Remember that feeling you got the last time you found an amazing new author and couldn’t wait to go out and devour everything they’ve ever written? We want to help you spark that kind of excitement in your fans. How, you ask? Get out there and talk to your audience! Today, we’ve put together some tips to help you craft a targeted email and social media campaign that will keep your fans listening and help you earn Bounty payments.
Targeting and Re-Targeting
First things first—let’s find out who’s listening. Surveys can be a great tool for creating awareness for your audiobook and deciding what marketing and production decisions to make next. Set up a poll using a service like Survey Monkey or your preferred social media platform (Facebook and Twitter both offering polling) to gather data about your fans, and use this opportunity to ask your audience additional questions, such as:
- Where and how they listen
- Whether they prefer male or female voices
- Who their favorite narrators are
- What types of audiobooks they typically listen to
Follow your survey with an email or social media ad that promotes your audiobook and directs listeners to Audible with your Bounty Referral link.
From there, you can review the results of your social media ad or check with your email client to learn how you can see which recipients opened your email and followed the links. Then, use that information to launch a follow-up campaign. Try sending non-openers an email with a new subject line to grab their attention, or appeal to openers who didn’t click the links with a different incentive to listen. You can then track traffic to Audible and view resulting audiobook purchases on your Bounty Dashboard to understand which of your tactics are working best.
Keep ‘Em Listening
Now that your fans have listened to your audiobook, what do they listen to next? Prompt them to listen to the other audiobooks in your series, another audiobook in your catalog, or even recommend a title by a peer in your genre. This keeps your fans engaged in the world of audiobooks and helps ensure they’ll stay Audible members.
Cross-Promoting
Want to reach an even wider audience? Talk with fellow ACX authors about sending an email campaign on each other’s behalf to promote your books to a new audience. Use this as an opportunity to bond with your fans over something you both care about—audiobooks! Create a “listening list” or “listening book club,” include recommendations for some of your own favorite audiobooks, or invite listeners to suggest some of their favorites. Then host a Facebook event or Instagram live video where everyone can discuss their listening experience.
Recommending new audiobooks and getting recommendations from your peers not only builds your connection and rapport with your fans, it keeps them in the habit of listening. New listeners may become Audible members, and fans who are already regular audiobook listeners are more likely to pick up your work.
Direct communication with your fans, whether it’s promoting your title or starting a discussion about what you’re listening to, can help you learn who your listeners are and grow your connection with them into a listening community that will sustain your success as an audiobook creator. Including your Bounty Link in all of your marketing efforts not only gives new listeners an easy way to access your titles, it can show you what strategies are driving traffic to your work. Check out Marketing with the ACX-Perts for more ideas on how to get the word out about your audiobook, and keep an eye on the ACX blog for additional marketing resources to help you earn even more.
Editor’s Note: This post has been updated throughout.
I’ve promoted bounty links extensively, and have many years of online marketing experience. Regardless, success with the new bounties has been virtually nonexistent in comparison to the old program. The new bounty program is a disaster — a massive pay cut for both authors and narrators being dishonestly presented as a good thing.
I guess I’m a little confused, that graphic shows 10 page views and 10 bounty units, I have 1,476 page views and 2 bounty links. Am I doing something way wrong? Does anyone have a % rate range that we can expect because I’m going from having bounties at about 6% per 100 sales from the old bounty setup to 0.13% under this setup.
Thanks for your feedback, Tony. We’ve updated the graphic in this post.
I thought this was the case, and my social reach is simply not strong enough to make the bounty referral program viable. I only have 14,000 YouTube followers, not 140,000. I took a glass is half full approach last August working with 2 authors (and 3 books) as a producer for the first time. I’ve since collaborated with another author on a book, so I’ve had a total of 1,233 sales from these collaborations and will replace bounty income with producer income. Audible is still an amazing platform and all my books are Audible exclusives. As a parent I don’t have time to complain about how I wish things would be, I’ll just continue to use Audible to fund my triplets’ college fund and I’m pretty sure they’ll have it paid for by the time they get there. Thanks again.
It’s terrible. They have to use MY link and then download MY book first? All so we can get YOU more subscribers? How about you give us the bounty any time we drive a new subscriber to you, regardless of which book they get?
In short, we are going to see zero bounties because not all the hoops were jumped through in exactly the right order, and YOU still got your new subscriber. Thanks, but I’ll just use my Amazon Affiliate link to promote my audiobooks. That way I get a percentage of ANY sale that customer makes in 24 hours.
It’s ‘improvements’ like this that have pushed me from accepting royalty share deals to almost exclusively doing PFH titles. This is holding producers hostage and saying ‘no more bonuses for drawing in new listeners, unless they come from your own personal link, so spend your time and money marketing for us, or else’. A blatant and underhanded way of exploiting narrators and producers that will undoubtedly backfire on ACX as, a; producers like me will stop doing RS deals and become distrustful of ACX in general, and b; those who try to use the new system will be spending more time and money marketing which will eat into their production time and they’ll produce fewer/worse audiobooks while they carry out their new job as unpaid marketer for Audible. The move itself isn’t surprising but the insulting part is how it’s being dressed up as somehow ‘better’ than the previous system, and the ludicrous implication of the screenshot on this article that, 10 page views will lead to 10 bounties. Nice try ACX.
Thank you for your feedback, Michael. We’ve updated the image in this post and shared your comment with the team.
What do you think of Dan O Day’s class for doing Audio books ?
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In the past, we’ve generated over 80 bounties per month, which means if the average new subscriber that WE’VE attracted hangs in there for a year, or even 6 months… well, you do the math. With the new program, I average about 3 bounties. So, we’re both losing money. We do a podcast, and the bounty referral is in the liner notes, but all the cross-promoting in the world isn’t going to close the gap. ACX is shooting itself in the foot. Both feet.
Some really good pointers, thanks!
I recently narrated several new books which are audiobooks!
https://www.audible.com/pd/B07MC5PVLY/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWU-BK-ACX0-139140&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_139140_pd_us
Helpful
I too doubt this new bounty program will be workable as a narrator. I’m spending at least an hour every evening putting out teasers to attract listeners. You’ve even provided fancy graphics (thank you) to place into my posts, it will be a couple of days before I see the results, but despite my effort over the past 3 weeks, the bounty count, click rate, etc. is unchanged from 3 weeks ago. The original $25 bounty program brought many per month, the $50 program resulted in a decline-but I still manage a couple per month. The new program does not look promising, but I’ll continue to give it effort for a time. I have to leave time open to produce more product.
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