an audio book. One can also directly publish their manuscript in audio book form instead of getting a print edition and audio edition.

In order to publish an audio book after a print book has already been published, the steps are as follows:

1. Audio files of book narration: Narrate and record the narration of your book yourself, with professional equipment and saving the title, preface and other sections, and each chapter separately as an MP3 file. Or else, find a good narrator with a clear voice who can agree to create the audio book for you. Their fees can either be fixed or negotiable depending on the number of words in your book and other criteria. It is better to find someone with previous experience of making audio books and ideally they should be a native English speaker (or native speaker of whichever language your book is in). Some good places to find a narrator include ACX by Amazon (ACX is currently limited to only a few countries, and its books are published in amazon’s audible among others), Findaway voices and freelance gig sites like Fiverr.

2. Designing a cover image: Design a cover image for your audio book. The cover image should ideally be shaped as a square, and consists of a cover image, title of the book and name of the authors.

3. Submission of your audio book: Once your audio files are ready, submit them to any of the audio book sites. Sites like ACX and Findaway voices may have their own stringent rules for deciding whether to accept the book for distribution. Usually if you get the narration by a professional narrator with experience, you should be fine. For amazon audible, it is better to have the print book with the same title and authors also published on amazon. You also have to set a price for your audio book and a library price for lending to libraries.

4. Approval for sale: Once your audio book files and cover image pass the quality checks of the distribution site, it will be then be approved for sale on the site or distributed to various audio book sites.

5. Promoting your audiobook: Finally, it is important to try and work hard to promote your book in any way possible. It is good to promote the book in different channels and with different groups of people such as your friends and reading groups.

Publishing an audio book takes a lot of hard work, no doubt. But it is equally rewarding to get it finally published and available for people to buy and listen to.

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