Spiracle audiobook cards seen in a store rack. Image: Spiracle Audiobooks
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Also today: Frankfurter Buchmesse 2024: Frankfurt Audio and The Arts+
The Search for Bookstore Audiobook Sales
Established in 2022, Spiracle is a UK-based audiobook e-commerce platform, the promotional copy of which says, “Our wider mission is to bridge the growing gap between book lovers and high-quality literature in audio form.”
Some who read that might wonder whether that gap is actually growing. Certainly in the United States, audiobooks remain a flourishing creature on the book-business landscape, for 11 years providing double-digit monthly growth as reported by the Audio Publishers Association. It’s hardly an irrational assumption to assume that book lovers are likely to be those who are driving that big growth in the audio format.
What certainly has been a question, however, has to do with which venues can sensibly be utilized for audiobook sales.
For the most part, audiobooks in recent years have been sold through digital retail, ever since they became overwhelmingly digitally downloaded and streamed products. A CD can stand on a shelf in a bookstore, right beside its hardback or paperback edition. But as we know, the biggest driver of the audiobook revival has been digital downloads and streaming, eliminating the need for a hard medium (remember those cassette tapes and CDs?).
That has automatically meant that analog bookstores have seen waning interest in audiobooks because hard media for them (as with music and ebooks) have made little sense to consumers who now have online subscriptions for audiobooks.
The ‘Audiobook in a Card’: Enthrill Revisited
Image: Spiracle, The Mainstreet Trading Company
Spiracle today (August 5) is announcing its “Audiobook in a Card” product for bookstores. It works this way:
- The company says it works with independent publishers who have audiobook rights to titles but no audiobook editions of them.
- With an independent house, Spiracle “co-publishes” an audiobook edition of such a title, producing the audio and creating a card for that title.
- With Spiracle handling production and the publisher handling the audio rights, Spiracle co-markets each audiobook and divides sales income on a formula that gives 45 percent to the publisher, 45 percent to Spiracle, and 10 percent to the reader of the audiobook in addition to the reader’s recording fee.
- The Audiobook in a Card product goes to a bookstore and is bought for £12 (US$15.32).
- The revenue from a sale of that card is divided between the publisher, Spiracle, and the bookseller.
- Inside the card is a QR code and an online link used by the consumer—or a person who receives the card as a gift—to download the audiobook.
- The audiobook is listened to via a Spiracle app which includes a library.
And does the idea of an in-store card sound familiar?
In 2013, the Canadian entrepreneur Kevin Franco based in Calgary introduced a sales approach much like this one, but for ebooks. His company was named Enthrill Distribution, and it produced a card displayed and hopefully bought in a bookstore. In that card was a code the card-bearer used to download an ebook. Franco was not a co-publisher of these ebooks, but operated, as the company name implies, as a distributor to physical bookstores of codes for ebooks.
The program went as far as landing a deal for the Enthrill gift cards with Walmart Canada, Franco reporting that some 9 percent of the downloads from the sold cards were made on the same day the card was bought.
A Canadian bookstore display of Enthrill ebook gift cards. Image: Enthrill
Franco also went so far as to create “author cards” that writers could use to promote, sell, or gift their books.
By January 2017, we had the news that Enthrill’s assets—which included the PackaDRM software and Endpaper Engine, ebook-delivery platform—had been bought by Firebrand Technologies.
And in January 2021, we had the news that Firebrand and its associated company NetGalley were bought by San Francisco’s Media Do International, an American subsidiary of Tokyo’s Media Do, with which Firebrand had worked since 2016. It appears that these successive acquisitions were focused on PackaDRM and the Endpaper Engine, which had been used to support those Enthrill in-store ebook cards.
And so some will see the British introduction of the “Audiobook in a Card” as a new effort to succeed with audiobooks where Canadian Enthrill card was meant to succeed with ebooks: as a kind of chip bought in a brick-and-mortar bookstore and cashed in on a digital product.
