Problems are just opportunities to improve. Listen to this episode. Siebert brought this up. Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. This is not a listener suggestion. This is a my suggestion from a personal experience I've had recently. It started out as a really cool experience.
Some of you listen to my audiobooks, and you know that eight of my ten books are on audio done in my voice myself, here in my. Either in my closet or right here with my podcast equipment that I've done them. I didn't do two of them. And that was the caterer venue edition of Shut up and sell more or the DJ edition of Shut up and sell more. And the reason is, is they're pretty much the same book as the original shut up and sell more weddings and events. So I didn't do them. I did the new version of Shut up and sell more of just about anything because I felt it was different enough. But I hadn't done the other two, and I didn't think I'd get around to them.
And I got contacted by Amazon's company, Kindle direct Publishing KDP, and they said, your books are on Kindle and paperback, but they're not on audio. Would you like us to do them using a virtual voice? And that's an AI voice. Now, it's not taking my voice, turning it into AI, it was an AI voice. And I said, curious. So they sent me over ten voices to listen to. My wife liked the australian woman's voice. And as much as I liked it, I didn't think that that would be the voice or should be the voice that was reading Allen Berg's book. I don't think I sound anything like an australian woman.
And then I listened to the male voices, and one of them sounded more like me than the other two. There were three of those seven women's voices. So I said, fine, let's go with this one. I told them in the morning, it's okay, in the afternoon, they were done. They were done. So if you want to listen to any of those in audio, not my voice, but certainly my words, my writings, they're there on audible. You can go in now. Here's where they're not.
I have a page on audible. That's an author's page, just like I have on Amazon. I have an author's page and all of my books there. If you're looking at the paperback versions, you're going to see them in English, you're going to see them in Spanish, and you're going to see two books that I contributed to, although I did not write the whole book, I was a contributor, so I'm listed as one of the authors. They show up there as well. So that's ten and seven. That's 1718. There's 19 books there on my author's page.
If you go to Audible, there should be now ten audiobooks, but there are only eight, the eight that I did in my voice. So if you go to getallensbooks.com, that's my audible authors page, you'll see eight books there, not ten. So I contacted KDP kindle direct publishing and I said hey, how come my books are not showing up there? And I've had it in the past where a book didn't show with my others, either a paperback or a Kindle, and they were able to fix it right away and they said to me, oh, that's not us, that's Amazon. You have to go to Amazon because the author's page is on Amazon. And they gave me the phone number. So I contacted Amazon and they answered and they were very polite and they said oh, that's not us. Thats ACX, which is the backend of audible. Thats another Amazon company.
So theyre all Amazon companies but theyre different departments. So I contacted ACX and I said, hey, eight books are there, two books are not there. Can you get the other books there? And they said, oh, you didnt do those through us. You did those through Kindle direct publishing. You have to contact them, which if youre following along, that was who I contacted first. So here I am in a loop. And what prompted this in terms of the learning opportunities along the way? Nobody said, oh, hey, unintended consequence. Sorry, we didn't realize that that was going to be a thing.
Thanks for letting us know. We're going to work on that. Even if you couldn't fix it today, nobody took that as this is a problem. Not, that's just my problem. This is clearly going to be a problem for every other author, even if they've never done any of their own audiobooks. If they had more than one books book, they can have an author's page. And on that audible author's page it should have all of your books. It just makes sense.
If you search on audible, you can find those two books. Just search. Shut up and sell more weddings and events, caterer venue. Shut up and sell more weddings and events. Dj, band, photo booth, you're going to find those books. You won't find them on my author's page. So if you're reading one of my books or listening to one of my books and click on my name, it goes to the page that has the eight but not the ten. So how does this apply to the rest of us? When somebody comes up to us with a problem, are we looking at it as well? The worst way is, hey, not my problem, somebody else's, and kick you over to someone else.
