Episode 46: Kristina Radke on Audiobooks in NetGalley

Kristina Radke is the Vice President of Business Growth and Engagement at NetGalley, a service that helps publishers and authors promote digital review copies and audiobooks to book advocates and industry professionals, including reviewers, booksellers, librarians, educators, media/journalists, and other book trade professionals. With over 15 years of experience in book marketing, publicity, and client relationships, Kristina joins us on the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss NetGalley’s expansion into the audiobook market, along with trends and strategies for publishers to be aware of when uploading audiobooks to NetGalley.

Kristina will be providing training for NetGalley users and publishers at the Publishing Innovation Forum, September 24-26, in Nashville, TN! This conference is open to the entire publishing community and will focus on the many changes our industry has faced, and how to prepare and adapt for the future.

Follow Kristina Radke on LinkedIn! Visit NetGalley.com for more information on their service.

Data in this podcast is based on audiobooks created on NetGalley.com between July 1 2023 – June 30 2024 unless otherwise noted.

Joshua Tallent
This week on the BookSmarts Podcast, I’m excited to have a conversation with my colleague, Kristina Radke. Kristina is from NetGalley. And Kristina, why don’t you give a little bit of background about how you kind of got involved in NetGalley, how you got involved in publishing, and what your role is on the NetGalley team?

Kristina Radke
Sure. Hi, I’m so happy to be here. I have been working at NetGalley for about 14 years now, which seems insane. My role here is primarily to sort of lead the customer engagement team, which includes onboarding our clients, general communication, and making sure people are getting the most out of their NetGalley accounts, which I love to do and I love to work with my team who are doing that work to talk to our publishers every single day. My background, actually, before I came over to NetGalley, I was working in house at HarperCollins, actually, on a marketing team, and had a really great couple of years there. So my in house experience now is quite distant, rather, but yeah, I did have such a great time working on the books themselves, and then bringing that experience over to NetGalleey. Joshua Tallent That’s great. So we wanted to talk a little bit about NetGalley today, but especially about audiobooks, because audiobooks are kind of a unique thing in the publishing world. We’ve seen this massive hockey stick growth in the sales of audiobooks of the last five years or so. So talk to me a little bit about how NetGalley handles audio and kind of the growth of audio on the platform.

Kristina Radke
Yeah, absolutely. So we launched audio on NetGalley back in 2020, which maybe wasn’t a great time in general for us all in the world. But it was kind of a great time to get in front of a literally captive audience and that worked out very nicely for us. You know, the audio market as a whole, as you said, has just been growing by leaps and bounds. I think it’s been like double digit growth for over a decade at this point, which is just astounding. And we actually have seen similar growth on the NetGalley platform for audiobooks, just in the past four years that we’ve been doing it. So, you know, the the audio interest has not slowed down, even though the world has moved on from that collective COVID trauma. People still love listening to audiobooks, discovering audiobooks, talking about audiobooks. And it has just been such a fabulous opportunity, I think, for us to help that segment of the industry continue to find its audience, which is our whole purpose for being here. We actually right now have over 212,000 members on NetGalley who have pressed a button in their profile to say I am specifically interested in audio. And, of course, there is overlap with people who are reading, you know, the digital review copies or the ebooks. So that 212,000 represents about 35% of our overall community size, which is really, really amazing to see. Yeah, in the past year alone, that number jumped up by 45%. So we’re still seeing members come say they love audio, listen to a ton of audio. Yeah, people are voracious.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. And so, in addition to the number of people who are interested, the number of audio books is also much larger on the platform now than it was before as well, right?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, that is exactly right. We have about 60 publishers now, audiobook publishers, who are putting hundreds of audiobooks on NetGalley every single month. In the past six months, I just peeked to see, January through June this year, compared to January to June last year, we’ve had 60% more books, more audiobooks, added to NetGalley so far this year, which is just phenomenal.

