Analysis The audiobook market
series charting in the year-end top 10. No other kids’ title made the 2016 top 50. In contrast, the Audio CD top 20 for the year to date features a whopping 19 kids’ titles—including the ubiquitous Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which appears in fiſth place. Given that the average seven-year-old probably doesn’t have an Audible subscription, J K Rowling’s phenomenal success in audio download can be credited to “first-wave” Harry Poter fans, now nostalgia-loving, iPhone-brandishing, twentsomething Millennials. Nielsen’s data backs this up: 48% of all adult audiobook consumers (aged 18+) are under the age of 35. Actual chil- dren, on the other hand, are keeping audio CDs alive. Of 2016’s near-750,000 audiobooks sold, nearly 300,000 were kids’ titles: that volume is the genre’s best in audio since its 2013 high, while Adult Fiction and Non-Fiction were both noticeably down.
Non-fiction’s flying
However, 2017 is shaping up to be narrative non-fiction’s year, with Jon Ronson’s The Butterfly Effect—a seven- part Audible Originals series on the birth of free internet pornography—spend- ing three consecutive months at the top. Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, which has rocketed back into the print and e-book charts aſter being published in 2015, made its début in the Audible ranking in March, and has remained ever since. The popularit of podcasts could be fuelling this narrative non-fiction boost, with Nielsen’s research showing that 75% of audiobook consumers listen to podcasts, with 28% doing so weekly. Again, there is a clear difference between the tpe of non-fiction title that does well in CD format and the kind that charts in the Audible ranking. Aside from humour titles such as Alan Partridge’s Nomad (really a fiction title in all but name), physical audiobook non- fiction is overwhelmingly dominated by language guides, with the Collins Easy Learning Audio Course for Spanish the only non-Children’s audiobook in the 2016 top 10. And take note, retro format enthusiasts: language audio- books seem to be the only titles still selling in cassete, with a John Wiley & Sons trio of Span- ish, Japanese and Arabic for Dummies selling a combined 638 units in 2016.
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POINT OF VIEW
Grasping the audio nettle: the format’s recent resurgence could be just the beginning, if publishers are willing to take a chance...
new audios annually. All to feed the smartphone revolution. It’s 2017, and big cheeses are saying all the right words, audio departments are no longer just solo affairs, and more titles than ever before are being published (yes— simultaneously to print and e-book!) There’s even the odd bit of marketing floating about. Audio finally seems to have hit the tricky teenage years and while the cash may be piling up, I can’t help worrying that long term we’re missing a trick. Audio is not just a quick bit of bunce to replace plateauing print and e-book revenue—it could be the game changer that publishing so desperately needs, but the combination of one huge retailer, publishers being risk-averse and a lack of vision is holding us back. Confidence in the format is key, as is a willingness to invest so the sector can progress to maturit. We’re still not publishing enough titles, and not well enough. Be it by one house or a combination of trade and specialist, together we need to commit to the format and let authors know they will be published in print, e-book and audio. If we can’t show readers we are serious enough about the format, how can we expect their long-term interest? One giant retailer saw the potential far sooner than traditional publishing did and took the lead, and that commitment has paid off. The only people with access to sales data across the whole industry, Audible’s constant invest- ment and innovation is awesome. “Take Me to the Good Part?” Wow. There’s a retailer who knows what its customer wants. But its failure to share data in any meaningful way massively contributes to the uncertaint around audio, the feeling that we’re all taking a punt. Concrete data collection has to be part of the solution; until then, we’re leſt to second-guess trends or use the limited data we have in our own systems. Obvious fields like literacy and education are relatively untapped and instead we stick to the safe bet. Another edition of Murder on the Orient Express, anyone? There are currently six and counting, while thousands of backlist titles are as yet unrecorded.
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Making the leap The response to this imbalance of power from publishers is to cut costs and make cheaper recordings. The constant cry of, “Oh, it’s so expensive” high- lights the difference in approach and a lack of vision. Audio is not, like an e-book, a copy of an existing product but brand new IP, digital product proper with a myriad of uses and ROI potential. And the expensive tag doesn’t wash when compared to a couple of broadsheet ads or a bulk order of Chinese-cloth tote bags. It’s fear of the unknown and a reliance on doing the old familiar. I want this industry to grow and fulfil its promise and to do that we need
to nurture and support it. Let’s do more of what we’re doing beter and less of what we’re doing badly. Every other format in publishing is just text on a page. Shock news, but that just ain’t sexy to an awful lot of people. We could move on from the perennial squabble over market share to a truly new era, one in which we get our books to the people who have never crossed the threshold of a bookshop. Millions of people don’t ever buy books, but they listen to radio, to podcasts, to CDs and stream music. ×
Jo Forshaw ran the audio publishing team at HarperCollins until spring 2017, taking its output from 80 titles a year, to a position of having an audio edition of pretty much every print title across its list.
E’VE COME A long way. In my nine-year stint at HarperCollins, we transformed the audio publishing programme, from producing 80 titles and digitising a backlist of abridged tapes to creating 500+
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