Podcast: Do You Hear What I Hear?

In my ongoing Stark Reflections on Writing & Publishing podcast series, I recent interviewed Kelly Lytle from Findaway Voices about the amazing opportunities for independent authors and small publishers to help get their books turned into audio and distributed globally.


I started using Findaway Voices in the summer of 2017 to test out their services. I had two shorter "chapbook" sized books converted into audio format.

• Active Reader: And Other Cautionary Tales About The Book World
• This contains three short horror stories where books are central to each tale. One is about an eerie bookstore eager to "take" new customers, the title story is about the macabre misuse of a bookstore loyalty card and the final story is a dark humor look at what might happen if someone takes the advice of a self-help book a little too far.
• Collateral Damage: A Sin-Eater Mis-Adventure
• A short story about an encounter that Peter O'Mallick, the main character in my novel I, Death, has in the midst of attempting to use his death curse to fight crime.

The Findaway system was easy to use and the narrators they hand-selected for me to choose from were great. I'm quite pleased with the production quality of these books and look forward to working with these two narrators again for other projects.


However, what surprised me in a really positive way, was that I was expecting to make the majority of my income from these two audio titles from Audible, Amazon's gigantic audiobook store. But I, in fact, made far more money from other markets, including Bibliotheca, Playster and TuneIn.

In our chat, Kelly explains the way that Bibliotheca works for libraries and some of the background behind the creation of Findaway Voices, the larger company of Findaway, Kelly's own experience as a writer, and other insights into the audiobook world.

I'm delighted about the future growth in digital book-selling that is continuing to happen for authors.

Do you hear what I hear?

I hear opportunity.