Listen to Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book for free! Believe it or not if you go the his website for young readers you can do that by listening to the videos of the video tour he did for the book. Like me you may be surprised that he did this. Won't this diminish the value of his book? Why would I buy the book now? This kind of thinking is what leaves us in the same place and not moving forward whether it be in the publishing business in general or the audio book industry itself.
Giving something so valuable as a reading by an Audie Award winning author does more to bring the joy of his work to more people and brings more people to the pleasures of reading and/or listening to a good book. I have included a video where he talks about this tour and The Graveyard Book.
Interestingly enough I have thought about someday writing a book about a graveyard. In the US I think we tend to call them cemetaries. I also lived close to a cemetary in a condo where we didn't have much space for my daughter to use her bike. We would walk over to the cemetary and walked behind her as she rode around with her training wheels. As we walked and looked at the gravestones it is hard not wonder what story lies beneath it…
Listen to The Graveyard Book here for free.
Here is the video I was talking about.
Download Audiobook of the Year 2009 The Graveyard Book and the nominees.
In honor of Audio Books Month save money on audio book downloads from CreateTimeAudio. We have updated our audio book discounts page as well for specific books on special offer as well as offers from other audio book stores.
Use coupon code junerocks upon checkout at our store and you will save 25% on all orders through the end of this month.
As a side note we also have started using Twitter and hope this brings our offer to more people so that they can enjoy the audio book listening experience. Our next posts will revolve around the Audie Award winners in our catalog.
As I mentioned in my last post I was looking forward to the 2009 Audies® being announced since the awards ceremony was Friday evening. I checked the Audies site before I went to sleep on Friday and then on Saturday morning. On Saturday morning the put up the PDF with all of the award winners. As some of you may know already Neil Gaiman won the Audio Book of the Year for the Graveyard Book.
Afterwards I came to find out that he had been twittering on Twitter as the ceremony was going on under @neilhimself. I have to say that was pretty cool. I have just started to use Twitter and am starting to see how extremely powerful it can be as a comunications tool. There were also a couple of other Twitterers at the Audies so it must have given many a feeling of being there!
I am glad to say 8 books in our catalog won. The insert is for Stephen King's Duma Key which won in the Fiction Category.
If you want to see the rest of the winners please go to the Audies® announcement site.
The Audies® are being held tomorrow evening in New York. Regretably I will not be attending this year but have high hopes to do so next year. The Audie Award ceremony is the kickoff to the most visible time for the audiobook industry.
The Audio Publishers Association also sponsors June as National Audio Book Month. Libraries and stores across the country will be offering ways of using and buying audio books. Increased visibility to the audio book industry is still much required. Not enough people have been exposed to the benefits of listening to audiobooks. I am hoping the APA will send out a press release by June 1st to remind everyone to help spread the word.
Last year the Association of American Publishers(AAP) added the Get Caught Listening Campaign to their Get Caught Reading Campaign efforts. Technically May is Get Caught Reading month and June is Get Caught Listening month but both campaigns are supposed to go year round to increase visibility to the pleasures of reading and listening.
We look forward to the Audie Award announcements and to the Month of June where we will be offering incentives to our customers at CreateTimeAudio. We will be offering special discounts in honor of National Audio Book Month.
The Association of American Publishers released their estimated sales data for the month of March 2009 which includes audio books. It was not surprising that they reported a decrease in sales from last March to this March. The recession is affecting everyone and audio books and even books in general can be considered a luxury that some of us can not afford right now.
The APA stated that:
Audio Book sales posted a decrease of 43.3 percent in March with sales totaling $7.6million; sales for the whole year were down 47.1 percent.
The numbers are only for the US but these are significant numbers and I am looking forward to getting more detailed and specific data from the Audio Publishers Association which generates more detailed data. The only issue there is that there is a time lag since they will be reporting data for the year 2008.
The APA does mention in their last annual estimate report that sales for audio books have a healthy CAGR(Compounded Annual Growth Rate) of 3.1% since they started tracking it back in 2002.
I would not take this as a negative trend for audio books because sales for all books was down. Something interesting to note is that the estimate for ebook growth bucked the negative trend jumping 110.4 percent for the month. This is interesting because we can see that people are moving away from traditional ways of "reading".
As the economy continues to struggle there are options for enjoying audio books. Libraries nowadays have a good selection of audio books both in the libraries and through their online services. Also note that audio book downloads are cheaper than buying CDs.:)
