It won’t have escaped your notice that Spotify audiobooks for authors have become a growing focus lately. Having started their audiobook journey quietly, they are now not only making audiobooks central to their listening offer, they are building more and more tools for authors to work with them directly.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
This has made them one of the most indie-centric platforms, with the most opportunities for indie writers of pretty much any platform out there. In that journey, the footsteps they are probably following most closely are those of Wattpad, with its desire to create a fully end-to-end experience (from opening sentence through finished book to on-screen adaptation) for writers.
Spotify Follows the Wattpad Model
Which is a perfect segue, because this week they follow somewhere else that Wattpad went before. Spotify will receive the Industry Innovator Award at this week’s Book Industry Study Group (BISG).
As with the Nobel Prize, the interesting thing about any honorary award is in the citation. That is, why has this organization given this award to this recipient? BISG’s comments on the award stand out to me in the same way they will probably stand out to most indie authors. That is, they are as much about what Spotify has done for authors as what they have done for other publishers (or, indeed, listeners).
For example, Brian O’Leary, BISG’s executive director, notes, “Spotify’s innovations around publisher and author service have brought continued growth in sales to the industry.” And the only specific product or offering mentioned is last month’s short fiction offering directly aimed at indie authors.
Authors First in Spotify’s Messaging
Equally interesting is the wording of Spotify’s response in the BISG release, which opens, “At Spotify, we’re committed to opening new doors for authors, expanding access for listeners, and helping the audiobook industry grow.” Authors, then listeners, then the wider industry. Some of this will be an accident of phrasing. Some will not.
I will end by saying that if you want to read some op-ed on the subject that is insightful and coruscating all at once, you can go to the master of the “insightful and coruscating,” Mark Williams, for a fascinating in-depth take.
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