Audiobooks: The Shining Prospect in the Publishing Industry

More and more readers are beginning to feel that they are doing justice to a book by listening to it. After all, in India, story has always been more of an oral tradition than a written one.

Even at our BYOB Parties, we had several readers speak about the audiobooks they had listened to including Born a Crime by Trevor Noah; Let Your Mind Run: Thinking Your Way to Victory by Deena Kastor, Olympian runner;  Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders; and poetry books as poetry is best listened to.

On that note, we attended the extremely informative workshop ‘Creating an AudioBook Future’ hosted by BEAT Technology in partnership with All About Book Publishing.

The event that was held on Aug 3 included Q&A with experts about creating an audiobook strategy, including curating a list, selecting narrators, studio recordings and marketing.

Some Takeaways From the Session:
  • Audiobooks are gaining popularity and many publishers are warming up to this model of infusing fiction and non-fiction with radio drama and digital technology. One indication that the audiobook trend is here to stay is that some books are being released exclusively in this format.
  • While the world over, it is fiction that makes the cut, in India, audiobooks seem to thrive the most in the self-help, financial and wellness segments.
  • In India, commute time to work is the highest in the world and so this is the perfect time to plug into a device and listen to a book. This is a huge opportunity for audiobook publishers.
  • Audiobook production is nothing like the making of a paperback or an eBook. The yardsticks are very different- audiobooks are very expensive to create, requiring high-quality narration plus no scope for automation. Yet publishers are diving in and trying to zero in on more optimal publishing and distribution models

What audiobooks have you been listening to recently?