I finished recording my "Noticing" audio book

What are good ways to market audio books? Should I release a free sample? If so, which one?

I finished recording the audio book version of my anthology Noticing yesterday.

I narrated it myself, but not because I am an adroit speaker — I probably averaged 0.75 mistakes per sentence (but that’s what the professional director and engineer were there to catch and patiently have me redo, over and over).

And, admittedly, my penchant in writing for long sentences with complex parenthetical inserts and/or multi-syllabic Latinate words combined with alliterative phrasing (try saying things like “fortuitously flagrant” or “sententiously sarcastic” without sounding like Daffy Duck) turns out to be better suited for a professional enunciator than not terribly articulate me.

No, the main reason I recorded my book myself is because it would be asking too much of even a pro to figure out which of my sentences or clauses are supposed to be serious and which are parodistic, needling, deadpan, over-the-top, or my other registers.

If you ask me who has had the most influence on the evolution of my prose style in the 21st Century, I’d say it’s this guy whose name I’ve forgotten from about 20 years ago who wrote a funny website insulting the celebrities of the day, most frequently Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears, who were (briefly) the Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill of blonde bimbos pursued by paparazzi. His shtick was to switch from serious to satirical and back with no warning to the reader, often in the middle of sentences: he assumed his readers were smart enough to figure it out.

But with a selection of my topical journalism going back to 1992 (and to 1973 if you count a letter-to-the-editor that shows either how intellectually precocious I was at 14 or how grievously I’ve failed to develop since then) loaded with examples and allusions ripped from the headlines of the time, it’s hard enough for even me to remember what’s supposed to be a joke or not.

So, I would have had to sit in the control room and coach the poor narrator on the right tone to get across the precise implications of each upcoming sentence.

Hence, I figured, I might as well do it myself.

In case you are interested in the mechanics of recording an audio book, my 421 page book took 42 hours in the studio to record over eight sessions. I expect the final product will be about 12 to 15 hours long, and should be available for purchase pretty soon.

I recorded everything in the book except the endnotes and index, with very few changes, other than that I gave up on certain foreign phrases, such as Stalin’s favorite “кто кого?”

in favor of “Who? Whom?”

Also, I dropped a few English words beyond my lingual dexterity. For instance, late yesterday with the clock running out on finishing the book without having to book the studio for another day, after several farcical attempts at saying the word “opprobrium,” I replaced it with “shame.”

I don’t know anything about audio books, so do you have any suggestions about how to market this?

For example, would it make sense to release, as it were, a single off the album as a free sample to see if you like my voice and to garner some attention for the paid product?

If so, which of the 61 recorded essays on Noticing should I put out for free?

Since this 1/61st of the book would be distributed free, while the audio version (very much) exists to make money (the standard price will be the same as the paperback version: $30), this shouldn’t necessarily be the best, most invaluable piece in the book. I don’t want people to feel the way those who had acquired Queen’s single with David Bowie “Under Pressure” then didn’t see much reason to pay for the rest of Queen’s Hot Space album.

I’d appreciate any suggestions from those who own a physical copy of my book who’d like to glance at my table of contents and make a recommendation for which essay to release as a freebie audio. I’d also be grateful for any other suggestions you have about promoting audio books, a subject about which I’m completely ignorant.