The audiobook of Inheritance of Shadows is on sale this week! Until 10th July it is 99c on Chirp and Apple and FREE on Authors Direct.
It’s 1919. Matty returns home to the family farm from the trenches only to find his brother Arthur dying of an unknown illness. The local doctor thinks cancer, but Matty becomes convinced it’s connected to the mysterious books his brother left strewn around the house.
Rob knows something other than just Arthur’s death is bothering Matty. He’s know him for years and been in love with him just as long. And when he finds something that looks like a gate, a glowing, terrifying doorway to the unknown, it all starts to fall in to place.
Matty’s looking sicker and sicker in the same way Arthur did. What is Rob prepared to sacrifice to save his life?
And can I ask a favour? If you’ve already read or listened and have a minute, please could you take a moment to leave me a rating and/or a quick review? It makes a difference to how the Amazon and Bookbub advert engines treat things, apparently, and I’m starting to experiment with them, really, really cautiously!
It seems to be The Week Of Promo ™ this week, so I thought I’d do a little blog post on all the different bundles, bookfairs and books giveaways I’m involved in.
They all end at the end of Pride Month, so you need to have a browse before 30th June 2021. There’s a good mix of giveaways, audiobooks, ebooks, sapphic and gay romance here, so hopefully you can find something you like!
It will quickly become clear that this is a blatant promo post about my new audiobook set-up, but I’m combining it with some info about the different listening platforms out there too, as I know a growing number of listeners are looking to move away from Audible. I hope it’s useful from that point of view.
I’ve recently moved the three books I have with Callum away from Audible and they should now be available via local library services as well as other places like Chirp and Kobo. I get as much money from borrows from your local library as I do from Audible credit sales, so knock yourselves out with that and don’t think you’re ever doing any author down by legitimate borrowing rather than buying!
Because of /technical reasons I don’t understand/ I don’t seem to be able to ALSO distribute them via Audible at the moment, but I’m hoping that when I have a free weekend and a bottle of gin handy I can plough through what I need to do to make that happen, as a matter of fairness to people who may have bought the first ones with Audible credits but perhaps haven’t yet got to the rest in the series. For the same reason, I think I will put The Hunted and the Hind up with Audible as well as everywhere else when it comes out in the summer.
HOWEVER, having said that, Audible set their own, quite high, prices for all the audiobooks they sell to people who don’t subscribe in some way. On the non-Audible platforms I have been able to set the price of Lost in Time and Shadows on the Border to $9.99 and the stand-alone, Inheritance of Shadows, to $5.50. A lot of places like Kobo and Google Play will add sales and reductions of their own to those prices and on Authors Direct I am able to directly control pricing without negotiating with anyone else, so I have made the prices $7.99 and $4.40, respectively. The Flowers of Time is still available from Audible and I won’t be moving that away from the platform.
These are some of the different audio platforms out there:
Alternative audiobook platforms are all gradually growing. It’s definitely worth checking the different platforms for your favourite authors.
Authors Direct is part of Findaway Voices, the audio arm of Draft2Digital, which is the service I use to distribute my self-published books. Each author can set up a little shop of their own for their audiobooks and direct readers/listeners to it. It’s quite new I think, but so far it seems really sensible and flexible. I load up the audio files Callum sends me, they check them for quality and then they send them out to all the different platforms I’ve selected as retailers. And at that point I can also add them to my own shop. Listeners download the app onto their phone and bosh, off they go.
It has an easy-to-use app (as do a lot of the other options) and it’s ad free. And apparently it has a safe-for-work mode where you can blank out your screen so no-one can see what you’re listening to :).
They have a handy infographic to explain how simple it is!
The downside as far as I can see is that there’s no main storefront where you can search for eg LGBTQ books or cook books or books about llamas. Listeners find each author’s books via a direct link to the author’s ‘shop’.
Anyway. I hope that makes sense…speaking as a creator this is much more transparent—the sales information is laid out clearly with a straightforward relationship between units sold, what platform they have been sold via and the sale price. Plus we get seventy percent of the list price of sale rather than roughly forty at the other platforms and twenty-five of whatever price they decided to set themselves at Audible, which is obviously very attractive.
So there we are. I really hope some of these non-Audible alternatives suit some of you, too. As a consumer I find the Amazon machine very convenient; and as a seller it is to some extent too. I just think that there should be alternatives should people choose to use them and this is my little effort to bring notice to the audio options. And sell more books!
As some of you will know, there’s a HUGE fuss in audiobook-world about the lack of transparency in the way Amazon/Audible treats authors. It’s all boring back-room stuff that you can find detailed elsewhere if you’re desperately interested; but what it boils down to is that although Audible is a huge market, it’s not a straightforward one for authors to navigate and that makes me sad and stressed.
So…ta da! Drum roll! Etc! My audiobooks are going wide! I have taken the two 1920s London books down and moved them everywhere else in the entire universe! Inheritance of Shadows will follow later this month. If I can work out how to get them back up on Audible once the dust has settled from extracting them, I’ll do that. New releases will definitely go up elsewhere before they go to Audible.
Shadows on the Border Audio
The really, really good thing about this is that I can now set my own prices and have a great deal more control over all of that. I have signed up to the Author’s Direct platform which gives me a level of control that sings to my obsessive soul and also gives authors 70% of the cover price. So if you choose to use that one, you can buy Lost in Time and Shadows on the Border for $7.99 each! You can also find them on all the other apps like Apple, Chirp and Scribd for similar ball-park prices.
Right then. I’ve decided I’m doing a New Thing ™. Each month, I’m going to to a giveaway draw that runs for a whole month, with the winner selected on the 1st of the following month.
So this month, October 2020, I have copies of all three of the current Lost in Time audiobooks to give away, with either US or UK codes. To enter, go to the KingSumo sign-up page. You can just leave me your email address, or for more chances to win, share the post or follow me on insta or twitter–you know the drill. I won’t be using the email addresses for anything other than selecting the winner–the KingSumo thing does that for me–so if you want to be notified of future draws, please either keep an eye on my social media or join up to the newsletter or my Lester Towers facebook group.
You can hear a sample of the narration for each one here on my YouTube channel(which I would like admiring looks for, please, because honestly, although I used to work in cutting-edge IT, that was twenty-five years ago and I feel like I’m drowning these days). You can click through to buy-links from there if you don’t want to wait until November and see whether you’ve won!
Callum is currently working on Inheritance of Shadows and he is going to try to fit Taking Stock and The Hunted & the Hind in during the first part of 2021.
I know I keep banging on about it, but I am so pleased with the work of both narrators. They have caught the sense of both the stories and my characters perfectly and are really a joy to listen to.
