‘Tis the season to celebrate audiobook growth, it seems. So what better way to mark the solstice—when the city is full of folk dancers and the countryside is full of all manner of people doing all manner of things to mark the longest (or shortest, depending upon your hemisphere) day—than to report on yet another set of industry figures that points to the health of the audio market?
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
This time it’s the turn of the U.K.’s Publishers Association, which has a neat little infographic-heavy summary of 2024 as it happened here. I have to say the way the figures are presented is somewhat confusing, though. That is to say, they are more like unconnected highlights than headlines divided into their segments. So don’t necessarily expect things to add up (though I’m sure the underlying data do).
Audiobooks Lead the Digital Charge
Anyway, the headline figures are that the overall digital market is up 6 percent and print down 3 percent. And that brings things to a point where digital almost exceeds print. Most of the loss in print, though, seems to be down to the educational and academic market (which in the U.K. is huge).
When it comes to the consumer market, there are some big winners. And biggest among those is audio downloads, up 31 percent. That’s almost half of the digital market, which itself has grown 17 percent. (By my math, that means e-books have still had a fairly good year.) And the biggest sector driving growth is fiction, where sales are up 18 percent at £1.1 billion.
Romance Fuels the Rise in Fiction Sales
Which leads to a fabulous story to finish on: the launch of a bookstore dedicated solely to romance books. Saucy Books in London caters to a vast array of romance subgenres, including a delightfully named “Smut Hut.” And what ties this to the previous story is the figures. The BBC article about the store cites romance as the primary driving factor behind that push of fiction over the £1 billion revenue mark.
And leading that, of course, is Romantasy, which seems from the figures quoted to have jumped from £59 million to £83 million in the course of a year.
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