In our last edition of The Hot Sheet, we wrote up the less-than-stellar sales that some self-publishing authors seem to be encountering in audiobooks. (Indie author Mike Wells tells us that his ebook sales outnumber his audiobook sales 200 to 1.)
In response, we heard we should check in with author Jasinda Wilder, one of agent Kristin Nelson’s clients, who is among the pantheon of the most successful indie authors in the world. A year ago, the news broke of her trade contract with Penguin Random House’s Berkley Books, and today, she and her husband, Jack—they work as a kind of dream team—have published fifty-one titles overall.
So how have they done in the audiobook department? Are you sitting down? They’ve sold close to 60,000 audiobooks to date. Typically eager not to come off as bragging about that spectacular number (Wilder says that she and her husband could practically live off their audiobook income alone), they’re quick to clarify that there’s both luck and a strategy in place: selectivity.
“I think part of our success with audiobooks is due to choice,” Wilder says. “We don’t try to produce every single title we publish as an audiobook, but rather we carefully select titles based on which ones we think, based on previous trends, will sell well. If the first book doesn’t sell all that great, we aren’t going to do the sequel.”
The Wilders have seventeen audiobooks currently on sale—exactly a third of their total number of titles. Two more are in production. And three of the titles in the Berkley deal are among the seventeen currently out there. Of that seventeen, the biggest audio successes are the Alpha series and the Falling series.
Bottom line: Attributing success not only to selectivity, Wilder told us, “We are also very fortunate to be able to work with some of the best voice actors in the business, which is a huge part of our success, and I think there’s an important distinction to be made there: we look at an audiobook as a production, a work of art in its own right, not just someone reading a story. Our amazing narrators are true, professional actors, artists, and it’s their incredible talent combined with our stories that have helped us sell [so many] audiobooks to date, and won us an Audie award.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
