By Rick Bleiweiss
If you’re a speaker who wants to create and sell audiobooks of your presentations, here are 5 tips for how to produce and publish your work.
1. Record High Quality Audio – To begin with, either record a live presentation or recreate it in a recording studio or well-equipped home studio. No matter how you do it, the key is quality. Make sure your voice is clear and strong, and the recording is distortion free without many pauses or extraneous sounds. Then edit it to get any distractions out to avoid bad reviews.
2. Add Visual Aids if Needed – If you use visual aids in your live presentation, find a way to make that work for an audio-only audience. It could be a Bonus Content folder on a physical audiobook CD, an online link, and/or describe the graphics rather than show them.
3. Take Physical Audiobook Copies to Talks – Physical copies of the audiobook are great items to sell at your speeches. However, if you do them yourself, beware that there will be minimum manufacturing runs and you’ll needs to create all the graphics.
4. Determine Self-Publishing or Traditional Approach – Once you have your recording, you can either self-publish through Audible or other audiobook-selling platforms. You can also go to an audiobook publisher, who can set up a recording session, publish and distribute it. If you’re a very successful speaker, you might approach audiobook publishers directly to license your audiobook(s). No matter who you are, if you want someone else to publish your audiobook(s), I’d suggest getting a literary agent because they have great access to publishers.
5. Review Licensing Deals with Publishers – If you go with a publisher, there are two ways you can do a licensing deal and have them market and distribute your audiobook(s). One is a typical licensing deal in which you get an advance and a smaller royalty. The second is a distribution deal in which there is no advance, but you get a much higher royalty. In the second deal, you must have a finished recording already done.
As a Publishing Executive at Blackstone Audio, I work for one of the nation’s oldest and most successful audiobook companies that has published over 30,000 audiobooks. We are actively looking to distribute already-recorded audio programs and presentations by top speakers with followings. Plus, as an author, you can get a fabulous discount if you buy your audiobooks to sell at events.
ABOUT – Rick Bleiweiss is an Author, Grammy Nominated Producer and Publishing Executive at Blackstone Publishing. His new mystery novel “Pignon Scorbion and the Barbershop Detectives” (Feb 2022) is a Sherlock Holmes-type book that takes place in 1910 Downton Abbey-era England. For this book, the audiobook was recorded by an actor with different voices for the main characters. If you would like your audiobook to be considered by Blackstone Audio, contact Rick via email: [email protected]