I’m often grateful to Mark Williams for his reporting, and this week especially so for pointing the way to a piece I originally missed. Alongside his usual insightful commentary, it elaborates on one of his most longstanding and emphatic themes: markets that get misrepresented by official figures—especially official figures that ignore indie and streaming or subscription titles.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
He has written some damning pieces this year on the ebook market, particularly noting the $50 million per month payouts from Kindle Unlimited that are completely overlooked when evaluating the earning potential of that market.
Reassessing the UK Audiobook Market
The piece he brought to my attention, from late October, paints a sobering picture of the official stats from the audiobook market. It comes from Kelli Fairbrother, who runs the audiobook platform XigXag. She discusses the size of the UK audiobook market, though her insights are likely applicable to other markets as well. Fairbrother challenges the oft-cited figure of £200 million for the UK audiobook market, which comes from “invoiced sales reported by the Publishers Association.”
Her argument is that this figure misses vast portions of the market, which, when accounted for, bring the total to five times that amount—£1 billion. How does she arrive at that figure? She begins by doubling the £200 million to reflect the heavy industry reliance on Amazon. This means the actual amount consumers spend is double what publishers report as invoiced revenue (i.e., the difference between the cover price and what publishers receive). Then, she doubles the figure again to account for direct publishing through ACX Audible—titles published directly to Amazon without an ISBN.
The remaining balance comes from other sources not included in official statistics, such as libraries and YouTube.
The Overlooked Growth of Spotify
What Mark Williams points out at the end of his commentary is the detail that leaps out for me: even with this recalibration, the market remains vastly undervalued and, as a result, represents an underappreciated opportunity for us as authors. However, even this revised figure still ignores the rapid growth of Spotify as a major player in the audiobook space.
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