AB 13 | Audio Is All The Rage with Michele Cobb
10/06/15 • 32 min
Site: http://www.audiobooks.com/podcast | Email: [email protected]
It’s officially Autumn! Grab a pumpkin spice latte, queue up an audiobook, and breathe in the sweet scents of the season. But before all that, we have a great installment of the Audiobooks.com Podcast to share with you. This week we had the opportunity to speak with Michele Cobb, the executive director of Audio Publishers Association (APA) and owner of MLC Consulting, a PR, sales, marketing and business development service for the publishing industry.
With an extensive background in directing and entertainment, Michele brings a unique perspective and knowledge set to the podcast, sharing insight into the demographics of audiobook listeners today as well as why audiobooks have seen an increase in popularity over the past decade. Once again, we get to hear about the power of audiobooks to entertain and educate and how they are becoming a vital tool in our society.
Listener Demographics
As the realm of audiobooks expands, it’s interesting to see how the core demographic of audiobook listeners also fluctuates. Michele presents us with some observations from a recent consumer survey that captures a snapshot of the current listener base and in addition to seeing that audiobook listening is on the rise, also sees that listenership is increasing amongst younger audiences. While the typical expectation is that the dominant listener base is in the 45 and up range, they are seeing significant growth among listeners in the 25 to 45 range.
Based on other statistics and observations Michele provides, it’s becoming easier to see why there is increasing growth in this area. Not only are audiobooks becoming more widespread, not only are they better produced and better funded, but they’re also becoming more accessible. In the last five years we’ve seen the creation of smartphone apps and the availability of borrowing digital audiobooks from a library, both which cater to that younger audience.
Building the Industry
If you’re reading the show notes for this podcast, we assume, at a minimum, that you are aware of the existence of audiobooks. But possibly a more accurate assumption is that you are more invested than most in the lifecycle, health, and growth of audiobooks. For as much as we love audiobooks here on the podcast, it’s amazing to think that many people don’t know about their availability and ease of access. But that is still the case in many cities around the United States!
Last summer, APA kicked off its largest consumer awareness campaign in the form of an AudiobookMobile designed to draw attention to the audio format of books and introduce listeners to the medium. Michele said that this campaign was both fun and informative, as it provided a unique opportunity to engage with people in local libraries about the benefits of audiobooks and their place in education, not just for entertainment purposes.
In addition to raising awareness, APA is also concerned with the internal health of narrators, publishers and authors. For the last several years, APA has sponsored a conference, the Audiobook Publishers Association Conference, which is dedicated to networking and education its members. The conference is their opportunity to have the face to face interaction with one another to discuss best practices, to hear insights from other people in the industry, and come into a common mind about the direction of the industry.
In Queue
Michele shares a couple audiobook suggestions with us before signing off! Her favorite audiobook, she says, is Blindness by Jose Saramago. This book is narrated by Jonathan Davis and runs 12 hours and 30 minutes. The uniqueness of this book, Michele says, is that it has very little punctuation and can be very difficult to read. But Davis, the narrator, does a very good job at bringing it to life.
Recently in her queue is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, a work of historical fiction and romance originally published in 1938. This book is narrated by Anna Massey and runs 14 hours and 15 minutes.
What’s in your queue?
Show us some love!
Tweet this episode: http://ctt.ec/3eLZ5
Subscribing, rating and reviewing the show: iTunes
Books & Resources Mentioned
Site: http://www.audiobooks.com/podcast | Email: [email protected]
It’s officially Autumn! Grab a pumpkin spice latte, queue up an audiobook, and breathe in the sweet scents of the season. But before all that, we have a great installment of the Audiobooks.com Podcast to share with you. This week we had the opportunity to speak with Michele Cobb, the executive director of Audio Publishers Association (APA) and owner of MLC Consulting, a PR, sales, marketing and business development service for the publishing industry.
With an extensive background in directing and entertainment, Michele brings a unique perspective and knowledge set to the podcast, sharing insight into the demographics of audiobook listeners today as well as why audiobooks have seen an increase in popularity over the past decade. Once again, we get to hear about the power of audiobooks to entertain and educate and how they are becoming a vital tool in our society.
Listener Demographics
As the realm of audiobooks expands, it’s interesting to see how the core demographic of audiobook listeners also fluctuates. Michele presents us with some observations from a recent consumer survey that captures a snapshot of the current listener base and in addition to seeing that audiobook listening is on the rise, also sees that listenership is increasing amongst younger audiences. While the typical expectation is that the dominant listener base is in the 45 and up range, they are seeing significant growth among listeners in the 25 to 45 range.
