So, my story "Lost Ampersand Found" has been approved and is for sale over at Audible. If you buy it, thank you. If you don't buy it . . . thank yourself.
I REALLY enjoy doing audio of my stories, and am planning on trying to do a book that's only audio, with no text version.
Anyway, I'm not one of those to flog my work endlessly (the bishop, however . . .), so you may not hear me mention it again. If you wanna check it, here's the link!
8 comments:
Hey Rish I really want to buy "Lost & Found" on Audible, but I'm flummoxed. The thing is that I "get" 1 Credit per month from Audible. One Credit = 1 download. Now, downloads can be anywhere from $4 to $25, and but the credit is spent just the same. For whatever psychological reason, I hoard my credits to spend it on high-price items because it feels like I'm getting more (whether that's true or not, who knows.) Buying "Lost & Found" for $6.95 seems like I'm squandering my credit. Perversely I wished it (the story) was more expensive to justify my precious credit.
oh what the hell - I just bought it anyway and am really enjoying the story. My two cents - if you feel that you're not able to charge $15-$20 for stories, maybe bundle them? Bu don't bundle "Birth of a SideKick" part 2. The audiowork done on was superb. You really knocked it out of the park on that one (sports metaphor, sorry...) Or do whatever you want.
Man, I'm sorry about the Audible credit thing. Abbie warned me that was going to happen years and years ago (or maybe that was a dream), but if my options were to put out my audio stories and hope someone bought them, or to not put them out in the off-chance somebody doesn't want to waste their Audible credit on them . . . well, I hope you understand me trying to do the former.
Speaking of Abbie, she's got this thing on her blog where you can buy her stories/books (and the audio versions of her stories/books) directly, just paying her and ignoring Audible. I ought to try to do that myself, since I like the idea of having that option. I will, barring the destruction of our country thanks to electing Trump, put out a bigger audio collection, which should be worth the Audible credit, but I've decided to focus on publishing my novel first (even though all the audio in the collection is already recorded and edited, go figure). If that collection (and the planned follow-up) ever happen, hopefully that would make someone happier than just purchasing single stories here and there.
The third option, though, might be to have somebody (like you) who is my "beta listener," who goes through the audio files right before I publish them, and can let me know where the mistakes are . . . and also gets to hear them for free. That might work.
Regardless, thanks for buying it. I recently recorded another Q&A episode based on your email, and it clocked in at about three hours long. So, that's pretty sad, isn't it?
Oh!
Sorry, I love Tom (for his questions and the accent you play for him) but I'm going to have to jump up and down and wave my arms around for a shot at that beta listener thing. I actually don't have an audible account, nor the means to get one (short of a trial version). so these stories are currently unavailable to me. Being the beta listener would be practically my only way to listen to your audible stuff in the near future.
Besides, I already notice mistakes in your podcasts but never said anything because you said you don't want to know about the mistakes.
Also I think Abbie is onto something selling her stuff directly, if you could get that set up go for it. It wouldn't benefit me any better than audible, but it's a good idea.
Hey Thanks AspiR! I worked hard on those questions - took a few days.
Um, I'm cool with being a beta reader - love getting the new stuff fo' free! But I'm happy to pay for the work (as you know).
Hey, Rish - I loved this one. Moar!! If this kid becomes some sort of super hero private eye? That sounds like a fun series. Also, he and Ben can grow up and meet and fall in love and get gay married. Wait...no, that's one of my stories; never mind. Anyway, I would read more about Will.
Tom - you know you don't have to shop with credits, right? When you check out on Audible, there's a little checkbox that says "Apply Credit." Uncheck that box, and you're buying with cash (meaning whatever credit card you have on file). If a story costs less than $12, I always buy with cash and save my credits for more expensive books. There are people who have such tight budgets that they can't afford to purchase anything beyond their credits, and so they only buy credit-worth items (this puts them right out of the market for short stories), but I don't think you're in that category. On the flip side, Rish gets 40% of whatever you spend. It's a flat 40%, no tricks, no hidden fees. So if you spend a credit, he gets about $5 instead of $2. So, there's that.
Rish - if you wanted a really simple online store, you could just tell people to Paypal you some set amount per story, email you which story they want, and send them a dropbox link. That doesn't scale, obviously. If you're too successful, you'll quickly be looking for other options. But it would take no time at all to set up, wouldn't require you to learn anything new, and wouldn't cost anything beyond possibly maintaining the space on Dropbox. (A SquareSpace store would require all 3 of those things.) An informal Paypal exchange might also fly under the radar with Audible (since their contract is exclusive). I have also heard good things about Gumroad as a digital store, but have not investigated.
Or, you know, you could just set up a Patreon and feed them the stories that way. :) This would also fly under Audible's radar.
Oh, Tom, one more thing you might not know - pricing is totally out of our control on Audible. They don't tell you their entire rationale, but books by indies are nearly always priced by length. There's nothing we can do about it. Even if Rish felt like a shorter novel was worth $15, he wouldn't get to choose that price. The only way to get into the sweet spot is to upload longer books.
This blog is blowing up with comments! Thanks for the insight Abbie. I need to go back to the Fullcast podcasts you and Bryan did to unpack and demystify the payment pricing of Amazon and Audible for indy titles. Those were so enlightening and helpful. To me it's like comparing travel award programs - side-by-side comparisons in the marketplace are tediously difficult to tease out. There's really just not one-to-one comparisons for doing things with Audible vs Patreon vs Paypal/Dropbox vs Amazon....the pros and cons for upcoming writers are very hard to understand - and I'm not even a writer!
One product I enjoy is Patreon, and it's clearly out to get the "subscription-based" portion of the business from Paypal and the rest.
To be honest, anything Bryan and I talked about is almost certainly out-of-date at this point. But the specifics of payment for writers is more transparent than it's ever been. You can find how any of this stuff works with a quick google search. Compare that to 10 years ago, when people didn't dare talk about their contracts and novelists got paid every 6 months if at all, with checks accompanied by impenetrable accounting sheets. Now, the two most common payment systems can be explained this fast: "Amazon pays 70% (minus small download fee based on file size) and ACX pays 40%, both monthly via direct deposit." Previous generations would have killed for something so simple. Sure, there are tons of additional options if those don't work for you, but a little research reveals exactly how they work. None of it is intentionally obscure.
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