After five years of producing music, we’re now producing audiobooks too!

Audiobooks are the fastest growing segment of the book publishing industry. As of 2015, the audiobook industry was worth $2.8 billion – this was because a whopping 43,000 audiobooks were released! Only 20,000 audiobooks were released in 2013.

According to a recent report by the American Association of publishers downloaded audio had the highest growth in the first eight months of 2015. The number of audiobooks sold  increased 43.3% in August, compared to August 2014. This brings the year-to-date growth for this format to 37.8%, compared to the same timeframe in 2014. Source: goodereader.com

Neilsen StatShot, for the first time, is even starting to track audiobook sales. Many publishers are also discovering audiobook subscriptions make a great revenue generator. In 2015, 3.88 million audiobooks were downloaded…only 2.47 million e-books were downloaded that very same year.

The traditional audio customer will find your titles wherever you offer them, however, many of these non-traditional distribution models are targeted to the non-traditional audio user and/or customers who have never listened to an audiobook before.  The hope is that through a subscription or bundling model, a non-audio user will be enticed to try and audio and become a convert.  Additionally, these types of models offer the chance to ‘sample’ your product – I.e. Offering the first few titles in a series – hoping to hook the customer, who will then go to a more traditional full price model to find subsequent titles in the series once they are hooked. Source: Linda Lee, VP, Publisher Scholastic Audio

If you’ve published a book, are looking to publish a book, consider also recording an audiobook. This is a great time in history to make digital products available for purchase.