Spiracle’s Start
Image: Spiracle, The Mainstreet Trading Company
Spiracle reports having had a “successful pilot”—the terms of that success are not defined in today’s media messaging—with 10 independent bookstores:
- La Biblioteka, Sheffield
- The Book Hive, Norwich
- Burley Fisher Books, London
- Dead Ink Books, Liverpool
- Hewson Books, Brentford
- Libreria, London
- The Mainstreet Trading Company, Melrose
- Medina Books, Cowes, Isle of Wight
- Mostly Books, Abingdon
- Stoke Newington Bookshop, London
Among those, you can see a detailed introduction of this approach to consumers by The Mainstreet Trading Company, which is in the Scottish Borders village of St. Boswells, Melrose. This may be exactly what’s required to get an approach of this kind going, and booksellers as ready with a customer’s questions as these are will be the best able to give it a shot.
Readers of Publishing Perspectives will note that the translation house Fitzcarraldo Editions is among independent publishers working with Spiracle, as are some other familiar names, including And Other Stories; Peninsula Press; Galley Beggar Press; Saraband Press; Pushkin Press; and more.
The Spiracle program has fielded this list of audiobook editions to the press. Note: Since the original publication of this article, we have been informed that with the exception of two books, these are titles that are already out. Only All My Precious Madness and On Bullfighting have yet to be pubished, we’re told, and those are anticipated to be released in September and October, respectively, indicating an initial inventory of roughly 20 titles:
- Exposure written and read by Olivia Sudjic co-published with Peninsula Press
- Losers written and read by Josh Cohen, co-published with Peninsula Press
- Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt, read by Jack Holden, co-published with Peninsula Press
- The Squire by Enid Bagnold, read by Juliet Aubrey, co-published with Persephone Books
- How Shostakovich Changed My Mind written and read by Stephen Johnson, co-published with Notting Hill Editions
- Fifty Sounds written and read by Polly Barton, co-published with Fitzcarraldo Editions
- The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier, read by Lydia Leonard, translated by Daniel Levin Becker, co published with Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Banzeiro Òkòtó by Eliane Brum, read by Carla Mendonça, translated by Diane Whitty, co-published with The Indigo Press
- These Bones Will Rise Again by Panashe Chigumadzi, read by Chipo Kureya, co-published with The Indigo Press
- Somebody Else by Charles Nicholl, read by Will Howard, co-published with Eland Books
- Playthings by Alex Pheby read by Jot Davies, co-published with Galley Beggar Press
- Insignificance by James Clammer, read by Lee Ross, co-published with Galley Beggar Press
- Shalimar written and read by Davina Quinlivan, co-published with Little Toller Books
- Venom by Saneh Sangsuk, read by Angelo Paragoso, translated by Mui Poopoksakul, co-published with Peirene Press
- You Would Have Missed Me by Birgit Vanderbeke, read by Kristin Atherton, translated by Jamie Bulloch, Mui Poopoksakul
- The Doloriad written by Missouri Williams, read by Laura Elsworthy, co-published with Dead Ink Books
- Days&Days&Days by Tone Schunesson, read by Stephanie Racine, translated by Saskia Vogel, co-published with Heloïse Press
- I Eric Ngalle, written and read by Eric Ngalle, co-published with Parthian Books
- The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing by Joseph Fasano, read by William Hope, co-published with Platypus Press
- Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik, read by Emma Fielding, translated by Martin Aitkin, co-published with And Other Stories
Update: In response to Publishing Perspectives‘ inquiry, we’ve learned more about the credits that Spiracle provides to Arts Council England.
The arts council, we’re told, provided a grant to help fund the pilot of Audiobook in a Card. Further, a spokesperson says, “The arts council has awarded Spiracle two grants in the past: one to assist with the co-publishing of audiobooks with smaller, independent publishers, and one that provided support for their marketing.
“Spiracle is a commercial business and Arts Council England’s support is matched by—and has helped attract—private investment.”
Image: Spiracle
More from Publishing Perspectives on audiobooks and other audio products and issues reletive to world book publishing is here, more on bookselling is here, more on digital publishing is here, and more on the United Kingdom’s market is here.
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