Good Aural -The Audiobook Podcast
Jul 2, 2026 · 14 min · 9 segments
Audiobooks are more popular than ever and that means that companies are going to compete to keep the consumer attention on THEIR platform. What does that have to do with us? A lot. In this episode…
the streaming aspect of audiobooks is changing what publishers are trying to sell and therefore changing what our job entails and what we are needing to do to stay relevant in the industry.
So for years, Audiobooks were built around ownership, right? You bought a book credit or you bought the audiobook outright, and because that credit had value, listeners wanted to maximize it.
If a four-hour novella and a 44-hour fantasy cost exactly the same amount, most people looked at it and thought, obviously I'm getting the giant one.
They care about whether you come back for that next hour, for that next day, next week, next month.
Like, if I were sitting in a boardroom somewhere and, like, let's all collectively thank the universe that I'm not running a billion-dollar company because that sounds exhausting, and I would be very good at it, but I would also just give all the money away.
I wouldn't be asking the board, how do we sell another audiobook? I'd be asking, how do we keep people opening up our app? Because that's where the money is, and that's written on the walls, and...
And this is also where it's hard, right? Because authors at the moment are not being included in that conversation.
The actual content creators currently are being cut out of that conversation.
But for us, we have to look at what the people who are giving us our paychecks are doing and become malleable and adaptive to it to an extent.
the streaming aspect of audiobooks is changing what publishers are trying to sell and therefore changing what our job entails and what we are needing to do to stay relevant in the industry.
So for years, Audiobooks were built around ownership, right? You bought a book credit or you bought the audiobook outright, and because that credit had value, listeners wanted to maximize it.
If a four-hour novella and a 44-hour fantasy cost exactly the same amount, most people looked at it and thought, obviously I'm getting the giant one.
They care about whether you come back for that next hour, for that next day, next week, next month.
Like, if I were sitting in a boardroom somewhere and, like, let's all collectively thank the universe that I'm not running a billion-dollar company because that sounds exhausting, and I would be very good at it, but I would also just give all the money away.
I wouldn't be asking the board, how do we sell another audiobook? I'd be asking, how do we keep people opening up our app? Because that's where the money is, and that's written on the walls, and...
And this is also where it's hard, right? Because authors at the moment are not being included in that conversation.
The actual content creators currently are being cut out of that conversation.
But for us, we have to look at what the people who are giving us our paychecks are doing and become malleable and adaptive to it to an extent.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
