The SoundCloud platform is great way to develop and promote your audio books. You can use the drop box to receive submissions, privately share the work amongst your colleagues and use the commenting feature for proofing. Once it's ready you can use the variety of players available to embed the final work on your site or social networks, or use the secret links for promotional purposes!

Before You Start: Look at a few Example's

Take Harper Collins Childrens for example who recently used SoundCloud to post audio books excerpts of author Michael Morpurgo on his site.

Or Faber Books, who gave away a free short story audio book (listen below) by Willy Vlautin via SoundCloud to promote his printed collection, adding buy links to the players and sending it out to the audio book blogosphere such as here and here and on their Facebook page.

And take a look at Penguin Books who are using SoundCloud to send publishers and stores snippets of the latest audio books and now distributing podcasts via SoundCloud to iTunes and their social networks:

The Penguin Podcast by Penguin Books UK

And even the smaller independent publishers are finding value in using SoundCloud, not only for promotion but for developing their audio books.

“One person can upload a file, share it privately with the rest of us to proof and we can make timed comments without having to download anything and the reader can see what and where the mistake/issue is and correct. Very nice!” - Carl Craig, Post Hypnotic Press

Canadian publishing house Post Hypnotic Press use SoundCloud all along the creation process. Using the drop box they receive the edited chapters from their narrators to proof. They then make timed comments to make notes on what needs to be changed. Once the final version has been agreed upon they take excerpts from the book and embed them on their own site using the mini player.