How To Make An Audio CD Program On A Budget (Part Two)
Saturday, January 17th, 2009(This is Part Two in a series of posts about my experiences creating and marketing a personal development/“self-help” audio CD program. You can find out about the recording and CD production in Part One.)
5. Graphic Design. By the time I created the CD series, I’d already worked on a few other projects with a graphic design firm in Argentina I found through eLance. They created the covers for my free e-book, Career Satisfaction From Within, and another recent e-book, Productivity From Within.
As the cover graphic was basically just a photo with text superimposed on it, and the text on the audio course cover was very similar to the Career Satisfaction From Within e-book cover text, I ended up paying my designer just $50 to design the audio program cover. I probably would have paid less if we’d been working outside eLance, but $50 is the minimum eLance allows a service provider to charge for a project.
Initially, my designer sent me a PDF file containing the cover, and this was enough for the downloadable version of the program. To make a “liner notes” file for the downloadable product with a track listing and introduction, I used OpenOffice to create a document with that information and convert it into PDF format. Then, because I don’t own a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional, I ran over to Kinko’s with a USB drive and combined the cover and liner notes PDFs into one file. I included that file with the downloadable product.
However, I needed more than just that PDF file to create a sleeve for the CD version of the audio program. I needed graphics and text for the back and side of the DVD case, and the file needed to be resized to fit the case.
Thus, I had my designer (for no additional charge) expand the cover graphic to include a “back section” of the sleeve, which was basically an excerpt from the sales letter I wrote for the audio course against a blue background. My designer told me I could just take the new graphic and a sample DVD case to Kinko’s, and they would resize the graphic to fit the case. I doubted, at first, that Kinko’s would be willing or able to do this, but they did it perfectly.
6. Printing The Sleeve And “Liner Notes.” Like I said, I had Kinko’s resize the graphic for use in a DVD case, and I had them print 100 copies of (1) the sleeve and (2) the “liner notes” file I mentioned earlier, which I condensed into a double-sided card slightly smaller than the DVD case. The total price for the Kinko’s portion of this process was $100. It would have been less if I hadn’t chosen to use a glossy type of paper (unfortunately I don’t remember what it was called) to get a professional look.
7. The UPC Barcode. Amazon Advantage, and most bookstores, require a CD product to have a UPC (Universal Product Code) before they will agree to sell it. The best option for obtaining a UPC for your product is to buy a barcode from a reseller. BuyABarCode.com, for example, charges $75 for the first UPC you buy, and $25 for each additional one. If you use a distributor like CDBaby to make your products available online, they may be able to sell you a UPC for even less. This is what I did—CDBaby sold me a UPC for $20.
As far as I know, the only other option is to obtain an original UPC through a nonprofit standard-setting organization called GS1. To do this, you must become a member of GS1, which costs $750 as an initial matter. If I were offering many different tangible products, this might have made sense, but at this stage in the game there was no reason to do this.
8. Online Transaction Processing. At this point, I needed a website to handle the processing of my customers’ transactions, and I chose E-Junkie.com. If you’ve sold information products on the web, you’re probably familiar with E-Junkie. By the time I created the CD series, I was already using E-Junkie to host the downloadable version of my audio program, and to process customers’ payments through PayPal.
For that service, I’m currently paying $15 per month—a price based on the total size of the audio program files I uploaded to E-Junkie (165 MB). E-Junkie can also process transactions for physical products that require shipping, and because selling the CDs through E-Junkie didn’t require me to host any more files on their site, I’m not paying anything extra to sell the CD series.
9. Marketing. I’m currently selling the CD version of the audio program through a few different channels.
First, I’m selling the program on this site, and handling the order fulfillment myself for those sales. Second, I’m marketing the CD program through CDBaby, which I chose because they will distribute both the CD and digital versions of the product through the same storefront. Finally, I recently sent sample copies of the CDs to independent bookstores, and have spoken with some of their personnel about the program, but it’s too soon to tell whether selling this way will prove successful. At the very least, this should get me some speaking engagements I can use to promote the program.
I hope you’ve found this information helpful. If you decide to make your own physical audio program, best of luck, and please let me know if you have any questions.
(If you’d like to learn more about the recording equipment I used, the recording process, and manufacturing the CDs and cases, check out Part One.)
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 | If you found this post useful, you'll likely find Chris's book, Inner Productivity, helpful as well. Inner Productivity is packed with techniques to help you find focus and motivation in your work from a mindful perspective. |
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