Audible Anxiety

Is there a way to publish an audiobook without surrendering to late stage capitalism?

You might have heard that I have a book coming out in (checks watch) approximately 55 days, 8 hours, and 23 minutes. Not that I’m counting. Not that I’m anxious. Not at all! I’m totally chill and relaxed about the whole thing. I’m sure that this time around I will not eat an entire cherry pie in a fugue state a few weeks before my publication date. I mean, what even is there to worry about?

Ha ha, just kidding. There is so much to worry about. Will people like my book? Will we still have a functioning society by the time it’s published? Is it bad form to be like, “Hey, I know the world is on fire and all but guess what? I have a book coming out and you should buy it!”

Psst, wanna buy a book? Photo by ALMA on Unsplash

My husband David tells me that both things can be true: the world can be on fire and I can be excited about my book. He says stuff like that because he is a grounded and sensible person and I am not. I keep things chaotic exciting. David keeps calm. He once quietly and competently ushered a baby raccoon out of our house in the middle of the night, during which time I fidgeted anxiously in the hallway, periodically emitting little shrieks and asking whether he wanted me to get the broom.

The thing that is currently making me anxious (okay, there are many things, but this is this week’s thing) is how to navigate the publishing marketplace without selling my soul to the devil.

Last month I wrote about preorders and how important they are for increasing a book’s visibility, especially on Amazon, and that even though I consider Amazon the devil’s engine, buying books on Amazon does actually help authors. Same with Audible, which, together with Amazon, is where most readers get their books and audiobooks. As it happens, I have an audiobook of my first book on Audible, and I just finished recording the audiobook for my upcoming book, which I assumed I was also going to upload to Audible, but then on Sunday Brooke Warner published a post called Jeff Bezos Is Not Good for Books and now I’m not so sure.

By “not so sure,” I mean that as soon as I finished Brooke’s post, I screeched into our kitchen like a small but very angry fire engine, startling David, who was peacefully drinking tea and minding his own business, and announced that I was not under any circumstances going to upload my audiobook to Audible. I was going to upload it to Libro.fm because fuck this shit.

Then David and I had what our friends Jarvis and Tina call a “fighty chat,” which is a term for a mostly civil and only slightly heated discussion, informed in part by the fact that David did not enjoy having his tea-drinking interrupted by a screed about soulless billionaires and late stage capitalism.

David is not pro-Amazon, just to be clear. Nor is he pro-soulless billionaires or late stage capitalism. He is, however, a fan of thinking things through. And his thinking was that my upcoming book is already on Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions, and that uploading the audiobook to Audible would mean that it would be easily discovered and downloaded by people who only listen to audiobooks. Uploading it to an ethical indie platform with a dramatically narrower reach would be a principled stand and also the publishing equivalent of cutting off my nose to spite my face.

That’s how they get you.

By “they,” I mean the soulless billionaires who have effectively cornered the market on how books get discovered and read.

So here are my questions: where do you get your books? (Your local bookstore, Amazon, the library, from a well-read friend?) If you listen to audiobooks, what platform do you use? How likely are you to switch to a new audiobook platform if it directly benefited independent bookstores and treated authors like actual people and not like indentured servants?

Please let me know in the comments. Also, if there’s anything else I should be worrying about, let me know that too, because you don’t know what you don’t know, amirite?

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Updates:

•In case you somehow missed my 847 earlier exhortations to preorder my book, please preorder my book! It’s about three generations of women (me, my mother, and my daughter) on a three-day road trip to California’s Central Coast, featuring terrible weather, family history, Greek myth, Russian proverbs, internet memes, the second season of The White Lotus, and aggressive ostriches.

•If you read this entire post and found yourself thinking, You know what would be great? Taking a writing class with this woman!, you’re in luck, because this March, I will be teaching a three-part virtual class for neurodivergent adult writers (particularly women with ADHD, of whom I am one). If you’re stuck mid-project or simply can’t get started, this class will provide a supportive community to help you build a writing practice that actually works. The early bird registration rate ends this Sunday!

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