Hi, I’m Jessica Kaye and I will be your tour guide through the landscape of audiobooks. My audiobook credentials are several decades long, from my introduction to the medium in a UCLA Extension class on record production in the 1980s, in which Nick Venet, the enthusiastic music record producer who taught the class, told the students that spoken word was the coming thing; to my work as an in-house attorney for an entertainment company that produced films, television mini-series, and audiobooks; to my own audiobook publishing company, The Publishing Mills, which received two Grammy nominations, including one win; to my current work as an attorney for numerous people in the audiobook industry and my continuing presence in the industry as a producer and director, resulting in more Grammy nominations and wins. In addition, I founded and own an audiobook distribution company, Big Happy Family, LLC, which provides audiobooks to digital retailers and libraries. This is not a humble autobiography but it does provide my bona fides, so that you can rest assured you are going to learn a lot from this book.
In the coming chapters, you will absorb information about how to determine whether any particular book is suitable for publishing in audio; a little about the history of the industry; how to acquire audio rights; how to decipher contracts; how to buy and sell rights if you control them; the keys to a quality-sounding audiobook; the nuts and bolts of making audiobooks; what to know about distribution, and a few legal matters impacting your publishing program. I will also confide my Six Rules of Audiobook Publishing.
There is a lot to learn, but please don’t let it faze you. Once you have been working with audiobooks for a while, much of it will become almost instinctive, just as does any skill set you acquire. You will find your own way of doing things, some of which may be different from how I do things. That’s part of what gives different publishers their different company personalities.
That will come in time. For now, whether you are a self-published author wanting to get your book in front of more prospective fans, a narrator interested in becoming a publisher, or an independent publisher contemplating developing or growing an audiobook line, this guide will serve as your starter manual in this flourishing area of publishing, and it can continue to be a reference book for you to reread as you come up against new circumstances over the course of your new—or renewed—career in publishing audiobooks.