On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway reports a return to double-digit audiobook growth in the U.S., with revenue up 13 percent and over half of Americans now having listened to an audiobook. He also breaks down new data showing a shift in reader tastes toward darker genres—especially psychological thrillers and dark romance—and reflects on how traditional publishers are just now catching on to the power of direct sales and loyal fan bases, something indie authors have long embraced.
Listen to the Podcast: Double-Digit Audiobook Growth Returns
Sponsors
All our ALLi podcasts are proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote.
Self-Publishing News is also sponsored by book cover design company Miblart. They offer unlimited revisions, take no deposit to start work and you pay only when you love the final result. Get a book cover that will become your number-one marketing tool.
Thoughts or further questions on this post or any self-publishing issue?
If you’re an ALLi member, head over to the SelfPubConnect forum for support from our experienced community of indie authors, advisors, and our own ALLi team. Simply create an account (if you haven’t already) to request to join the forum and get going.
Non-members looking for more information can search our extensive archive of blog posts and podcast episodes packed with tips and advice at ALLi's Self-Publishing Advice Center.
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 from Oxford where we are about to learn that the power of my prognostication is not what I might have hoped, but that is yet to come.
Audiobook Market Growth Doubles
Dan Holloway: We will begin with some really positive news and that is around audiobooks. If you remember, this is how long I've actually been reporting on the news, which is an interesting reminder that it was a decade ago that I was reporting on double digit growth of audiobooks back from, I think it was around 2013 to 2022. Audiobooks grew by double digits every year, absolutely without fail, and then the growth started to flatten off.
But the latest news from the Audio Publishers Association shows that double digit growth has returned. So, in 2024, audiobook revenue in the US grew by 13% to $2.22 billion. That feels like really positive news for the sector.
AI-Narrated Audiobooks Receive a Mixed Reception from Readers
Dan Holloway: It is also interesting to dig down into why that might be, and you might think that one of the reasons for this would be that everyone's reading AI-generated books these days, and it does seem that more AI-narrated audiobooks were read in 2025 than they were previously.
But, and this is a really interesting figure, it seems that readers are less well disposed towards them. So, in 2023, 77% of readers said that they would be willing to try reading AI-narrated audiobooks, but by this year, that had declined to 70%. So, it's really interesting to think about why that might be.
You might have thought, back in 2023, the reason people would've been unwilling to read audiobooks, if they were unwilling to read audiobooks, would be because they thought that the quality of the narration was awful.
That has clearly gone up since 2023, we know that narration these days is pretty good. You've got companies like ElevenLabs doing quite remarkable things with all sorts of AI-generated voices, so that can't actually be it.
So, maybe it is that readers are getting more nuanced and are starting to see AI-generated stuff as bad in general, or less positive than they used to think about it.
So, a very interesting development is that as the quality of audiobook narration goes up, more people are getting sceptical about using it. Make of that what you will.
More Americans Listening to Audiobooks
Dan Holloway: The other big figure from the audiobook surveys that have come out; this is the consumer survey by Edison as opposed to the Audio Publishers Association, one of which was carried out by Toluna, is that it is now the case that more than half of Americans have listened to an audiobook. That's 51%.
That feels like a major breakthrough, and it looks like the market is not going to be slowing down because previously, we have had a figure of 30% of non-audiobook listeners had said that they would be interested in listening to audiobooks. Now that figure has gone up to 38%, so not only are more people saying they've read audiobooks, but more of those who haven't read audiobooks are saying they'd be interested in doing so.
Rise of Dark Romantasy and Psychological Thrillers
Dan Holloway: What are they reading? This probably comes with no surprise, the biggest growth in audiobook listening came in romance and that's followed by children's and young adult, and then science fiction and fantasy.
That leads me into my poor prognostication. If you will remember back to the start of the year, I talked about the fact that cozies had been very popular for a very long time, and as the world got darker, I didn't see people's trends in reading changing that much because people wanted escapism. They wanted something that was light and something that was comfortable and didn't make them feel as though that darkness from the outside world is encroaching on them too much.
We have this week, the results of the reading trends survey for the first half of 2025, and what do they show? They show that the thing that is dominating reader trends is an increasing turn towards darkness in topics. So, there we go. What do I know?
So, the most popular genre still is what we would call romance with a dark twist, and this comes out through the figures that are produced, basically think Rebecca Yarros. So, it's dark romantasy.
Interestingly, Rebecca Yarros has four of the top 10 bestselling books from the first half of the year, including two versions of the same book. So, Onyx Storm in both its regular edition and interestingly, it's limited edition, which has actually sold more than the regular edition. So, it's clearly not that limited. That book features in the top 10 twice. The other two books that are out in that series also feature.
So yes, dark romantasy is still the big thing, but it's not just that. Dark fantasy has also gone up, but interestingly, psychological thrillers have gone up by even more at the 29% rise.
Whereas cozy mysteries felt like, if you wanted something with a bit of a plot twist and a bit of something to keep your brain active, that was what people were going for and I certainly didn't see that changing. It seems now that psychological thrillers are back on the rise.
As someone who spent a lot of time writing psychological thrillers, this feels like potentially good news, maybe the kind of stuff that I find easier to write is going to take a turn for the more popular again. Who knows?
Also, horror is up, so that's up by 13%. So, readers are taking a turn for the dark.
Insights from the U.S. Book Show
Dan Holloway: Segueing rather clumsily from Rebecca Yarros's special edition, one of the other interesting stories I had this week was from the U.S. Books Show, and the discussions from the U.S. Book Show, which basically seemed to have taken a self-publishing 3.0 term, not to put too fine a point on it.
Although they wouldn't call it that because this is big publishers talking who seem utterly oblivious, as they so often do, to the fact that what they're saying is really important is stuff that indies like us have been doing for years and years.
So, one of the big themes of the U.S. Book Show was, what do we do about the fact that increasingly people are chasing these really huge books like Rebecca Yarros and the sort of mid list authors are being ignored?
There were lots of people there talking about the value of what a lot of the potentially selling authors, but nonetheless popular authors, are doing really well, and that is connecting directly with a fan base and then selling to those fans.
That's very much something that, we as indies, we're just used to.
This came up in the context of, all mid list authors who don't have that many titles printed but sell them all, they do this because they've got this really loyal readership, and they sell directly to them. As opposed to a lot of authors who maybe sell more, but they don't necessarily sell out all their run.
So, there is this sort of realization that it matters to connect directly with your readers. That seems to be the message from it, and it is one of those situations where it feels as though that's something we could have told you a long time ago, and if you've been listening and watching what we were doing, you might have realized that actually, yeah, we do that quite well already.
But anyway, the landscape seems to be changing and it's not changing in a way that it's necessarily going to do us as indies, who have a great relationship with our readers, any harm at all.
I'll leave you with some positive news about how things are out there for us and look forward very much to speaking to you again at the same time next week.
Have a lovely week in the meanwhile, thank you.
