Selecting the Sales Sample for Your Audiobook

The Beautiful and Damned Sample’s Waveform

One of the trickier tasks to accomplish once you’ve mastered your audiobook, is selecting a sample clip to append to the image of your book on Audible or any other audiobook publication website. It sounds so simple, but once you get into your book and own certain characters, when you’ve described grand and glorious landscapes, or when you help your listener sneak around dark corridors of a suspenseful plot, picking out one snapshot-like snippet of the story becomes a real challenge.

Let’s be frank here: The reason the clip exists is to hook a buyer for your audiobook. There are other narrator-fisherpersons on the publishing dock, casting their samples out in the hopes of snagging a passing fish…er… sale. Here is the Audible search results page for my just-released audiobook, The Beautiful and Damned. I'm down at the bottom, and it's a long way up to the top if sales don't happen. 

The Beautiful and Damned

Take Good Notes

Remember when your parents, teachers, or professors told you to take good notes? If you did, you know they paid off when it came down to finals. The same holds true in audiobook narration and in the selection of a sample for sales. 

Because I like to record medium-length audiobooks—anywhere from 9-15 hours long—finding a three- to five-minute clip requires extensive note-taking throughout the narration process. Although my reading source during narration is usually a PDF of the book displayed on a monitor adjacent to my DAW (digital audio workplace) monitor, I keep a hard copy of the book next to my keyboard, placing sticky tabs on pages with unusual pronunciations, special effects possibilities, character characteristics, and passages with potential for clips. And I must admit to the heresy of writing directly on the pages of the book!

(Tip #1: Buy a used copy, or at least a cheap copy, online. Be sure it matches the version you're narrating. Hardbacks are easier to markup, but paperbacks cost less.)

Don't be afraid to mark up a hard copy of your book

Plot-Driven Sample

In selecting the clip from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, I chose a point in the lives of the book’s two key characters, Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert, in the run-up to their full-blown relationship.

Think of yourself as the director of a play, with notes for characters and scenes 

Having read the book twice before beginning the narration, I had a pretty good idea of what characters I wanted a sample to include and what stage in the story the clip should describe. I chose a point near the end of the concluding half of chapter two, a point at which the two lead players were just beginning to show their characters to each other and to the reader. The setting is the Marathon, a New York City jazz-café on Broadway, described by Fitzgerald as, ‘[A]n unsung palace of pleasure,” where the inhabitants are, “…very rich and the very poor, the very dashing and the very criminal….” 

Harvard graduate Anthony, 25, the novel’s tragic male protagonist is seated at a table with the beautiful 22-year-old Gloria. She is fascinated by the circus of customers surrounding their table, and as Anthony watches her take it all in he finds himself completely enraptured by her loveliness and her excitement at the music, the dancers, and the swirl of life around them. He is astonished by her reaction to the scene before them: “I belong here,” she murmured. “I’m like these people.” Although the sample is only five minutes out of 15 hours of audio, it should be enough to intrigue someone who is considering purchasing the audiobook.

(Tip #2: A sample without dialogue, or with very little dialogue, can work if the scene itself has enough plot-foreshadowing elements to lead the listener to want more.)

The Reluctant Dragon

Voice acting Sample

If your goal is to use the sample to highlight your range of vocal characterization, then grabbing a few minutes of back-and-forth among the story’s key players, as with this light-hearted sample of a three-way conversation between the Boy, the Dragon, and St. George, from Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon, will showcase your voice acting skills in just a few minutes. This particular book is only 56 minutes long, so a clip like this one represents nearly all of the major characters in just a single sample. I selected this clip because the characters themselves describe the whole point of the story in one scene: St. George has been called to a small English village to confront a troublesome dragon. The dragon, a poetry-spouting, fire-breathing beast, has been befriended by a young boy, who is trying to keep the dragon out of harm’s way, while, at the same time, appeasing St. George and the villagers.

When I first volunteered to narrate the public domain book for Listen2aBook, I’d forgotten how many versions of the book were out there, and how many different voices had brought the story to life over the past 70+ years. The Boy was not too difficult: a light, confident, upper register voice would be fine. St. George’s voice fell well within my own natural range between baritone and bass; I just had to give him a bit of gravitas (I imagined I was giving a fatherly “the talk” to my own children). The Dragon, the star of the book, was ultimately given over to a W.C. Fields treatment, but not in a ridiculous way; he’s a sensitive guy, well-read, and thoughtful.

Owen Wister's Epic Western, The Virginian

The Sweeping Story Sample

If your book is sweeping or epic in nature, covering years of territory and a broad cast of characters, then you really have to work at isolating a sample that will encourage a listener to buy the book because they are so intrigued by the chosen character or characters, or the scene-setting descriptions that they feel compelled to hear more. With the Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, a public domain novel by Owen Wister, the 19th-century story spans half-a continent, disparate cultures, and years of plot in a tale of a cowboy and a schoolmarm, a wise old western judge, a Bennington, Vermont great aunt, and a black-hatted villain named Trampas. The Virginian’s sample is pulled from the opening chapter as the unnamed storyteller describes a tense poker game in a bar in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. It is the first meeting of the Virginian and Trampas, and it sets the stage for the bitterness, violence, and final showdown that drives the story along.

(Tip #3: Be sure to treat an anonymous narrator—particularly one who is a first-person character—with the same enthusiasm you give to your main players. Anonymous though they may be, they are still very much a part of the story)

Wrapping It Up

Selecting a sample for your audiobook’s sales pitch can be challenging, but it’s not a Sophie’s Choice. Yes, you will wonder after you sent the whole audio package off to your publisher or producer if maybe you should have chosen a different clip. It’s quite likely that you’ll open up the book, or the audio files and think you’ve found something much better. “Drat!” will be your first reaction (okay, maybe not Drat, but those are the four letters I chose). You may wonder if the clip is too long, too short, too this or too that. If you did your groundwork, took notes as you went along, considered the plot elements and flow of the book, and then went with what you felt best portrayed your narration skills and would capture the attention of a potential buyer, you did your job. Put the second-guessing aside and get started on your next book.