Based on other statistics and observations Michele provides, it’s becoming easier to see why there is increasing growth in this area. Not only are audiobooks becoming more widespread, not only are they better produced and better funded, but they’re also becoming more accessible. In the last five years we’ve seen the creation of smartphone apps and the availability of borrowing digital audiobooks from a library, both which cater to that younger audience.
Building the Industry
If you’re reading the show notes for this podcast, we assume, at a minimum, that you are aware of the existence of audiobooks. But possibly a more accurate assumption is that you are more invested than most in the lifecycle, health, and growth of audiobooks. For as much as we love audiobooks here on the podcast, it’s amazing to think that many people don’t know about their availability and ease of access. But that is still the case in many cities around the United States!
Last summer, APA kicked off its largest consumer awareness campaign in the form of an AudiobookMobile designed to draw attention to the audio format of books and introduce listeners to the medium. Michele said that this campaign was both fun and informative, as it provided a unique opportunity to engage with people in local libraries about the benefits of audiobooks and their place in education, not just for entertainment purposes.
In addition to raising awareness, APA is also concerned with the internal health of narrators, publishers and authors. For the last several years, APA has sponsored a conference, the Audiobook Publishers Association Conference, which is dedicated to networking and education its members. The conference is their opportunity to have the face to face interaction with one another to discuss best practices, to hear insights from other people in the industry, and come into a common mind about the direction of the industry.
In Queue
Michele shares a couple audiobook suggestions with us before signing off! Her favorite audiobook, she says, is Blindness by Jose Saramago. This book is narrated by Jonathan Davis and runs 12 hours and 30 minutes. The uniqueness of this book, Michele says, is that it has very little punctuation and can be very difficult to read. But Davis, the narrator, does a very good job at bringing it to life.
Recently in her queue is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, a work of historical fiction and romance originally published in 1938. This book is narrated by Anna Massey and runs 14 hours and 15 minutes.
What’s in your queue?
Show us some love!
Tweet this episode: http://ctt.ec/3eLZ5
Subscribing, rating and reviewing the show: iTunes
Books & Resources Mentioned
Previous Episode
AB 12 | Controversy and Scandal
Site: http://www.audiobooks.com/podcast | Email: [email protected]
Welcome back to the Audiobooks.com Podcast! This week we have a very different show for you, but one we’ll hope you’ll enjoy as a book lover. To start things off, we discuss some of the audiobooks that were recently released and our interest in them, then get into some of the books we’ve been listening to.
The core of our discussion revolves around some controversies occurring right now in the book industry. Many of the decisions that have been made surrounding these incidents bear a significant impact on the creative side to the business of books and audiobooks, and we wanted to take the time to explore some of these issues. Taking a serious look at them, we believe, makes us better consumers and equips us with the knowledge we need to make informed decisions and support those who need to be supported. Exercising our consumer rights can be the loudest weapon we have against the creative types who are being manipulated by the money-driven machine that fuels them.
ON THE RADAR
Mindy Kaling’s newest book, Why Not Me, was released on September 15, 2015. She reads much of the book herself, but also has other voices making appearances on the audiobook production, including Greg Daniels (known for his work on Saturday Night Live and The Office) and B. J. Novak (writer and fellow co-star on The Office).
Kaling’s first book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), which was released in 2011, received mixed responses amongst critics. As her writing style ranges from prose to a more blogging-feel, Mindy herself reads the audiobook, with help from Michael Schur, and brings it to life with a more conversational tone. She covers topics from recounting experiences in Hollywood to childhood memories.
Why Not Me is a collection of humorous essays of Mindy’s mission to find a balance of fulfillment and joy in life, from love to weight loss. And we hear it is one heck of a chuckler!
Also on our radar is a book from singer-songwriter Jewel, entitled Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story. As far as typical celebrity memoirs go, this one is on the longer side. The audiobook is 10 hours and 30 minutes long, but it is read by Jewel herself.
We are familiar with Jewel’s early albums, such as her debut Pieces of You from 1995, but the singer has been releasing albums almost every year or two throughout the 2000s. This memoir isn’t the first publication Jewel has released. She published a book of poetry in 1998 entitled A Night Without Armor, and then an autobiography in 2000 called Chasing Down the Dawn, which chronicled her journey from Alaska to the world’s stage.
Never Broken seems to be Jewel’s second stab at an autobiography, but one that is already being met with great reviews! We’re excited to check it out.
