Audiobooks

John Morrison investigates the market for audiobooks and considers the prospects for a format poised to enter a new era of change and expansion.

Look around you next time you’re on a train and count the number of  your fellow passengers with headphones in their ears. The chances are that the ones over 30 are listening, not to music, but to audiobooks. The book trade traditionally refers to buyers of its products as readers, but nowadays the term listeners fits just as well. All the signs are that the cosy world of audiobooks is poised to enter a period of unprecedented change and expansion. Writers should sit up and take note.

In 2004/5, the last year for which figures are available, customers in the UK spent £68.6 million on audiobooks, though it’s likely that very little of this filtered back into the pockets of writers.  Only the most successful writers can hope to earn more than a few hundred pounds from selling the audio rights to their books, and the whole area of library lending audiobooks is described by Guild General Secretary, Bernie Corbett, as “a black hole” for authors.

Audiobooks were once a niche product designed, like large print books, for the visually impaired. They mostly sold to libraries in large, ugly plastic packs containing unabridged cassette versions of mainstream popular fiction, while cheaper abridged versions of bestsellers sat on bookshop shelves alongside the BBC’s classic comedy recordings. Twenty years ago audio CDs joined cassettes on the shelves, but did not drive them out as they did music cassettes.

Only in the last two years have sales of spoken word CDs overtaken cassettes in total value, largely because the cassette has one very simple but unique advantage, according to Frances Goldberg of The Talking Bookshop in London’s Wigmore Street: “If you stop a cassette and take it out you can start it again at exactly the same point. With a CD you have to remember which track you are on.” 

Despite the appeal of cassettes to older customers, the writing is on the wall for this 40-year-old technology and it is expected to decline rapidly in the next two years, largely because of pressure from retailers who do not want to waste space stocking both formats. New recordings are already being made on CD alone, with cassettes confined to the backlist.

Technological shifts

But other technological shifts are much more far-reaching. With most internet users now using broadband, the UK is about to follow North America in discovering the internet download as a means of buying audiobooks. Publishers are busy negotiating with new sites such as Audible (audible.co.uk), Audioville (audioville.co.uk) and Spoken Network (spokennetwork.co.uk) to distribute their recordings, and many are considering the option of setting up their own download sites as well. 

Audible, the British outpost of a company founded in America in 1997, has something of a head start and is the sole supplier of  audiobooks to Apple’s iTunes website.  The US audiobook market reached a turnover of $800 million in 2004, and is generally seen as about two or three years ahead of the UK. Apple’s iPod technology dominates the music-driven download market, even though it is  incompatible with other MP3 players. 

Despite technical glitches and differences in format, audiobook downloading is following a well-trodden technological path pioneered by the music industry.  The new gizmos work, but nobody knows how fast book buyers, who form a different market from teenage music fans, will embrace them. “We expect this to be a golden period,” says Paul Dempsey, managing director of BBC Audiobooks. “We have already sold 200,000 downloads and half of those have been bought by people who have never bought an audiobook before.”

Most publishers think it will take at least a year from now to form any judgment.  They don’t expect 18-year-old fans of the Arctic Monkeys to suddenly start downloading James Joyce, or even Dan Brown.  But there are early anecdotal signs of a new market being created among adults which goes beyond the traditional elderly  buyers of audiobook cassettes and CDs.

For the BBC, the biggest download hits so far have been the mainstream works of PD James and Bill Bryson.  Philip Nixon of Spoken Network says that in his view over-45s are the key market. “This is why publishers are excited,” he says. “There are new sub-groups coming into the marketplace who are not traditional audiobook buyers, but now have broadband.” 

So it’s not the impecunious Napster generation but the time-poor, cash-rich generation between 30 and 50 who are going to be the new customers. “Listening is fundamentally a background experience,” says Jonathan Korzen of Audible. “Your eyes are busy but your mind is free, so you can listen while you’re out walking or weeding the garden.” 

It’s clear (to me at least) that this is the key advantage of the audiobook over the much-hyped electronic book or e-book, downloaded in text form to a portable reader. Don’t be surprised if the e-book turns into a damp squib while the downloaded audiobook, becomes, as the marketing people say, the Next Big Thing. What it means for authors is that books that are not bestsellers will for the first time have a better chance of becoming audiobooks.

Unabridged

Already the traditional split between the unabridged library market and the abridged retail market for audiobooks is being eroded. Adventurous publishers are going for unabridged recordings, following the example set by JK Rowling who famously insisted that the Harry Potter series should not be abridged. 

