RWA 2014 Workshop – Hearing Voices: Why Audiobooks Are Suddenly Chic

Are you planning on being at the Romance Writers of America (RWA) Conference this year? It’s being held in San Antonia, Texas on July 23 – 26 and we’ll be there!

I’ll be teaching a workshop, Hearing Voices: Why Audiobooks Are Suddenly Chic, along with Laura Kinsale, Karen White, and Suzanne Saville. We’ll give an overview of the audiobook market, the creation process, and how authors can participate in this fast-growing publishing rights opportunity. You’ll find the workshop in the Career Track so we encourage you to sign up!

I asked Laura to share with us her inspiration in planning this workshop.

 I’ve always loved audiobooks, so when I received an offer from an audiobook publisher recently, I was very interested in the possibility. It quickly became clear that the author can be “persona non grata” in the world of producing audiobooks—at least it was for this particular publisher. But I’d grown interested in the idea of having my books narrated, and began to research the possibilities.

I found that a whole new industry is opening up, the growth of audiobooks exploding, due to the ease of downloads onto portable listening devices such as smartphones. This creates a real opportunity for authors to finally exercise audio rights, which have often been just boilerplate in a publishing contract, lying dormant unless the author is quite a huge best-seller.

I began to research the possibilities, so that I could make an informed decision about how best to use the audio rights to my books. I began to realize that it was within my reach to publish them myself, to my own standards, but there was a huge learning curve. It was both daunting and fascinating. I discovered a new world of production, publishers, narrators, technicians and retail options, a world I’d known nothing about as an author.

The RWA workshop is the ideal place to convey some of the important factors in the decision for authors about how to exercise their audio rights—and why those rights will be increasingly valuable in the future. It’s a complex industry, but we’ll try to present it as clearly as we can.

Visit RWA’s site for the complete schedule of workshops.

Come see us at RWA. We’d love to meet you!

Lea Hensley