Thinking about selling sounds. Could you give me some advice?

[Fernando Carvalho]

Hi. I am an electronic music producer for more than 20 years. I love sound designing and I think I am reaching a level which could let me sell preset banks and sound packs for both software and hardware.

So I am seriously thinking about creating my own company and start to sell.

What advice could you give me as sound designers?
Which things are fundamental to start this kind of business in your point of view?
Which are the best strategies for marketing your products?
How do you set the price of your libraries?
Doing sales is a good strategy? (I personally don´t like them that much, I would prefer to set an inexpensive price from the beginning...)

Any word is very welcome.

Thank you.

[VELLTONE MUSIC]

Don't wanna break your ambition or trill about the 'company' but if u take it too seriously like i did in the beginning probably will be very disappointed - the money are enough to buy new synths and some hardware but count them in hundreds not thousands to have an idea how this 'business' earn
Which doesn't mean that you can't become most successful sdesigner of all times...
There will be always people saying something negative about you work,by reasons you couldn't even imagine (nationality,race,whatsoever) and as there is a joke 'once somebody say you sister is slut,go and explain you don't have a sister :):)
Personally i do it cuz i love it and still there is few crazy guys donating for all the stuff i do which motivate me to create new sets,if you find your solution go for it.
Nothing stop you to try at least.Good luck :):)

[solidtrax]

What advice could you give me as sound designers?
Make sounds that you like, that you are comfortable with. Trying to make sounds for a specific genre while you have no connection with that genre, I would not advice. Sure, think out of the box, create unique sounds, but always make sounds that you like and at the same time you have to be able to imagine that other people will find use for these sounds too. We once tried to make sounds in a genre we had no experience with. We ended up giving it away to the developer to use them in the factory bank (no reference to us), instead of selling it commercially, simply because of the fact we didn't stood behind our product. So yeah.. lot of words, but all I wanted to say is: stand behind your product!

Which things are fundamental to start this kind of business in your point of view?
Make up your mind who you want to be your customer. Do you want to make commercial sound banks for end-users, do you want to create factory content or official sound banks for developers/companies? Or perhaps do you want to do both? We do both, but now that we do a lot of work for developers, our goal of releasing one commercial sound bank each month is thrown out of the window. There is simply not enough time, and we put quality first, not quantity. We rather release no commercial sound bank, than rush things. However, a good commercial sound bank that is picked up positively by the community, will most likely end up earning you more money in the long run, compared to (mostly) fixed payments by developers/companies.

Which are the best strategies for marketing your products?
Since we focus mostly on working for developers/companies, our marketing efforts at the moment are pretty non-existent (which is not good, I know). Anyway, we use social media and websites like KVR and Gearslutz to get exposure for our commercial sound banks, we create demo songs for our sound banks to showcase some of the presets and we recently decided to make a "taster pack" with a small selection of the banks so people can check out (to some degree) the quality of our work. We should have done this earlier, it helped sell our banks significantly. However, our website/shop is not exactly state of the art and our new website/shop is 6 months late and probably will be another 6 months late. So yeah, I can tell you what you should do, but we don't do it ourselves.

How do you set the price of your libraries?
We compare prices, simple as that. However, you will see prices as low as $10 for 500 presets and as high as $50 for 64 presets, so yeah, what do you compare your prices to, that's probably a good question. We try to be in the middle, we don't believe in very cheap, we also don't believe in over expensive. Hmmm, this is probably a worthless answer, sorry!

Doing sales is a good strategy? (I personally don´t like them that much, I would prefer to set an inexpensive
price from the beginning...)
We don't like sales, but we believe in them though. Pretty much all developers and sound designers we have contact with, have the same experience: sales work. I guess it's because people like to have the feeling that they payed less for a product than the usual price. So a $40 bank for $20 feels like a good deal, while a $15 bank that has never a sale will never attract that same feeling. People think, it's just a $15 bank, it's probably not as good as the $40 bank which I can now get for $20. On the other hand, when you have many sales each year, people stop buying for full price. Yes it's difficult.

