Profits are rising in the audiobook industry, so much so that Hollywood A-listers like Scarlett Johansson, Matthew McConaughey and Reese Weatherspoon are now queuing up to lend their voices to the growing genre.
Recent figures, published by the Online Platform GoodEReader, showed an increase in audiobook releases from just over 3,000 in 2007 to a staggering 35,000 in 2014. The global audiobook market, with companies like Audible at the forefront, is currently worth $2.6 billion (£1.69 billion).
Research your target market for multilingual audiobooks
Let’s assume you’ve written and recorded your audiobooks in English and they turned out to be a huge success in English-speaking countries. The next step would be to distribute the audiobooks worldwide to gain more listeners. Start your journey by researching your most viable audiences and decide which market you wish to target.
According to GoodEReader, the German market is one of the world’s most vibrant audiobook markets. The Allensbach Institute, an opinion polling institute in Germany, found out that five million Germans purchased audiobooks in 2014. Historically, Germany has a very prosperous book market but what’s fascinating about the findings from Allensbach Institute is that their figures show that audiobooks are even more popular than the eBooks available on Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks.
The advantages of audiobooks
An advantage of audiobook recordings is their ease-of-use and convenience when compared to a physical book or eBook. You can listen to an audiobook while walking, driving or washing the dishes. Another advantage of an audiobook is the learning aspect: audiobooks are read to you by professionals who have brilliant knowledge about languages and can teach you how to pronounce words correctly.
Choose an expert to help you record your audiobooks
So, with your chosen target market in mind your next question is likely to be how should you record your audiobooks?
Here’s our top three tips to record your audiobooks and become a huge global success:
- Translate your script into your target market’s language. Make sure you give yourself plenty of time too as, on average, a translator can translate 2,500 words per day.
- Choose your voice over artist to record your audiobooks: If you’re the author of the book, you might consider recording the audiobook yourself. However, Penny C. Sansevieri advises that “you should never, ever read your own books […] because having a “voice” and being able to narrate and produce and audiobook are not the same thing.”
- Record your audiobook in a professional multimedia environment with experienced sound-engineers.
With our top three tips above, recording your audiobook for foreign language distribution will be just as easy – if not easier – than working on the initial local version of your audiobook.