Did you write a book? Or create 52 episodes of a weekly podcast?
Writing a book is hard. Selling a book is even harder. They don't call it the Best Writing Author — they call it the Best Selling Author! Ouch, right? Now, you sit on the long tail of Amazon's platform waiting for a nibble or two. All that work you put into writing a book only to have sales flatline.
It's time to give that book a second life! How do you give it a second life? What if you could tell your story and sell your book at the same time? What if you could use all the content in your book to help drive sales to your book? You can with a podcast based on your book!
The strategy is simple to understand, but difficult to execute. Here's a quick breakdown:
#1 — Podcast Design: First, you will need to design a podcast based on your book's main premise.
#2 — Podcast Schedule: Next, you'll need to break your book up into 52 logical mini-topics, or topics that can be self-contained within a 20-60 minute audio episode. This can be segmented with your first episode that introduces your podcast, special episodes, and even interviews based on relevance to your topic.
All in all, you really only need to come up with 40+ episodes actually based on your book's content. That should not be too difficult if you think about how your book is already organized. There's no need to recreate the wheel. Just follow your book's natural progression from episode to episode. Tell your story in spoken word audio the same way a reader would experience it themselves. If you think about your podcast as a reader would your book, 40+ episodes are really the 10-12 chapters of your book broken down into stand alone themes. Then within each of those chapter themes are possibly 3 or more sub-themes. Enough content for at least one year's worth of weekly podcasting (or more).
#3 — Podcast Book Promotion: Finally, turn your stagnant book sales into a 52 episode audio series where each episode features your book as the content and the sponsor. The ads become your ads. The deals and sales become your deals and sales. When you control the content and the ads, everything comes to you. Not only can you expose listeners to each of your books main points, but you can engage with them, hear from them, and find out what they think of you and your concepts.
This gives you tremendous leverage over other books on your topic. Other peoples books are just books. Your podcast on your book can become BONUS content for your book by including amplifying thoughts, additional viewpoints, and new information. Think of it as the Directors Cut of your book, only given out in 52 bite-sized chunks.
This strategy has a huge side benefit too. It helps you flesh out ideas for Book Number Two while you engage with real fans using content from Book Number One. This is A/B testing of a book you haven't even written yet.
Furthermore, it can lead you to entirely different directions with content already tested to be what your audience wants. When you know what your audience wants, your can turn Best Selling Author into Top Ranked Influencer on your topic. It takes converting your book into a podcast to realize these advantages.
However, podcasting your book is not for those that only want to try it out. This is a strategy that requires you to become dedicated to podcasting for at least 1-year. In other words, you have to commit if this strategy is going to have any chance of working!
Are YOU are ready to do the work that will save your book sales? If so, you have a huge advantage over most new podcasters. You not only have a year's worth of content to work with up front, but you also have a book to sell with your podcast. This gives authors something most podcasters wish they had: a head start!
And now you know!
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Oncetold is a podcast education and technology company. We turn new podcasters into yarn weavers, big dreamers, and true believers. Start telling your story at oncetold.us.
Find more podcasting wisdom on Not Easily Squished or at noteasilysquished.com.