Whether you have a professionally produced Audio book version of your ebook or you made it yourself, it is a big job. If your full length book is a collection of short stories, you might want to test the waters with a single short story. If all goes well, you can always produce audio versions of the rest of the stories.
Your ebook and paperback already provide a free sample to perspective buyers. This is almost always the beginning of the book. So, the first short story in your book should be your first audio production. Once it is done, produce a youtube video. So the audience will have something to look at, display your book cover, any associated images. Occasionally, display a text message telling where they can find your ebook and/or paperback. (Click here for an example)
If you are worried about giving your short story away for free, you already are doing this through the text based free sample. If your short story is long, break it up into two to four smaller video clips. Enable your youtube account to allow (adsense) ads to be posted at the bottom. This way, you may make a couple dollars from people listening to your audiobook short story.
Once the audio clip is live on youtube, go to Smashwords and add the URL of the video to your ebook. This is assuming Smashwords.com is one of the sites you have your ebook published through.
Using a test to speech program to make your short story
As I had mentioned in a previous posting, I have been finding my $50 Amazon Fire Tablet very useful. One of the voices in the free word processing app is really impressive. It just might be good enough to use to make audio books. I feel confident that it is better than my own reading voice.
To make my audio sample, I connected two computers together. The headphones out of one is connected to the microphone in. The Amazon Fire tablet ran the text to speech app for five minutes. The second computer recorded the audio, saving it as an mp3 file.
I produced this particular video using Windows Live Movie Maker that came free on my Windows computer.
If you decide to use a program to read your book, expect to program to mangle the occasional word. You can fix this by changing the spelling of the problem words. Sometimes, breaking the problem work into pieces can fix the problem. For example, spacesuit becomes space-suit. Text to speech sometimes have problem with the timing of some sentences. They don't pause in the right places. This usually can be fixed by adding extra commas and periods.
If you found this interesting, you might like my book, The Independent Author's Handbook, 2nd edition. It is available on Amazon.com (ebook), Amazon.com (paperback) and Smashwords.
If you decide to use a program to read your book, expect to program to mangle the occasional word. You can fix this by changing the spelling of the problem words. Sometimes, breaking the problem work into pieces can fix the problem. For example, spacesuit becomes space-suit. Text to speech sometimes have problem with the timing of some sentences. They don't pause in the right places. This usually can be fixed by adding extra commas and periods.
If you found this interesting, you might like my book, The Independent Author's Handbook, 2nd edition. It is available on Amazon.com (ebook), Amazon.com (paperback) and Smashwords.