Putting Up Guards
Here at Audiobooks.com, we’re all about supporting the creative geniuses behind the books and materials we enjoy. As consumers, we have the poignant power to show publishing companies our opinions through choosing to purchase, or not purchase, a book or audiobook instead of complaining. However, we’re neither advocating nor supporting a boycott in these situations we bring up, rather we want to bring to light that when the creative process is mistreated by someone intent on making a sell, we have the opportunity to respond to that in kind.
The two controversial situations we examine at length are Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and the late Steig Larsson’s The Girl In the Spider’s Web. While some books are currently receiving heat for their accuracy, such as Wednesday Martin’s The Primates of Park Avenue, these books are brought to our attention because of the publisher’s role in releasing a creative work that the author, arguably, had no say in due to death or mental acuity.
What makes matters difficult for fans, we think, is a desire to respect the creative process of an author while still having an insatiable curiosity to discover what the book holds. Fans of the first three novels released by Steig Larsson under the Millennium Series are no doubt anxious to read the rumored 7 books that remain. Following Larsson’s death in 2004, the hope of reading any further seemed to be dashed.
In that same vein, Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill A Mockingbird was an immediate success, winning Lee a Pulitzer. But the reactions by Lee and her family, following the books release, make it difficult to justify reading the book. How much of the book was changed from Lee’s original manuscript? Did she have a say in the changes that were made? Is this book really deserving of Lee’s name under the autho...
Next Episode
AB 14 | Ready Player One and News
Site: http://www.audiobooks.com/podcast | Email: [email protected]
Welcome back to the Audiobooks.com Podcast! We’re so glad you’re joining us for this installment where we take a step back to check in on what we’re listening to and review a couple recently completed audiobooks. In addition to finally discussing Ready Player One, Addy also gives us a synopsis of and her reaction to Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone. Hopefully this will be a great segue into next week because we have the distinct privilege of speaking with the author of Every Last Word herself! We hope that you will join us for that interview.
Popular, But Bad?
Before jumping into our reviews of Ready Player One and Every Last Word, we explore a handful of books in popular culture that have been categorized as overhyped. Many books receive a lot of attention or a lot of praise either by the media or by a particular subset of people, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate a work of excellent fiction. In fact, in many circles, book lovers might classify these books as bad!
We fully acknowledge that judgments of this sort are highly subjective. Books on this list include the likes of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, which all have enormous fan bases and have received critical acclaim in certain respects. It is interesting to see what people are reading, what is trending on the New York Times’ Best Seller List, and contrast that with the opinions and reviews of those books elsewhere.
We found a surprising number of classics that often fall under this banner as well. One such book is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, originally published in the U.S. in 1958. Shortly following its release in the United States, a columnist for the New York Times wrote a rather harsh review of the book, not just highly critical of the book’s content, but also critical of the snobbish intellectuals who gave the book so much momentum following its release in Paris several years earlier. At one point, the reviewer wrote: “There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first that it is dull... The second is that it’s repulsive.”
A contemporary of this reviewer for The Atlantic, had nearly the exact opposite reaction. He closes his review by stating: “It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero...brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy.” As Addy states on the podcast, it’s important to take each review and recommendation with a grain of salt, to understand the reviewer’s general interests and to understand the subtext of taste. For every person who raves about a novel, there will be someone else to cut it down.
Another classic that got its start with a bad review is Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, originally published in 1936. The reviewer found it riddled with convention—conventional dialogue, conventional characters—and yet states that Mitchell’s style is rather unconventional for an early 20th century female novelist. The reviewer leaves the reader with a notion of puzzlement, as he praises the efforts of the author but has no distinct praise for the story. Now, over 75 years later, the book is regarded often as one of the greatest books of all times. In 2011, for the 75th Anniversary of the book’s publication, TIME Magazine published an article that claimed Gone With the Wind has transcended criticism, along with Star Wars, in that it will never lose its relevance.
Shaping Our Time
Despite the critical or common reviews of books in popular culture, it is clear that these are the books shaping our times. Books like Ready Player One might not be literary masterpieces, but they are highly indicative of modern culture along the projected continuum of human history by presenting realistic peeks into possible futures. Given a certain set of scenarios, and a little imagination, we get a raw look at what could happen. Perhaps we won’t see a future exactly like the one Wade Watts experiences in The Oasis, but the internet has certainly connected us to a virtual reality that is quickly becoming more fibrous than the physical world.
The last century of books has brought with it an uptick in disturbingly possible dystopian future scenarios. Brave New World in 1932. 1984 in 1948. Fahrenheit 451 in 1953. A Clockwork Orange in 1962. The Giver in 1993. And then, more recently, cultural phenoms like The Hunger Games and Divergent. As much as our society can produ...
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