Untangling the Very Tangled World of Audio Rights
However much the print world is suffering as it stares down proliferating e-formats and their rights, the audiobook world’s been there, and done that. With cassette, CD, and now streaming media all up for grabs in a variety of permutations, many of them farmed out to different publishers with completely uncoordinated agendas, the audio biz is well into a protracted battle against the hydra-headed monster.
“In an ideal world all audio rights would be bundled, but they’re not,” says Jan Nathan, executive director of the Audio Publishers Association. “The more sophisticated the author, the more complicated the contract. You’ve got abridged and unabridged, then single voice and multiple voice, and interactive. There are so many different types of rights that can be sold.” Indeed, while audio may seem established compared to electronic editions, many of the topsy-turvy rights issues remain common to both formats. Agents report that every book is treated differently when they offer rights, so publishers can never count on getting audio included with print rights. Audio rights may be reserved and auctioned off to the highest bidder later — mostly for abridged editions, as full-scale unabridged runs are still rare. However, most agents now understand that marketing dollars are not generally available for audio, so they strive to tie in with the p-book release for maximum promotional exposure.
But it’s still complicated. Just ask Maja Thomas, executive director of Time Warner AudioBooks, who says she’s doing Nicholas Sparks’s The Rescue in abridged and unabridged on both cassette and CD. “That’s four different formats and four different packages,” says Thomas. “It’s one title but it’s really four different pieces of work.” All of which begs the question: Can there possibly be a market to justify so many audio formats? Apparently so, publishers say. On Thomas’s list, literary works such as Tony Earley’s Jim the Boy or Jody Shields’s The Fig Eater only go out unabridged, because “the language and the plot are inseparable.” And Thomas says that as the market becomes more sophisticated, longer, four-cassette abridgements are on the rise. Since about 20% of all cars have CD players, there’s a push to service that market as well. “The interesting thing is that we don’t see the CD sales cutting into our cassette sales,” Thomas observes. “We were losing sales because people with CD players weren’t buying the cassette version.”
Carrie Kania, associate publisher of Harper Audio, concurs: “On the bigger books we try to do all formats, and in the last four months we’ve pushed the envelope and done a few unabridged releases on CD.” Kania’s first such title was Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, a 10-CD set selling for $50. On the Internet front, incidentally, Harper is putting out Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener as an Internet audio serial on Salon.com, two weeks before the book, cassette, and CD hit stores. Kania’s also been dipping into the Caedmon list, which Harper bought in the 80s and features venerable audio moments such as T.S. Eliot intoning his own poetry.
With audio sales on the rise, publishers have realized that handling audio themselves can be a boon. “The competition for audio rights is much tougher all across the board,” says Eileen Hutton, vp associate publisher at Brilliance Audio. Now it’s all part of being a full-service publisher, adds Judy McGuinn, former head of Warner Audio. “If you can handle audio you become a publisher that an author feels is a one-stop shop.” Unfortunately, McGuinn says, a lot of publishers have still failed to appreciate the potential of audio to reach a new audience. “Book publishers have never looked at audio and said, Wow, I should be putting major ad dollars into creating a marketplace for people who don’t read books in the classic sense,” she says. “If audio books not only appeal to readers but to nonreaders, and if the only place book companies ever advertise books is in book review sections, then how do we reach nonreaders?”
Don Katz, chairman at Audible, has a similar take on the issue. “It might be the most underpenetrated segment of publishing. There are 84 million people who drive to work alone every morning, and what they do by default is listen to the radio.” Katz says the bias against audiobooks is deeply ingrained. “A lot of people didn’t want the audiobook industry to exist. They thought it would cannibalize book sales. But research always indicates that there’s a rub-off effect that just creates more reading.”
In any case, there’s no shortage of synergy at Random children’s audio imprint Listening Library, which has been ground zero for the Harry Potter ripple effect on the whole kids’ audio market. Publisher Tim Ditlow says that around 70% of the children’s audio releases fit on two cassettes (and all Random kids’ audio is unabridged), which sell for about $18. But as usual, Potter IV broke all records, going over 20 hours in a 12-cassette set for $39.95 or a 17-CD set for a whopping $69.95. He’s sold over 300,000 audio releases of Potter IV, bringing the series up to 1.3 million copies. “It puts us into an interesting category in terms of audiobooks,” Ditlow says, “because it has become the fastest selling audiobook series, surpassing any of the adult bestselling authors.” Now, parents are coming back for more. To stoke the fires, Ditlow’s embarking upon a 19-hour, full-cast production in London for the third book in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass series, set for a simultaneous release in October. “The complexities of a full-cast production are daunting,” he says. “It’s like producing a Broadway show. People here are scratching their heads and telling me that the BBC doesn’t even do this.”
