On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway discusses how Spotify focuses on audiobooks with new tools for authors and its first full year of profitability. Kindle device sales hit their highest levels in over a decade, suggesting a shift in e-book reading habits. Plus, London Book Fair is just a month away, with key sessions on accessibility, sustainability, and attracting new readers.
Listen to the Podcast: Spotify Focuses on Audiobooks
Spotify focuses on audiobooks, reporting its first profitable year and expanding tools for authors. Kindle sales hit their highest in over a decade. @agnieszkasshoes covers these trends on Self-Publishing with ALLi. Share on XSponsors
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 podcast.
Interesting Panels Coming to The London Book Fair
It's a bit of a bitty news week this week. I wasn't imagining it though, London Book Fair has indeed been moved earlier in the calendar than it normally is, taking Bologna's place as the earliest event of the year. It is now, as this podcast is released, just a month away.
To mark that fact, some highlights of the program have become public, and I will be taking a little look through those. A reminder, you will find lots and lots of ALLi members at London Book Fair. You'll find many of them on stage at Author HQ. There won't be an ALLi stand, as I understand this year, but as I say, you'll find loads of us around.
I am hoping to be there one day or two. So, do come and grab me. If you're unlucky, I may have a microphone on me, and you can find yourself featured on this podcast. I am not sure yet which day I will be there. It will probably almost certainly have some kind of correlation with the availability of food paid for by Amazon. Because anything else I may say, when it comes to food, I'm a corporate shill with the best of them.
Anyway, looking at the highlights of the program, the session that I am looking forward to most, 3:15 to 3:45 on March the 11th is a session on the European Accessibility Act, and this is going to go over the things that we have to do in order to not get into trouble come June the 28th if we are going to be selling into the European market.
This is something I'm going to be making sure I keep everyone thoroughly updated on. I know there are lots of questions coming into ALLi about the things we, as indies, need to do and to make sure that our books do in order to comply with regulations.
Also, on a pragmatic note, I know there are questions about what actually is going to happen to you if you don't manage to comply in time, what's the level of the catastrophe that would ensue? That's also something I will hope to be finding out. So, that's one session I look to be reporting from.
Inevitably there are going to be lots of things about AI, but the other two things that catch my attention in the list, so on March the 13th there's a fascinating session on the main stage called Cultivating the Next Generation of Readers. This has got some interesting people on the panel including the winner of the Merky Books' Prize. Those of you who know your culture will probably know that Merky Books is the imprint founded by Stormzy and they're going to be discussing how we can go about attracting the next generation of readers.
So, that is something definitely for those of us writing for younger audiences and for all audiences who may not be readers yet and may have this wonderful world yet to discover.
Straight after that, there is going to be a session on sustainability. So, one of the things, of course, we can do for a much more switched-on Gen Z audience is to make sure that we are at the leading edge of issues that matter to them and live our values through our work, as we're always being told. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that we know what we need to be doing when it comes to sustainability.
So, those are the three most interesting sessions that caught my eye from London Book Fair. The next generation, accessibility and regulation, especially EU regulation, and sustainability.
Probably no surprise to any of you who are familiar with my column that those are the ones that caught my eye. So, what else has been happening?
Kindle Unlimited Program a Source of Unrecognized Income in Official Figures
The story this week that really got my interest is about Kindle. So, we talk a lot about eBooks, we talk a lot about Kindle books. This past year, the Kindle Unlimited program has been in the news a lot as a source of unrecognized income in official figures, as the source of income that makes up a surprisingly large amount of indie author income.
But there's been less talk about where people read their books. Do they read them on a Kindle app on their phone? Do they read them on Kindle on their desktop or laptop? Or do they read them on an eReader?
It's weird, I remember when Kindle first came out, how exciting it was, this new technology. There's already a tendency for people to think of it as quite an old technology and maybe outdated, but in 2024, the last quarter of 2024, we saw the largest sales of Kindle devices for over a decade. So, that's really interesting news for people, how they go about reading eBooks and what people's reading habits in general are. So, maybe this is the start of a more concerted move back towards reading eBooks.
This seems to have been led, as I reported when I was reporting on Amazon Black Friday, it seems to have been led by a new generation of Kindle devices, most notably the new Kindle Paperwhite that has really gained popularity and seemed to have functionality that people can't get from their phones. So, really interesting to see that.
Call for Transparency Around AI Regulation
What else has been in the news? So, there has been some AI news. There's been a get together of all sorts of organizations from the creative industries, 38 of them publishing a statement called ExplanAItions, just to make it clear that we are creative folks, we can do puns.
It calls for all sorts of things. Most of it is not surprising. This is being brought out ahead of the Paris Summit on AI, which I will undoubtedly be reporting from. They're calling for transparency. They are calling for, interestingly, licensing agreements, where platforms do train AI on creative works, creators need to be compensated, and this they expect to happen through licensing arrangements.
Most notably, there is a call for enforcement of regulation. It's the first time that I've seen it really. So, there's a lot about what regulators should be regulating on, but there's been very little up to now about actually regulation is only as good as how it is enforced.
It will be interesting to see if anything comes of that. I'm not necessarily holding my breath.
Spotify Reports Most Profitable Year
On a more positive note, we've been talking a lot about Spotify and how they have been really doubling down on their audiobook offering and trying to get on side with authors. One of the things that they've just done is they've just issued their figures or their release to their shareholders on 2024, how it went, and they've done it in a really whizzy infographic. You can find the link in my column, and front and center of that infographic is the fact of what they're doing with audiobooks.
That's really great to see and the achievement that they are most proud of in that regard, it seems, is launching Spotify for Authors. What they actually say is, “our platform empowers authors and publishers with better tools.”
So, in that order, authors and publishers. So, it's us they are talking to. They're clearly very keen to get indie authors working directly with them, and we saw this with the Audi Awards. We saw that there were people who were publishing direct as indie audiobook publishers to Spotify. So, that's really great to see.
Also interesting to note is that they claim to have had their first profitable year or wholly whole year of profitability, I think they put it, since they started 17 years ago.
They are claiming 263 million subscribers, which has led to a 16 percent revenue increase to 4.2 billion euros, which gives them an operating income, I think that's their way of saying that's like gross profit, of 477 million euros. Not insignificant figures, figures that a lot of publishing platforms, a lot of people in the literary industry would be absolutely falling over backwards to record.
So, things seem to be on the up at Spotify, and most of all their desire to do business with authors directly.
So, I will leave you on that, what feels like a positive note, and look forward very much to speaking to you again with more self-publishing news next week. Goodbye and take care. Take care.
