Interviews with Influencers Book Series
Do you want to create books very fast? Quality books that attract readers? How about doing Interviews with Influencers?
Write an Influencers Interview Book
You can create and published an interview eBook in just a few hours. The idea was to interview someone, send that interview to a transcriber, get a cover made, and format it into a book. This is then published as an eBook and paperback on KDP. The interviews should be with popular influencers in your market.
I’ve created 3 interview books so far. The first one took about 7 hours, which breaks down as follows.
- Maybe an hour to find an influencer to interview.
- 90-minute interview which took about 2 hours
- 2 hours to send to the transcriber, format the text that came back and get it ready for publishing
- Another hour to publish on KDP
- And one more hour to format and publish for KDP in paperback.
The book created by this process is now available on Amazon.
This is the first in a series titled “Interviews with Influencers.”
The Process
Here’s the whole process without using the application, step-by-step.
- Find someone to interview and set a time. Talk to them a bit to get an idea of what questions to ask.
- Write up your interview questions.
- Interview them, recording the interview. You can use an application on your smartphone to record it. There are plenty of other recording applications available. Make sure there is as little background noise as possible.
- Send the MP3 file to a good transcriber. 60 minutes should cost no more than $60.
- Get a photo from your interviewee, and send it off to a cover artist. Fiverr has some great cover artists, and you should be able to get a good one for $10 (with source, always get the source.)
- To make your book nicer, get some other photos and illustrations from your interviewee. Also, get a bio and any promotional materials he’d like to include.
Edit the document that’s returned. You’ll find areas marked “unclear” (or something similar), these need to be corrected by you. In my case, there was only one, and it was the name of a company.- Keep the editing light. The idea is this is supposed to be a fast process, and it’s an interview, so you want to keep that flavor.
- Break apart long paragraphs into shorter ones.
- Make your major questions into chapter headings.
- Add your front and back matter, which can include your own promo. I also make it a point to include promo from the person I’ve interviewed to help them out as well.
- Always be sure to add a preface which clearly states this is a transcribed interview. Otherwise, your readers will be confused. You should also state it on your cover and your Amazon description.
- Write your description for Amazon (make it the same for everywhere)
- Figure out your categories and keywords
- Be sure to include your interviewee name in the title
- Upload it to KDP
- Format for Createspace, adding page numbers and other niceties.
- Upload to Createspace.
- You now have a book in eBook and paperback format.
- If your audio quality is acceptable, you can even create an audiobook on ACX. You’ll probably want to edit the MP3 a bit.
- You can also upload it as a free podcast.
- Offer paperback copies to your interviewee at a deep discount. You can order copies from Amazon at a reduced rate, so sell them to your interviewee at cost plus a buck or something like that.
- Send the links out using your standard promotional methods.
Total cost should not exceed $100 (less if you do your own transcription), and the total time should be around 6 hours. The idea is to make it quality, of course, but also fast.
There you have it. How to create a quick and easy book and podcast for very little money and effort.
What do you think of this idea? Make your thoughts known in the comments below.
Richard is the Owner and Senior Writer for The Writing King, a bestselling author, and ghostwriter. He’s written and published 63 books, ghostwritten 40+ books, as well as hundreds of blog articles.
