On this week’s Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway digs into Audible’s new Nielsen IQ study of 18,000 listeners, which finds audiobook fans buying the same books in multiple formats — and still seeking out human narrators. He also covers Smashwords adding pre-orders and pre-sales through Draft2Digital, and a Bookseller report on how AI is splitting the ghostwriting market in two.
Listen to the Podcast: Audiobook Listeners Buy in Multiple Formats
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.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello, and welcome to the Self-Publishing News from the midst of conference season. And a reminder, if you are not already signed up, that this weekend is ALLi's SelfPubCon '26. A whole weekend of fantastic sessions all about the question of the future of being an indie author. So make sure you do listen in and take part in that.
Audible Study Links Audiobooks to Multi-Format Sales
And we begin with something that came from Frankfurt, and this is a new study from Audible. And we're used to studies from audiobook companies, usually Spotify, telling us how much they are impacting the world of audio and the literary world as a whole. And this from Audible is no exception.
It has been commissioned from Nielsen IQ, and it looks at the responses of 18,000 audiobook listeners from across the globe, and some really, really interesting findings about the way that the audiobook industry is going, which I think would encourage anyone to consider, if they don't already make their books available as audiobooks, doing so and making your books available in as many formats as possible.
So the first thing is that people in 2025 listened to more audio. So 34 percent globally of respondents said they listened to more in 2025 than they listened to in the previous year. In the US, that was 35 percent, and in the UK, it was 38 percent. I believe the highest figure came from Brazil. So audio is still growing, and most important of all, it's not just about getting new listeners in, it's about people who are already listening, listening to more than they did.
So that's the background, but that's not the thing that's really been catching people's attention. What's been catching people's attention is the claims that are being made around multiple format reading and listening, and in particular, around sales in multiple formats. So we know Spotify have claimed that their Page Match feature, which is where you can slip seamlessly between your audiobook if you're on the bus, then you take your paperback out when you get home and get to the bath.
They're saying that that means people are completing more books. What Audible are saying in this survey is that people who listen to audiobooks are actually buying books in multiple formats. So, really, really interesting that. So 63 percent of listeners are claiming that after they have listened to an audiobook, they go on to buy the e-book or print copy.
And even more than that, 69 percent say they have listened to an audiobook after first reading it in a different format. So it really is the case that multiple formats can mean multiple sales. Another interesting finding is around social media and screen time. So, 47 percent of people who listen to audiobooks are claiming they spend less time on social media as a result.
So we know that social media and screen time is a big concern. It's a big concern for all age groups, in particular for parents of children, and it seems that audiobooks might be one part of a way to spend less time scrolling through social media, because you are listening to something edifying — or not necessarily edifying, something you enjoy — instead.
So audiobooks might be decreasing time spent on social media. And the final finding, and this goes to the question of how we make our books available, because obviously we are now in an era where there are a lot of tools available for people to generate AI narration. Spotify in particular, with its partnership with ElevenLabs, makes it possible to turn your e-book into an audiobook in many, many languages for free and then make it available in many places.
So this has raised questions about human narration. So, it is undoubtedly the case that listeners aren't, as a group, fussy, shall we say, about listening to human authors. On the other hand, 65 percent of listeners in this survey state that they go looking for audiobooks based on the narrator.
So very interesting. There is definitely still a future for human narrators. So that's the latest audiobook finding.
Smashwords Adds Pre-Orders and Pre-Sales
And that brings us on to a real dose of nostalgia with news from Smashwords, which was the very first place that I made my e-books available, back in the days before Kindle.
There were so few books on the platform that I remember the number of my first e-book. It was Smashwords book number 3308. So long before the days of millions of books published per year, mine was the 3,308th book published on Smashwords. So there we go.
Anyway, Smashwords is still going. It, as you are probably aware, is now part of the Draft2Digital group, and Draft2Digital have just made the announcement that Smashwords is going to be making pre-orders and pre-sales available. So what does this mean? Pre-orders — this means you can list your e-books on Smashwords for up to 12 months in advance of their release date.
People can buy from you at any time during that period. Payment will only be taken on the release date. And the really important thing here is that all your sales made during the pre-order period will count towards the sales on day one of your launch. And as the press release has made very clear, very few authors — it's only 20 percent actually as a whole across Draft2Digital's offering — use pre-orders, but the ones who do sell a lot more books, and importantly, they will also do very much better on the algorithm.
So this is a tool that enables you to do that through Smashwords very straightforwardly. So that's pre-orders. There is also an option for pre-sales. You can only make your book available for pre-sales if it's also available for pre-order. What this means, as it suggests, is that you can actually sell the book before the official launch date.
So this is only the case if the book is actually ready, because obviously people are going to be buying it, paying for it then and there. So they have to have something to download and read, and this is being sold as a way of marketing to fans. You can also use it to get signups to your email list.
So the idea is readers can get advanced copies of your book. They can do so if they give their email address. So it's a potential new marketing tool, and again, it is available on Smashwords through the Draft2Digital platform. So yeah, exciting news from Draft2Digital there, following on from Audible, and we will end with a little bit of AI for the week.
AI Splits the Ghostwriting Market in Two
And our main news on AI for the week comes from a very interesting piece in The Bookseller about ghostwriters. So it's sort of topical for Halloween and spooky season to talk about ghostwriters, and one of the things that has been reported to The Bookseller is that AI is affecting commissions to ghostwriters.
So this is not uncontested. And interestingly, the London Ghostwriting Company's head, Luke Shipman, in the same article is saying that he has seen not only continued demand for ghostwriting work, but continued recognition of the value of ghostwriters. And what seems to be happening is that this market is splitting in two. So there are smaller nonfiction pieces of descriptive writing that would normally have been given to ghostwriters, and these are now being commissioned from AI instead.
So that part of the market really is being hit. But the kind of deep work — that sort of biographical work, in-depth knowledge being required and human research being done — that is still coming to human writers, and Shipman at least isn't reporting a decrease in the value of such work in financial terms.
What isn't contested, though, is that ghostwriters are seeing an increase in the amount of work which is asking them to correct the outputs of AI. So there we go — a little reminder of the value of human ghosts, as it were, as we come into Halloween. And with that, I very much look forward to speaking to you at the same time next week.
Thank you as always.
