The digital audiobook company Storytel is showing strong growth as it expands into new countries and markets. In 2019, Storytel hit its target for subscriber growth (1.1 million)—which represents a 41 percent increase over the prior year—and it anticipates 1.5 million subscribers by the end of 2020. Most subscribers consume books in their local language, while English makes up about 3 to 10 percent of total consumption. On the whole, Storytel is not yet in the black, although it is profitable in its home country of Sweden. (In 2019, audiobook sales comprised about 50 percent of Sweden’s total sales of adult fiction.)
Earlier this year, Penguin Random House pulled all of its titles from Storytel and similar subscription services to protect earnings potential—and they’re not the first publisher to avoid the service. Sweden’s Bonnier started withholding its audiobooks when Storytel stopped paying a fixed price per title. Because Storytel subscribers do not purchase audiobooks, Storytel pays publishers on a revenue-share model based on the relative consumption of a publisher’s titles. This is very different from Audible, which works on a credit system and pays a fixed royalty rate to publishers.
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.