So there you go. I have no idea if any of what I wrote is useful to you, but hope some of it does. Feel free to drop a private message if you have any further questions.

On and one more thing. Yes, you can make a living with doing sound design work. Be good in what you do and be prepared to work hard!

[VELLTONE MUSIC]

Some good advice here,stand behind your sound,but things are relative when comes to quality - everybody can claim that his 50 presets pack cost 500 euro because it's absolutely unique touching the sky of sound design and same time to be just copy/paste to other guys years hard work so right price is even more relative than the quality,better users to decide what they are willing to pay for it.
I'm not even trying to be successful when it comes to 'business' - instead of making 15 sets each with 100 presets inside - same sound,same style i prefer to build only one,
which couldn't be successful business model and obviously i don't do it for the money but to satisfy my invention mania making new stuff and when start new project using this set to have something complete as set of sounds.
Or you can make 30 sets,same 10 years old sound used everywhere inside and to claim whatever you want about quality and originality and if somebody byte such trading tragedy/strategy and all 'PRO' statements works for you go for it.Cheerz

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

To add a little to the great advise already given...

Designing sounds for sale can ge a bit different in that when making a sound for one ot your tracks you program in what you need and thats it. For a commercial bank you need to consider setting up normal modulations such as MW and AT. If the synth has macros you should set those up also. Make sure that the volumes are consistent and not 0 db. Make sure you are not generating strong information below 30 hz. Naming can be a challenge also. I admire those guys that consistently give unigue names that describe the sound sith out saying.....FM bass....one of my names by the way.

Jump on in!! the water is warm.

[Fernando Carvalho]

Thanks a lot for your responses, very useful advice.

I will probably start very humbly, with cheap and free soundbanks, sell them via gumroad before I make any expensive inversion in a profesional website, graphic design and things like that. I will try to make all the work by myself, but I want it to look good. I am not bad with graphic design and I could make the video promos myself. I may pay for pro design at first if I don´t like my attempts with it and work from there.

I know this must be mostly a one man operation at this point.
I have an estudio where I do some work as producer, mixer and sound designer and I teach too, so selling sounds will not be my only income, but I would love it to be one of the main ones

[TripleSpiralAudio]

Solidtrax made a really good post and hits the nail on everything in my opinion. I am working full time as composer already now since 2003 before I started my sound design company in 2017. I have worked in the game industry and production music business and always done my own sound design.
In one year my company grew to a point that I can actually decide to do it fulltime, so yes there is certainly a way to make a living out of it. It can also lead to do bespoke sound design which is a very nice route as well (doing that now as well)
Most of my things I will say is also said by Solidtrax, but here from my own perspective.

Design and produce the sounds you would also use yourself. I think I made the mistake in the beginning to think too much what people would like. As soon as I dropped this, everything went much better. You cannot please everyone and the first one to please should be yourself If you have good quality, it will sell.

I have put out at first my products in my own network, on forums like here, VI-control (where I am active for many many years), Facebook, twitter etc. It takes time to build, but if you deliver solid products, establish a good name and some good customers, the things will spread slowly towards bigger (or even quick as I noticed haha).
What helped for me as well is to offer good service to customers. Listen to the advice, address any potential errors that might have slipped in, offer a refund (never had to use it, but its good for people to know that there is this option). I also work with creating a small freebie for my products, give them some hands on experience.

Don't price too low, nor too high and don't be too much distracted what the competion does. Too low can give you the name of being "cheap", too high can scare people away. Price it at a price you would pay also for it and use sales now and then. This does help. I also always work with an introduction price and full price. Introduction price is mostly around 20% off from the full price and lasts a week/2 weeks. Don't put your stuff to cheap on sales and if a product has just been released, exclude it or make it even with the introduction sale, but never below (can result in angry customers).

Do a walkthrough video, some good demos, make sure paypal is included in your payment options and make sure you use external hosting for larger products to avoid website problems (as I found out the hard way...).

And most of all, just enjoy and believe in your own products and with that amount of experience you have, you know whats out there

Good luck!