Makoto Tokudome walks us through a thoroughly modern yet incredibly important set of steps in book marketing. As another TVWriter™ minion said when we talked about this post, “Maybe we should call it, “Podcasting Your Book for Fun and Profit.”
by Makoto Tokudome
Are you a self-published author? Are you looking to get your book into other mediums such as audio?
Do you wish someone would narrate your book? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to turn your book chapters into podcast episodes?
Well, by using some free online tools, now you can!
I’ve put together this comprehensive tutorial to walk you through the process I used to turn the chapters of my book into a podcast. You can check out my example here.
In a nutshell, I used Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech (TTS) service to create MP3’s of my book chapters. And then used Anchor FM to create and publish the audio as podcast episodes.
The idea of creating podcast episodes out of a book was inspired by Mark Coker and his podcast episodes of his Book Marketing Guide book.
*Caveat – Although text-to-speech (TTS) technology is quite impressive, my understanding is that Audible/ACX and other vendors still require audiobooks to be narrated by a human.
So What Can We Do With Our Text-to-Speech Audio Files?
1. You can create a podcast
2. You can use the audio files of your book to be a lead magnet. Give your audio files as a free audiobook download in exchange for email signups.
What is Amazon Polly?
Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service that can convert text into audio speech. Text-to-speech technology has been around for some time. You may have even used it on your Mac or Apple device.
But up until recently the technology has usually produced halted, robotic voices. But Amazon Polly is able to create more lifelike speech that is quite impressive.
Amazon Polly currently offers this service in 26 different languages (e.g., English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, etc.).
I chose the male voice “Brian” with British English to narrate my book chapters. (Listen to a sample.) You can sign up for an account here.
Take a look at the pricing. My understanding is that you can request up to 5 million characters (i.e. not words) a month for free, and then $4.00 for each additional million characters….