Audiobook sales soaring

My own Granny Smith Investigates available from Audible

No longer just the greatest invention for bathtub readers, the audiobook is, according to new data, the surprise saviour for solving one of the world’s greatest problems: getting non-readers to read. Sales of audiobooks have doubled in the past five years, according to Nielsen with commuters and men aged 25 to 44 accounting for the bulk of that rise.

Good news indeed as conventional wisdom is that less and less men are reading, but audiobooks seem to dragging men back to the printed page. Audible.com are a great provider of audiobooks - not only do they stock several of my books - why not try Wild Bill Williams by Jack Martin for a slice of western adventure, or for a comedic crime caper try Granny Smith Investigates by G. M. Dobbs. Ok that's my shameless plug out of the way - but do visit Audible as they stock thousands upon thousands of titles, of ever genre and from almost every author you can think of.

Total sales for audiobooks rose 18.2 percent over 2017, with digital downloads making up 82.4 percent of those sales, compared to 76.8 percent in 2015. Physical audio (CDs) dropped to 16.2 percent of total audio sales, from 21.8 percent in 2015.

And the good news for publishers, looking forward, is that much of the audience for digital is young. Almost half of those who say they listen to audiobooks were under 35. And it’s a hungry audience. While only 24 percent of Americans say they listened to at least one audio book in 2017, the average listener in that category consumed 15 books in that same period, mostly on a smartphone. In the UK the average was higher with 24 perecent saying they had listened to two audiobooks in the previous year. You have to figure that the average reader of physical books did not buy 15 books last year, much less read that many.

Find Audible and er (Granny Smith Investigates and Wild Bill Williams) HERE