Takeaways on Audio from London’s FutureBook Live Conference

FutureBook Live panels on audiobooks focused on a big snag in rights—and a big question mark about what’s next in the field

In its October 2018 StatShot report, the Association of American Publishers noted that downloaded audio revenue in the US jumped 37.7 percent year on year. And in the UK, Nielsen is seeing a jump in audio revenue from £84 million (US$105.7 million) in 2015 to £114 million (US$143.4 million) in 2017. That’s not unusual, of course; downloaded and streaming audio has been the brightest spot in many publishers’ finances for years.

But the FutureBook Live conference on November 30 revealed that authors’ audio rights and a question of What’s next? may be the biggest threat to continued audio profit jumps. It fell to Cathryn Summerhayes, a literary agent with London’s Curtis Brown, to spell out early in the day how authors are sometimes unwitting victims in the rise of audio on the market. In the session Big Audio: Dynamite!, Summerhayes challenged publishers’ “insistence on bundling audiobook rights with print rights” in contract negotiations, which, she said, can mean that authors get only “pitiful” royalties from audio, even as revenues rise.

Summerhayes reported that authors are getting less than 5 percent in royalties from audio, in some cases after being expected to record the books themselves for no extra money. Authors, she said, “are not stupid. They want to be paid properly for what they do. If audio sales are going up, they should be making more money.” Summerhayes also said that print publishers are saying no to rights reversions when audiobook producers make offers for authors’ backlist titles—although the original print publisher may have no plans to produce the audiobooks themselves. And when it comes time for audio to be marketed, Summerhayes said, too frequently the publisher’s line is “Oh, look how well audio is doing, even though we’re doing nothing” to market it—instead of capitalizing on the popularity of audio with a special push.

Joseph Evans from Enders Analysis acknowledged, “Publishers have adopted a position of ‘no audio rights, no deal’” in contract negotiations. What’s more, Enders’ research indicates “there’s a large proportion of publishing that remains unpublished in audio. Similarly, there remains a good proportion of audio that’s not published in print.” One of Evans’s most important points: “An audiobook is not a simple format extension” of a book in the same way as an ebook. “I would suggest that an audiobook is closer to a film or TV adaptation”—a work that stands alone in its own sphere of production. “It’s a whole new production. It takes very different skills to cast it, produce it, and market it,” he said. “You don’t see many publishers sitting in on TV and film production.”

In another panel, New Platforms, New Ways of Storytelling, the biggest takeaway may have been that there isn’t a lot that’s truly new going on, as much as an effort to learn how to use what we have. Smart-voice devices such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home have text-reading capabilities, but, as Pan Macmillan’s Sara Lloyd asked, are books going to become merely merchandise to accompany such auditory delivery? (Pan Macmillan in London and has been among the quickest in the major houses to experiment with both audio and visual products, especially on YouTube.)

For more genuinely new approaches, the “ambient storytelling” experimentation led by Tom Abba—in which a smartphone’s GPS can be used to adjust story content—is still among the most forward-looking, but it’s hard to develop in the trade market. “Amazon has complete control of the Kindle,” he said, “so there’s no room to innovate in terms of how books look and perform in the Kindle context” or in similar corporate environments. Much of the work in “ambient storytelling” is done in university settings instead.

In the panel The Originals: How to Develop New Audio, author Sophie Hannah explained how podcast creation has become for her a gateway format to other storytelling tech. Having written a self-help book, How to Hold a Grudge, she was persuaded to try turning its points into a weekly podcast. She confessed that the idea sounded far-fetched, but the podcast, now going into a second season, was so effective, she said, that, “Apart from reading, listening to podcasts is now my main leisure activity. I’ve completely changed the way I see innovation. I’m still the author who writes the stuff,  but I now think about innovative ways to transmit my work. ‘What could I be doing with this? What is everybody else doing?’”

Bottom line: The industry’s challenges, as reflected in comments at FutureBook, now have to do with two major issues: the growing standoff between authors and publishers about how audio rights are handled, and how to innovate in a space in which consumers may already have found their comfort zone. Kate Jones, who heads up English-language production for the subscription service Storytel’s Originals program, says that Storytel is publishing in 18 languages this year. The challenge is finding work that “travels” from one linguistic and cultural context to the next in audio. “And that involves the writers’ roles, too,” Jones said.