Why Audio?

The benefits of creating an audio edition of your book come in many forms. Completing your catalog with audiobooks offers a new creative medium to explore, along with the opportunity to share your stories at scale and engage with a wider audience, making them a crucial step in growing and sustaining your self-publishing business. Audiobooks have proven themselves to be more than just a trend, especially with companies like Audible making them both widely popular and accessible, allowing storytellers to meet audiences where they are across a variety of devices such as smart phones, in-home virtual assistants, and car stereos. According to WordsRated.com, an international research data and analytics group focused on the publishing industry and beyond, the audiobook market will grow by 26.4 percent every year over the next 7 years, while the book publishing market will grow by 1.9 percent. Some further proof from their research shows that sales revenue for audiobooks in the US increased by over 50 percent over the last 5 years. Just this past June, The Audio Publishers Association’s annual sales survey revealed an 11th straight year of double-digit growth in audiobook sales. With its proven success and increasing popularity, the audiobook market is ripe with opportunity for you and your stories. The Listening Distinction As this UCL study on the emotional impact of listening uncovered, there's much more than meets the eyes (and ears) when it comes to expanding your story from the page and into audio. One important distinction to use in leveraging audiobooks for your audience is how they offer the reader a new and exciting way to experience your story that amplifies what can traditionally be accomplished on paper. With audio, stories transform into an immersive experience that listeners can enjoy and get lost in together. Stories can be told in color, with carefully selected narrators or even full casts bringing them to life amid soundscaping, sound effects, or original scores employed to build suspense and embellish important moments. Listening also offers more versatile ways to engage your audience and consume your content beyond traditional reading. For example, Audible listeners can choose their preferred cadence by increasing or decreasing the speed of the narration, which can make focusing on the story easier. Listening to audiobooks also offers the type of efficiency consumers have come to expect—it enables them to transport to new worlds while simultaneously doing other activities, like a long road trip or while doing daily chores. In fact, in a report by WordsRated.com, a statistic showed that around 70 percent of American adults reported that they engage in multitasking while listening to audiobooks. Creating an audiobook for your fans to listen to is a valuable tool for reaching an audience that is always on the go—which turns out to be just about everyone! Accessibility for All Perhaps equally important to the storytelling enhancements that audio offers, is the accessibility it brings. People who have a visual impairment or other disability that makes reading a book difficult, as well as neurodivergent audiences, can benefit from the availability of audiobooks that allow them to get immersed in a story via a medium that works for them. Creating an audio edition of your book doesn’t just offer a different way to engage with your story, it offers a way to access your story to a whole new audience that may not be able to consume your work in print or eBook formats. Attracting More Listeners One of the greatest benefits of bringing your story to audio has to do with numbers. The more formats in which your audience can find your book, the better chance you have of reaching more of them. There are literary fans that consume stories solely or primarily in audio, and therefore are only looking for titles on services with audiobooks available. If you don’t have an audio edition of your book out there, there’s an entire cohort of potential fans that may never see your titles or know they exist! Creating an audiobook gets your work in front of more consumers by bringing it to them where they already shop for content so they have the opportunity to purchase it, driving your sales and growing your fanbase. Ready to dive in? Head to acx.com and click ‘get started’ to start claiming your titles and bringing them to life with the power of audio.