When I first saw this article by Tom Alderman at the Huffington Post I thought, Wow. On second thought I recalled all the audiobooks I’ve ordered for my middle child, who despite being dyslexic, is an avid reader. I didn’t spend close to the amount that Marion Bryant spent last year. Then again, Ms. Bryant is the director of the Bluegrass Regional Library in Columbia, Tennessee. The library has,”…an annual budget to buy audio books for a consortium of 200 non-metropolitan libraries around the state.”
What was even more interesting to read was that “…across the country, libraries are consumers’ first choice for audiobooks, accounting for 43 percent of the listening audience, according to a survey from the Audio Publishers Association, the industry’s trade organization. Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and all retail sales, amount to 27 percent of the market, while downloads from sites such as Audible.com or Amazon account for only 9 percent of sales….”
Again I am reminded that while libraries provide reading pleasure for our country’s citizenry at not cost, they can also contribute to enormous sales for an author’s book, whether in hardcover or paperback and also in audio format.
Authors, both traditionally published and self-published would do well have their works converted into audio format.
That we have not considered the audio form as important to sales as the written form seems to be one more example of the narrow thinking that has led all who are connected to the publishing industry into the quandary out of which we are now scrambling to find trails of escape.
Perhaps the problem with book sales, despite the poor economy, has less to do with too many books being published, some that are poorly written, but for those that are well-written, there is not a large enough audience waiting to read them, a problem due in large part to the limited accessibility to books–a lack of diversity in formats and an inadequate supply of various formats.
Rather than urging authors to write books faster, and less creatively, publishers and their companies and staffs would do well to seek out and develop ways to make more available to the public books that are already in print–i.e. widen the pool of readers to include more people as opposed to sucking off the dwindling few readers that remain.
Is your book in audible format?
How often do you purchase audiobooks?
How often do you think of libraries and people with disabilities when devising a marketing strategy on which to promote and sell your book?