As this podcast has done since 2017, CCC’s Beyond the Book takes a look again for 2020 at the latest developments and top achievements in audiobooks with two leaders in the field.
Interview with Michele Cobb and Robin Whitten
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Email | Download
Published in 2019, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, by historian Douglas Brinkley, chronicled the effort to land on the moon in 1969. The audiobook for Moonshot, narrated by actor Stephen Graybill, recently received a 2020 Audie award for best in history and biography.
Many listeners likely heard the story of Armstrong and Aldrin played on smartphones with more computing power than what NASA had to run the Apollo missions. Indeed, smart devices, including smart speakers, have launched an entire new category of business growth in publishing, the audiobook.
As this podcast has done since 2017, CCC’s Beyond the Book takes a look again for 2020 at the latest developments and top achievements in audiobooks with two leaders in the field – Michele Cobb, executive director of the Audio Publishers Association (APA), publisher of AudioFile magazine, and executive director of the recently launched Podcast Academy; and Robin Whitten, editor/founder at AudioFile magazine.
In June, Cobb noted the APA released a survey of sales and consumer habits showing US audiobooks sales for 2019 climbed 16% from the previous year to a total of $1.2 billion. “This is the eighth year of double-digit revenue growth. So it’s a really exciting time to be in audio,” she said.
Among the more unusual of Audie awards this year, noted Robin Whitten, was in the YA category for the graphic novel/memoir, Hey, Kiddo, by Jarrett Krosoczka.
“Taking a graphic novel and making it an audiobook is sometimes hard to even wrap your head around, yet it makes a lot of sense when you think about the sequential art of a graphic novel,” she told CCC’s Chris Kenneally.
“Some of the art is replaced by the soundscape. So if you have someone walking down the street or on a city bus, in the artwork, it doesn’t say I’m on a bus. You can see that someone is on a bus. And in the audio version, you hear the sound of what it would be like if you were riding a bus with a group of people and a lot of chatter going on in the background. The soundscape takes the place of descriptive words,” Whitten said.