One recent example is Sarah Waters’ novel The Night Watch published by Time Warner, which provides 17 CDs as a boxed set for £25. This looks good value until you realise that the same recording can be downloaded from Audible for only £11.99. “Nobody buys an audiobook solely because it’s a bargain. They pay a premium for the convenience,” according to Jonathan Korzen.  Frances Goldberg of The Talking Bookshop agrees that price is secondary for her customers. “If you want it enough you will afford it.”

Nonetheless, nobody is predicting that abridged audiobooks, which still account for most of the market, will disappear. Rachel Davidson of Audiobooks4hire, a small company offering CDs for rental by post, says she is sure abridgments will continue in order to keep down costs and because a lot of buyers like them, irrespective of price. Guild member Michael Bartlett's new Crimson Cats audio list is deliberately sticking to a single CD format priced at £9.99 (see UK Writer Spring 2006 for more about Crimson Cats).

Internet distribution

For publishers the arrival of the internet to distribute audiobooks provides a big opportunity to strip out the costs of manufacturing, packaging, warehousing and transporting CDs. They can also sell to an English-speaking worldwide market on five continents.  Bookshops have traditionally been reluctant to stock more than a handful of top titles and have shunned expensive unabridged versions, but online retailers have no such problems. 

The key phrase is the ‘long tail’, which means publishers will be able to go beyond bestsellers and offer a wider selection of books for the audio market. “Downloading liberates you,” says the BBC’s Dempsey. “You can offer more than just the top slice to customers.”  Download sites will be able to follow Amazon’s example and stock thousands of titles which may only sell in tiny quantities.

Remember that you don’t have to own an MP3 player to enjoy a downloaded audiobook. After downloading, you can just as easily burn a CD to listen to at home on a hifi or in the car. Those who spend most of their time travelling will obviously opt for an MP3 player as their first option. The holiday traveller will no longer have to squeeze cassettes or books into the suitcase, just a device the size of a cigarette packet containing half a dozen novels. That’s the theory, anyway.

Anxious to cut through the hype about the iPod and form my own view,  I said the magic words “Writers’ Guild” and borrowed one from Apple for a week. After a bit of head-scratching I successfully downloaded a chunk of Alan Bennett from the iTunes website and listened to it. Frankly, it wouldn’t be my first choice; I found the compressed sound quality inferior to my pocket FM radio, and I felt as though I was listening to Bennett talking about his mum on the telephone, but I can see the attraction of the MP3 player for those who are permanently on the move. 

For many people, such a device will soon come for free as an office perk as part of an upmarket mobile phone. For the technically challenged who don’t or can’t manage a download, there is even a new device in the US called a Playaway, which is a small MP3 device sold pre-loaded with a single book. All that’s needed is a battery and set of headphones.

Listening habits

Of course, not every development in the North American audiobook market will be repeated here. Across the Atlantic, it is the 12-hour car journey that has fuelled the market for unabridged audiobooks;  here the journeys are not quite so long, and BBC radio offers a more stimulating alternative than anything available in the US, but drivers in their cars will form a core part of the target audience. During my research for this article I asked all my friends how and why they listened to audiobooks, and I was surprised by the variety of the replies. One told me she listened in the middle of the night when suffering from insomnia;  another had bought dozens of audiobooks for a dyslexic son unable to read novels. A bookseller at Waterstone’s told me she sold increasing numbers of unabridged CDs to foreigners learning English.  And I suspect there is an increasing market among stressed-out office workers whose eyes are simply too tired to read a book on the train home after eight or more hours staring at a computer screen.

Production costs

One thing that hasn’t changed much is the fixed cost of producing an audiobook.  Publishers pay for the rights, abridgement (where needed), the studio and the actor who does the reading. This can cost anything between £1,000 and £10,000 depending on the length of the recording, the fame of the author, and occasionally that of the actor.

In the UK, more than in the US, actors such as Martin Jarvis, the acknowledged king of the audiobook, have their own following and their names can make a big difference to sales. Sometimes publishers strike lucky; Orion bought the audiobook rights to The Da Vinci Code long before Dan Brown’s book became a Random House bestseller, and its recording has sold a record 110,000 copies. Most audiobooks sell only a fraction of this number.

One leading UK literary agent told me it was hard to negotiate more than £1,000 or £2,000 as an advance for an audiobook for most authors. Author royalties normally amount to 10% of the income received by the publisher, not of the retail price, which means most writers will at best earn about 70 pence per audiobook sold. With the possible exception of Dan Brown, authors are not going to get rich quick on that kind of money.

