Indie Authors Win at the Audie Awards and Creativity Shapes the Future of Work: Self-Publishing with ALLi Featuring Dan Holloway

On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast, Dan Holloway celebrates indie successes at the Audie Awards, highlighting notable entries like Spotify’s audiobook Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood. He also discusses the World Economic Forum’s report on the future of jobs, which predicts creative thinking and lifelong curiosity will be among the most valued skills in the next five years, even as reading and writing are seen as declining workplace priorities. Plus, an update on the AI Summit planned for the Bologna Book Fair in April.

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About the Host

Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.

Read the Transcripts

Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another Self-Publishing News. For the first time in 2025, it's a relatively calm week in which we will be celebrating all things audiobook and talking very little about AI, talking not at all about TikTok, and just enjoying some very gentle news.

AI, we do have to mention, it relates to Bologna Book Fair. So, bologna Book Fair, of course, is the event that kicks off the conference season in the publishing world, held just before London each year in March. This year it will have an AI summit.

Actually, this year I think it's just after London Book Fair. Anyway, it doesn't necessarily kick things off, but it is one of the very early conferences.

There will be an AI summit. I couldn't help but chuckle because the scheduling is rather delicious. The AI summit will be held on April 1st, to make fools indeed of us all. There aren't full details of what will be on the agenda yet, but it looks as though it will be what I've been calling a slightly more matured landscape kind of agenda where talk is about how to live in a landscape in which AI is present, so what tools to adopt, how to navigate things in this world now that AI seems to be with us to stay. Although, I'm sure there will also be lots of talk about copyright and so on.

That's all I have to say for AI. I'll say nothing about TikTok this week.

Nonetheless, what there has been lots to talk about is the Audies. The Audies are the Audiobook of the Year Award. They come courtesy of the Audio Publishing Association, and they are the most prestigious awards for audiobooks in the industry. I like to cover them because there is no entry criterion to say that indies can't be part of them. Indeed, over the past years, there have been some notable indie successes, most particularly 2021's Heroine by Mary Jane Wells.

It's also a really interesting reminder because there is no obvious sign of who is and who isn't an indie author. Rather depressingly, there is a lot by Macmillan, there is a lot by Harper, there's a lot of Penguin Random House, there's a lot of Hachette, there's a lot of RBM Media. But there are various other titles where it's not clear from the publisher name whether this is an indie title or not, so I tend to do quite a lot of delving around to find the indie titles so that I can celebrate them because it's fabulous to celebrate indie titles.

This year, I think there were three indie titles to celebrate. I have to say that with 28 categories of award and sort of three to five titles shortlisted in each category, that's not a huge number, but it is a larger number than for the last couple of years. So, that is definitely something to celebrate.

In the erotica category, great to see two indie titles in this category which has for so long been an area in which indies have thrived and have pushed the industry forward. They are The Beta by Avanne Michaels and Faking with Benefits by Lily Gold. Really interesting looking at the pages for those titles on Amazon, they are titles with clearly a huge readership, large number of reviews; it shows that the erotica genre really is thriving, and that's absolutely fantastic.

The other indie title to make the shortlists is in the originals category, and that is Ali Hazelwood's Two Can Play. So, the originals category is for those titles which are published audio first.

This is interesting because if I go and find the list over here, this is the section in which there's quite a lot of research to do, because as I say, it's audio first. So, the publisher of note will often be one that you can't tell whether or not it's an indie title. So, we have Two Can Play, published by, and this is the really, really interesting thing that I want to highlight, Spotify Audiobooks.

I think it's the first time I've seen a Spotify title in the Audies, do let me know if I don't know if there were some last year. But obviously Spotify is really new in the audiobook scene, is courting indie authors, and this is a title that has made the shortlist as an indie title published through Spotify. So, it's not just Audible that you can publish to first and make prize lists and make a splash. Spotify is on the landscape decidedly as well.

I just found that very interesting and it's showing how things are broadening out.

What I'm not sure of, certainly there doesn't look like there are any AI-narrated titles that have made the shortlists. I will need to go back at some point and check the terms and conditions to see what the eligibility criteria related to AI narration is for the Audies, whether they are following the suit of the Grammys and allowing some contribution of AI or not.

So yes, good news for indies in the Audies, the Audie Awards.

Finally, something that I'm not sure whether it's a positive or a negative. You will probably have noticed, if you've been reading the news that last week was the annual staging of the World Economic Forum held in Davos.

Because I am interested in such things, I spent a significant amount of my evenings last week reading through the various reports that are published at the same time, and the one that particularly caught my eye is the future of jobs report. This one is an absolute veritable novella or chapbook of a report at just over 200 pages. So, barely a skim, but what is really interesting is they take a look at what people think are going to be the most important skills for employment in five years’ time.

The rather worrying bit of the report is that, of the great big, long list of skills, at the bottom, with a 24 percent decrease in importance perceived over the next 5 years, was manual labour, possibly not a surprise, but second bottom, and the only other skill that is seemed to be decreasing in importance was reading, writing, and maths. So, for those of you who remember the old three R's, reading, writing, and arithmetic, with minus 4%, that is considered to be one of the skills that is in decline.

So, this obviously ties in with a whole bunch of things, including those of us who write nonfiction, who write books for people to use to improve themselves, use in a work context, or just think that reading is a really important skill.

But it's also significant because there's been quite a lot of debate recently about whether people are reading more these days for productivity as part of the hustle culture of social media, or whether anyone's really reading as much for pleasure as they used to.

It seems that reading in a job-related setting is seen as much less important. So, maybe there is a trend there we can pick up on and get in early and if we need to pivot, then pivot.

But on a more encouraging note, two of the categories that are right up at the top of the list also relate to us. One was lifelong curiosity coming in at number six and the other, coming in at number four, is my personal favorite, because it is my favorite thing to do in the whole world, and that is creative thinking.

And creative thinking and lifelong curiosity are basically the content of what we do as writers. So, we keep people interested. We want to fire imaginations. We want people to have original ideas. We want to enthrall them in immersive worlds of the making of their own imagination. So, if you look at what we actually do, there is an increasing demand for it, even though the technique through which we're most commonly seen to get there at the moment might be perceived to be in decline.

So, I think I probably didn't take all negatives from that report. I saw it as very positive that people really are valuing creativity and curiosity, because if I had to define what I do, it wouldn't necessarily be a writer. A creator of curiosity would be far more of a description of what I do, and I'm sure it would be for many of you listening as well.

So, take that as a note of positivity to end January, and I look forward very much to speaking to you again in February. Take care and speak soon.