People connect with people, and humans have used their voices to connect for millennia.

It's hard for authors who favor text, but you can stand out if you use audio for book sales and marketing.

In the intro, I talk about the launch of Destroyer of Worlds and the importance of remembering it's about long-term sales rather than short-term spikes. I also mention the How to Make a Living with your Writing Workbook, which is a new version that contains more questions and space to write your answers.

Plus, the Book to Course Summit, a fantastic, free, online summit featuring some amazing authors who have turned their books into six figure courses. If you want to turn your book into multiple streams of income, check it out here.

The corporate sponsorship for this show pays for hosting and transcription. This podcast episode is sponsored by 99 Designs, where you can get all kinds of designs for your author business including book covers, merchandising, branding and business cards, illustrations and artwork and much more. You can get a Powerpack upgrade which gives your project more chance of getting noticed by going to: 99Designs.com/joanna

My official bio! Joanna Penn is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers (as J.F.Penn) and non-fiction, a professional speaker and award-winning entrepreneur. Her site, TheCreativePenn.com is regularly voted one of the Top 10 sites for writers.

I delivered this session at the London Book Fair Indie Author Fringe. You can listen above or on iTunes or Stitcher or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below. You can also download the slide pack with clickable links.

Why audio? Why now?

Audio as another income stream for authors.

How to self-publish audio books, both with and without ACX, including information on contracts and agreements, narrators, and narrating your own books.

The costs involved with creating audio books.

Marketing an audiobook and the differences between that and marketing a book.

Podcasting and its advantages for authors.

How to create a podcast and why it's a brilliant marketing tool for books.

If you like audiobooks, check out Business for Authors: How to be an Author Entrepreneur on Audible, which I narrate myself. For fiction, you can find all the links to my thriller audiobooks here.

Transcript of the Class on Using Audio
Hi, everyone. I'm Joanna Penn, from TheCreativePenn.com, and welcome to the Indie Author Fringe. My event today is going to be "How to use Audio as an Author for Book Sales and for Marketing." And we're going to go through a load of stuff on audiobooks and also on podcasting. But first, just a little introduction to who I am, in case I haven't met you before. I am two people.

I write nonfiction as Joanna Penn, and I have a blog and a podcast, and I'm a speaker, and I do all kinds of things for authors. I also write thrillers under J.F. Penn. And you can see some of my books there I sell around the world, and I sell in e-book, print, and audiobook format, all without a publisher. And I left my day job in September, 2011, and so I'm coming up to five years as a full-time author/entrepreneur. And a lot of the stuff I'll be sharing with you today are lessons that I've learned along the way.

But, of course, it wasn't always like that, and I just wanted to wind the clock back to 2008. Here's me with my very first book. So if you're just starting out, hopefully you'll enjoy this session anyway, and there will be things you can use if you're just starting out or if you are at the point of having lots of books and wanting to expand your income.

Just as an overview, we're going to go through, "Why audio, and why now?" "How to self-publish audiobooks with ACX," "Working with a narrator," "Narrating your own book," if you fancy doing that, as I have done with one of mine, so far, "Audio programs,