Audiobooks are becoming more and more popular. Depending on which research you look at, somewhere around forty percent of survey participants report listening to them regularly. That’s a lot of audiobook buyers, right? So the question is: should you get into the audiobook business? Should you create or outsource them, list ’em on Audible, market them, and see if you can make some money? Maybe even a lot of it? Maybe even passively? Read on.
I’ll start with the general overview of how you’d go about it, and then I’ll end with why I wouldn’t, if I were you. Basically, go to Audible and browse the best sellers. Assuming you’re not gonna write (remember, even audio books have to be written before they can be narrated) the next great crime novel, you’ll probably wanna stick to categories like Money & Finance, Health & Wellness, Religion & Spirituality, Relationships, Parenting & Personal Development, things like that.
Usually a good idea to pick a niche that interests you, too, so it doesn’t feel so much like “work” when you’re putting this thing together (or overseeing it). Now start drilling down into a subcategory. For example, maybe you start out by looking at Health & Wellness, and then you search for the word “diet” to see what the best sellers are for audiobooks that are about various diet plans, right? And then maybe you, yourself, are actually experimenting with intermittent fasting, so you check that out.
You could search for the word “fasting” and sort by best selling and pretty quickly kinda ballpark A) what the money making potential is for an audiobook on that topic, B) what you’re up against in terms of competition, and C) what types of things you might wanna do to increase your chance of success. For instance, you’d wanna look at winning titles, the actual cover art for the audiobook, and how long are they on average, and how many reviews the top sellers have, and so on.
When you feel like you’ve got your audiobook topic figured out, I’d go ahead and order the top five or so in that space, spend like a hundred bucks, and now you can make your own outline based on what’s already working, right? And then once you’ve got your outline, you Google “audiobook ghostwriters” and find someone decent who’ll research and write the entire thing for you for a decent price. And once that’s done and you’re happy with it, obviously, you need a voice actor, right?
So Google that or “audiobook narrator” or whatever, and hire someone to turn your book into a high quality audio. Next, search for “audio book cover design” and get that done, making sure to give them the designs from the current top sellers for inspiration. Now you upload the finished product to Audible, optimize the listing, and start marketing it, right? To get the ball rolling, you’ll probably have to send people you know to buy it and leave you a nice review, maybe run some Audible PPC ads, etc.
With any luck, and assuming it’s actually a solid audiobook, Audible will start ranking you higher and higher when people search for “fasting” or “best diet” or “how to lose weight fast” or whatever, and then you’ll get to enjoy organic sales and passive income. Which, if you’re lucky, might be a few grand a month. And then you’d need to rinse and repeat to hit your income goal. Now. As for why I wouldn’t recommend you do any of that? It’s simple. There are less complicated, less expensive, less competitive ways to make the same money, if not more. See below.