But we're looking at it as, hey, let me fix your issue. Or, hey, is this a bigger issue? Is this something that affects more people and also turn it around to opportunities? I remember speaking to a jeweler one time, and I said, when people come in and ask for something that you don't have, do you keep track of that to see if there's any patterns? And they said, oh, well, we used to. We don't anymore. Okay, why not? Well, they just stopped. There was no particular reason. Another personal example, I flew to London one time, did the overnight flight, and I get in, it's 07:00 in the morning, 08:00 in the morning. By the time I get to my hotel, it's, you know, 839 o'clock in the morning. My room's not ready, obviously, it's too early.
And so they took my bags and I said, you know what? I want to get a scone. I'm in London. I would like a cup of tea and a scone. Right? What's more London than that? And I asked where I, where there's a bake shop around. They told me. I walked down the street. I was kind of in the Piccadilly Circus area. I walked down the street and there's this baked goods in the window and kind of a pretty big kind of bakery restaurant.
And there's a young man at the, at the hostess host stand. And I said, excuse me, do you sell scones? And he said, oh, you know, we don't. I get asked a bunch of times a day, but we don't. But if you go down the street, you see that awning on that hotel, they sell them there. And I'm thinking, you just told me that you ask several times a day if you have scones and you don't. Is that information getting transmitted back to the owner, back to the chef, back to the baker to know that people are asking for scones and we don't have them? And in my case, they lost the sale. Now, that's not a big deal. They lost one sale.
But how many other sales did they lose? How many other people said, no, I'm not going to eat here because I want a scone. So I went down the street and there's a hotel, and I went into their restaurant and I said, do you have scones? And they said, yes. And I sat and I had a wonderful breakfast, reading the London Times, drinking a cup of tea off of mismatched, beautiful china with beautiful patterns on it, eating my scones with clotted cream and jam. And it was wonderful. But they lost the sale up the street because they weren't transmitting back that how many other people are asking for the same thing? Now, just because somebody's asking doesn't mean you have to do it. But it's a pretty short trip for a bakery, a bakery restaurant, to add scones to the menu when you're already baking all these other goods there. It's not like I'm asking a bicycle shop that bake scones, right? Where in your business are the opportunities if people are coming to you and saying, hey, do you offer this? Where you say, when is it time that I should do those other things? Now, if they fit in with your business, like clearly scones fit in with the bakery. That was clear thing right over there.
A jeweler. If people are asking for pink elephant charms and you hear it again and again, oh, maybe there was a movie came out with that, or maybe some celebrity was wearing that on TikTok or something. You want to know. So you can order those and get those in. They fit with your business. You don't want to do something that takes you into a totally different direction unless you're looking to build in that direction. You can build off of that thing. So think about this.
Problems listening in terms of opportunities. It's not a problem if somebody says, do you do something? And you don't do it, you might be able to refer them someone else, or you might be able to get them that service through someone and you can provide it through you to them without doing it. So there's opportunity there as well. But the problems are the opportunities when if someone's having trouble finding something on your website or they don't understand exactly what you do, and they constantly say, hey, do you do this? Do you do this? And you're like, of course I do that. How do they not know I do that? Well, maybe the problem is that it's not as clear to them as it is to you. I was reviewing somebody's website today, and we found some errors where there are things missing in terms of menu items and things like that, but also part of those menus is the clarity of what do you do? How do I get the information I want? How do I find out more and things like that. And I've talked about website stuff and on other episodes. You can listen to those, me with Brian Lawrence and others.
But problems are opportunities. Finally, after going in my loop between Kindle and Amazon and ACX, Kindle and Amazon, ACX, finally somebody said, hey, figured out the problem because you didn't create the book on ACX. It won't show up there because it didn't go through their system through the regular way. But we're going to let people know that that's what it is. So they didn't solve the problem, but they finally said, oh, now we know what the problem is. Now we're going to report it on there and then hopefully we'll fix it. Now will anybody ever come back to me and say, hey, thanks for reporting this, we fixed this? I doubtful, I doubt that. But what I want you to do is listen to the problems, listen to the friction, listen to what people are asking for and look for the opportunities.
Not only fix someone's problem or to make one sale, but to fix, make the problem go away so it just doesn't exist. Reduce the friction or to come up ahead of the curve because you hear what people are asking for and you'll be able to provide that new service and it's a new profit center for you. Hope that helps. Thanks.
I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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