Audio books getting new respect from publishers

NEW YORK: When you are an author and you appear on the U.S. television talk show "Oprah," it is sure to give book sales a boost.

But what do you do if your book is not even written, never mind in stores?

For Mignon Fogarty, who is the host of a popular podcast called Grammar Girl, the answer is to scramble to record a short audio book in just a few days in between the time the "Oprah" show was taped and aired. Fogarty signed a contract a few months ago with Henry Holt & Co., the publisher, but her book will not appear until next year. Meanwhile, her audio book climbed quickly to the top of iTunes' best-selling books list after she appeared on Oprah Winfrey's show.

Fogarty's feat prompted Henry Holt and other presses to rethink their audio book divisions, which have negligible marketing budgets and typically ride on the coattails of the hardcovers. Because audio books are so fast, inexpensive and easy to make, the dynamic seems to be changing, with publishers looking to the audio format to fuel interest in paper books that are not quite ready for the printing press.

And with the ubiquity of iPods, that interest can be generated quickly: Recordings need not be pressed onto CDs and packaged, but can quickly be uploaded to iTunes. Sometimes these recordings will be made with well-known authors whose next release is not quite ready for bookstores, and other times with newcomers like Fogarty whose work has gained a following another way.

Fogarty said that when she was first contacted by Winfrey's television show, she thought, "I'm going on 'Oprah.' Gosh, I wish my book were done."

Unlike most authors, Fogarty owns a mixing board for recording her podcasts, which allowed her to gin up a quickie audio version of the book she plans to write. The effort was spearheaded by Mary Beth Roche, publisher of Audio Renaissance, the audio book division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, which also publishes Henry Holt.

About 100,000 people a week download the free podcasts, which consist of five minutes of grammar tips, from grammar.qdnow.com and iTunes. She says she creates them on about $600 worth of equipment in her home in Gilbert, Arizona.

"I was working on the book on the airplane on the way home" from Chicago after recording the episode of "Oprah," said Fogarty. That was March 21, a Wednesday. By that Friday, she had finished the recording, and it was sent electronically to Audible.com, which provides audio books through Apple's iTunes and on its own Web site.

On March 26, the day the show aired, iTunes' home page highlighted "Grammar Girl's Quick & Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing," an hour-long audio book that could be downloaded for $4.95. By the end of that week, Fogarty's presentation had bumped "The Secret" out of the top spot.

" 'The Secret' is the phenom of the moment, and here we are basically improvising, creating a digital audio book in a matter of days, and out of nowhere we're No. 1 on iTunes," said John Sterling, the president and publisher of Henry Holt.

He placed the number of sales in the thousands, but would not specify; Fogarty's audio book remains among the top 10 sellers on iTunes.

"We didn't break out champagne because we weren't selling tens of thousands, but we certainly broke out the sparkling water," Sterling said. "We are accustomed to working with product cycles one measures in months, but in this case we were working with a product cycle of days and even hours."

An audio book would normally appear after - or simultaneously with - a published book, not before.

Other publishers also are experimenting with such changes, including Hachette Audio (formerly Time Warner Audiobooks), which in 2005 released the audio version of Jon Stewart's "America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction" on Audible and iTunes several weeks before the book.

"Publishers always want to hit the bestseller list at No. 1, and there had been some concern that releasing an audio version first would drain away sales from the hard cover," said Beth Anderson, vice president of Audible, which, along with iTunes, had brisk download sales before Stewart's book and a CD-format audio book were simultaneously released. "But the publisher told us releasing the audio helped to sell the print version, because having the audio out there really helped to build the buzz for the book."

Publishers also increasingly are releasing recordings that might never materialize as books. Simon & Schuster Audio, for example, will put out Jimmy Carter's "Measuring our Success: Sunday Mornings in Plains," the second of three collections of the 39th president teaching adult Bible classes, on May 15.

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