The BBC has a whopping 40 % of the UK audiobook market, thanks to its fantastic back catalogue of radio and TV recordings.  It is followed by major trade publishing houses such as Penguin, Random House, Macmillan, Hodder, Orion and HarperCollins, who mostly turn their own bestsellers into audiobooks.  Then come the smaller specialist players such as CSA, whose list includes a highly successful version of Machiavelli’s The Prince read by Ian Richardson and classics read by Martin Jarvis, who is known for his meticulous preparation and versatility. Jarvis manages to match his voice subtly to his material, but at the same time he is self-effacing. “You have to be careful not to get in the way of the book,” he told me. “I try to make the listeners forget they are being read to.”  Of course, well-known personalities often read their own books, and they get paid for doing so.  Some authors, such as John Le Carré, turn out to be perfect readers of their own works, although others are less successful.

Shelf life

One peculiarity of audiobooks is that they have a long shelf life, according to Pandora White of Orion.  While popular novels come and vanish from the shelves of bookshops in a matter of weeks or months, audiobooks of Agatha Christie just go on and on. Early Ian Rankin and Maeve Binchy audiobooks sell just as well as the recent ones. As Rodney Troubridge of Waterstone’s told me, “The audiobook market is immensely nostalgic.  People are stepping back in time.”  This has implications for authors as well. An audiobook is for life, not just for Christmas.

One audiobook publisher whose list follows that principle and has a devoted following is Naxos, part of the classic music label. Naxos puts more timid publishers to shame with a list ranging from Homer and Plato to Haruki Murakami, taking in Milton, Joyce and Beckett on the way. Proust weighs in at 39 CDs and is available by mail order from Tesco for less than £100. Naxos is creating a backlist of classics that should sell steadily for decades to come. “Naxos are head and shoulders above the others,” says Sue Baker, who previews audiobooks for Publishing News. 

Nicolas Soames, the publisher, is currently working on a recording of  War and Peace.  Despite the high prices he has to charge for unabridged recordings, he has been pleasantly surprised by the lack of price resistance from customers. “Where people want it,” he says, “they will pay the money.”  Naxos is looking closely at its options for offering its own downloads as a way of cutting costs.

With the approach of the download market, the barriers are coming down for small players, though the market is still limited.  Audioville says that most titles sell in the tens rather than the hundreds.  If you want to get your audiobook on the iTunes website you have to go to Audible first and they, not surprisingly, keep most of the money.  Only between 20% and 12.5% comes back to the publisher.

The library market

Meanwhile the library market still makes up about a quarter of the value of the total UK audiobook market, and this is where authors really lose out. Public Lending Right does not cover audiobooks, and it is highly unlikely that the law will be changed to allow it to do so. Traditionally, libraries have paid more for their audiobooks, around double the retail cost, and a proportion of this money trickles back to publishers, agents and authors.

In theory European law should entitle authors to a reasonable payment every time their work is lent out, but in practice it doesn’t happen and nobody has the money to fight a court case to change that. The lack of any payments for library borrowings means that popular authors find themselves in the “black hole” mentioned by Bernie Corbett.  It’s likely that the ALCS, which collects royalties, will eventually get involved, but the subject is fiendishly complicated.  Not only will the government have to find the money to allow libraries to pay more, but an agreement will have to be reached between all interested parties, not just authors. “It’s been a very long running and frustrating saga,” says Mark Le Fanu of the Society of Authors. “Libraries won’t play ball unless there is money from the government.”

“Collecting the money isn’t a problem,” says Jane Liddiard of the Guild and ALCS, “It’s agreeing who gets it.”

One uncertainty on the horizon is whether the BBC will carry out Mark Thompson’s latest vision and make its huge archive available for download – a problem highlighted by Alan Drury in the Spring 2006 UK Writer. 

Nobody at the BBC Worldwide knows exactly what will happen, but Alan is right to point out that the BBC is under government pressure to open up its archive on the grounds that the public has already paid for it. Nobody, however, including the BBC’s competitors, expects it to cut its own throat by giving away for free material which it can successfully sell. Writers who have sold their work to the BBC for radio are at least protected by standard agreements. Writers negotiating with  publishers are on their own, dependant on their own vigilance and that of their agents to protect their interests. The only advice I can give to fellow writers in this fast-changing market is to remember that your audiobook rights are increasingly valuable. So don’t just give them away for nothing.

John Morrison is a member of the Guild’s Editorial and Communications Committee. His novel, Anthony Blair Captain of School, is published by Black Pig Books.

This article first appeared in the Guild's magazine, UK Writer (Autumn 2006).