Every author surely is aware by now of the growth of audiobooks in the past ten years. The Audio Publishers Association released their annual sales survey in June of 2020 in which it states audiobook sales are experiencing their eighth year of double-digit revenue growth.
No doubt as an author, you’ve either come out with an audiobook yourself, or have at least given it some thought.
But have you given thought to the audiobook as a form of content beyond that of purely “an audio version of a book?”
Audiobooks: More Than Just One Piece of Content
Audiobooks are not just another “version” of an already-existing work. While an eBook is simply an electronic version of a print book, audiobooks offer your audience—and you, as the author—a completely different medium with which to engage.
Audiograms are a term you may be familiar with. For those who aren’t, audiograms are short, bite-sized pieces of audio content with a visual element for use in marketing and sharing on social media.
While typically utilized more often by the podcasting and radio industry, where podcasters may take particularly engaging clips from an interview or talk to share on their socials to spread awareness and interest in his/her show.
However, podcasting is not the only medium that can take advantage of the usefulness of audiograms; authors are another cohort who can benefit from adapting his/her audiobooks to audiogram format.
Audiograms typically consist visually of some kind of branding, at minimum the podcast’s (or audiobook’s) cover, as well as some text and a sound waveform visualizer. Many times, captions transcribed from the audio are included for those whose sound is turned off on their device.
Audiogram lengths vary based on social media platform:
- Twitter: 2:20 minutes max
- Instagram: 1 minute max
- Instagram Stories: 15 seconds max
- Snapchat: 10 seconds max
- TikTok: 1 minute max
- Facebook: 10 minutes max
In addition to lengths, sizing varies from platform to platform:
- Square for Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook
- Vertical or Portrait for Instagram Stories, TikTok, and Snapchat
- Horizontal or Landscape for YouTube and other websites
The most well-known audiogram services include Headliner, Wavve, and Audiogram. Each of these services offer a free plan which you may use to test their service. Each will vary in terms of what they offer in their respective free plans as well as their paid plans, but for reasons of brevity, this is outside the scope of what we’re talking about here.
Why Get Fancy?
This may beg the question for some: why get fancy with an audiogram, when I can just send around a Soundcloud link, for example, of an excerpt?
While it’s true that services like Soundcloud make it easy for creators to embed and share content with a graphic, audiograms include more visual appeal than an embedded audio player does.
Check out the gallery pages on Headliner, Wavve, and Audiogram for multiple examples of use cases for audiograms. Note the variety in styles and format.
Artwork
Artwork is self-explanatory, and similar to what you’d get with a Soundcloud player: a piece of artwork that, presumably, would be your book’s or your audiobook’s cover.
Text
The ability to add your own text is a helpful feature of audiograms. These can reiterate the title of your book or your name, and/or be calls to action, such as where to purchase your book.
Additional Graphics
Audiogram services also allow the option to upload additional graphics to compliment your audiogram. These can be your own brand’s logos, as well as logos of the retailer through which your audience may purchase your work.
Transcriptions
In a world where most people are browsing social media in silent mode on their mobile device, sharing an excerpt with transcriptions can prove much more engaging than one without. In fact, 80% of people will watch the video in its entirety if transcriptions are included.
So in addition to providing accessibility options, utilizing the transcription features of an audiogram service invites audiences to engage with your audiogram in ways an embedded audio streaming player will not.
When sharing your audiobook sample to your various socials through a service like Soundcloud, your content merely sits there, waiting for someone to become interested enough in their lazy scrolling to click on your player and listen to your sample.
With audiograms, your content plays automatically, without sound, until a viewer clicks it. The result is a piece of visually stimulating content that enticesand invites the viewer to take a listen. Even if the viewer is in a situation where they can’t play sound, the subtitled audio makes following along possible.
The combination of artwork, call-to-action text, transcriptions, and a visually eye-catching waveform visualizer can prove more engaging than a simple embedded player with a cover image of your audiobook.
Amazon Product Reviews: A Creative Use of Audiograms
In addition to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms, a great place to share your audiogram as an author is on the product page of your book.
Uploading your audiogram as a product review on your book’s product page is a creative use of audiogram content, as it allows for viewers to sample what is essentially an audio book trailer for your book. The screenshot above is from the product page for AuthorImprints founder David Wogahn’s book My Publishing Imprint.
No need to hire a videographer to stitch together a book trailer; audiogram services allow for easy, ready-made visual content that can act as a book trailer for your work.
Nonfiction
Perhaps the most applicable genre for book marketing using audiograms, audiogrammed nonfiction works offer the chance to produce multiple short excerpts en masse, which is a helpful way to share a multitude of short clips with important points from a book.
Worry not over giving away too much of your book’s content in this manner. Audiograms are generally kept quite short in accordance to the platform for which they are being produced, with the average audiogram landing at around a minute.
Giving away bite-sized amounts of content allow for the bulk of your audiobook to be retained for those who purchase it, while still providing helpful bits of information that both provide real value to a viewer as well as entice that viewer to consider purchasing your audiobook.
What if I Don’t Have an Audiobook?
The wonderful thing about audiograms, in my mind, is the fact that you don’t necessarily even need to release your book as an audiobook to take advantage of them. Simply choose a few sentences or paragraphs that you would like to showcase, and record them specifically for use as an audiogram.
Sure, you’ll need to jump the hurdles involved in how to home record, which makes already having an audiobook such an easy way to utilize audiograms, but it’s still an option to consider. See my posts on setting up a home studio and best microphones for home recording for guides on how to optimize your space for recording.
Conclusion
The main takeaway here that I want to stress is to encourage authors to think broader about audiobooks. While on the surface, audiobooks are merely an audio version of your book, audiobooks may be used in a number of ways for brand-building purposes.
Audiograms make playing with your audiobook’s (or book’s) content easy. From basic excerpt sharing on major social media channels to more specific uses of audiograms in Amazon product reviews or as giveaways, audiograms offer a useful way in which an author may use audio in ways a full audiobook or embedded streaming platform player may not.