Audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment of the book market. While paper and ebook sales grow by a measly 1-4% per year, audiobooks are growing by 20-25% every year. 

If you don’t have an audiobook, you are missing out on that growth. You are also missing out on sales to readers like me.

I only buy audiobooks.

Since I graduated from college, I have purchased and listened to nearly 1,000 audiobooks. During that same time, I have purchased and read maybe a dozen paper books and ebooks. 

But just because you have an audiobook doesn’t mean people are reading it. It’s still a needle in the proverbial haystack. While the audiobook haystack is much smaller than the ebook haystack, you are still competing with hundreds of thousands of other audiobooks.

To learn how to market your audiobook, I talked with David Wolf, the CEO of Audivita Studios, an audiobook creation firm. We talked about seven strategies for marketing your audiobook.

Strategy #1 Hire a Celebrity Narrator  

Thomas Umstattd, Jr.: Having a celebrity narrator gives readers a second reason to say “yes” to buying your book. Audible lets you browse books by narrator, and I have purchased books based on the narrator.

What are some tips for hiring a celebrity narrator?

David Wolf: Narrating a fiction audiobook requires the art of performance. Most authors cannot do this well. You need an actor to pull off the narration, the changing of character, the emotional content, the action sequences, and the pacing. It takes a skilled actor. 

A well-known name might attract more buyers and produce a high-quality recording, but they are expensive. Many authors are not able to hire a celebrity narrator.

Thomas: There are two ways of working with two different kinds of celebrity narrators. 

The first option is to hire a famous Hollywood actor, like Elijah Wood who read Huckleberry Finn (Affiliate Link).

Hiring a Hollywood actor is tricky because they generally hate audiobook narration. Narrating an audiobook is grueling, boring, and not very glamorous. It doesn’t have the cachet of narrating an animated film. The Hollywood actors who are willing to narrate audiobooks often want a lot of money to make up for the hassle.

But if you’re writing fiction, you don’t have to hire a Hollywood narrator. 

The second option is to hire a genre reader. In microgenres, you’ll discover a handful of narrators who read most of the books in that genre.

For example, there are a couple of narrators who perform military science fiction. A bestselling space battle audiobook is likely narrated by one or two narrators who have perfected space battle narration performance.

I read a lot of military science fiction. When I see you’ve hired either of those top narrators, I know you’re familiar with the market. You’ve done your research or your publisher believes in your book enough to get one of the top narrators. And there must be something about your book that those narrators like.

Savvy narrators are careful with their brand.