Joshua Tallent
And that also means requests for audiobooks to be listened to. How does that work? Is the audiobook the full audiobook? And if so, then, you know, you can request if you’re a professional reader or a, you know, a reviewer on NetGalley, you can request to listen to those audiobooks as part of your review process, right?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, that’s exactly right. So publishers make their books or audiobooks, or both formats available to our members. You mentioned a couple of our member types so I’ll just name them all: reviewers, librarians, booksellers, educators, media and book trade professionals. And those members come to NetGalley to discover the books that they want to read or listen to and make a request of the publisher to receive a free digital copy so that they can preview it and ideally write a review. We’re seeing tons and tons of requests coming in. For audiobooks, specifically, we’re seeing close to 35,000 requests on average each month, which again is over 50% higher than it was last year at this time. So definitely thousands of requests coming in. What’s really cool about, you know, these numbers and how these numbers are growing is that activity on NetGalley is really a funnel. So, you know, the biggest bucket of activity, if you will, is the number of impressions a book gets. And that’s just how many eyes actually opened up that Title Details page and look and wanted to learn more about this book. From that number of impressions, the next part of the funnel will be how many people decided, yes, I want to read that or listen to that book. And they’ll make that request. And then from that request, the publisher will decide what portion of those requests they will approve. And then from those approvals, those readers will listen or read the book and write a review. So the more impressions you get, means the more requests you’ll get, the more approvals the publisher grants, the more reviews they will receive. For audiobooks, actually, the feedback rate is just like absolutely astounding, we’re seeing about 60% of approved members sending their feedback in after listening to an audiobook. By comparison, the feedback rate for the ebooks or the digital review copies is more like 36%. So when I say astounding, like double almost. And that’s not to say that, you know, the review rate for DRCs is small. 36% is still really, really great. And if we’re talking about scale, actually, digital review copies are still getting more feedback just by flat numbers. So we’re seeing about 105,000 reviews per month on average, or digital review copies and audiobooks are getting about 10,000 per month. So the scale is a little bit smaller. But the follow through is just like mind blowing.

Joshua Tallent
That’s impressive. I’m curious about the types of people who review audiobooks, and you mentioned kind of the different types of members at NetGalley. Are you seeing the people who review audiobooks as, you know, I’m assuming there’s special publications that review only audiobooks, but there’s probably also just a lot of individual people who are librarians or booksellers who are just interested in what should I put on the shelf, the digital shelf, so to speak, or is there anything special, anything unique, about kind of the audiobook side of the reviewers? The Members. Is there anything special about them that’s kind of different than ebooks?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, I don’t know if I would say anything different necessarily. But I do think that the places in which people are discovering books and audiobooks is just so wide ranging now, right. The NetGalley community, as you said, certainly, there are librarians who are previewing content to decide whether to carry it for their collection, or whether to make a recommendation to their patrons. Same thing for booksellers. But our reviewer category actually is extremely vast at this point. And it covers everything. from more traditional review organizations all the way to social platforms, people who post on TikTok, for instance, or Bookstagram, or anything like that. We’ve been in business for many, many years. We’ve seen the evolution of blogs, and vlogs or video blogs, and this enormous impact of social media on book sales. So the ways in which people are sharing their feedback about books and making book recommendations continues to evolve and we are continuing to evolve with it and making sure that the tools that we’re offering to them will allow them to talk about books wherever they are talking about books. One thing that you said I think is really interesting and something that I’m also interested in learning more about and that is where audio specific reviews are happening, right? There are certainly platforms out there that are focused on the audio format, and plugging into those platforms with NetGalley, with the reviewers who are on NetGalley and media who are on NetGalley, I think, is a really important thing that more time should be given to, right? More effort should be given to.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, cause there’s so much more about an audiobook than just an ebook and, you know, ebooks you have design and layout but really an audiobook you’ve got, you know, the narrator, you’ve got the sound quality, you’ve got, if there’s a bunch of people doing it as kind of a radio play kind of thing. You’ve got all that. There’s just a lot that goes into creating an audiobook that has its own unique property. So yeah, it would be interesting to me to see how those are being reviewed and how NetGalley is impacting that.

Kristina Radke
Yeah, definitely. And in fact, there are lots of ways that we sort of engage with our community to remind them, you know, best practices about things like you just said, right? Like how to write an audiobook review. We have a guide that we share with our community that says, you know, make sure that you’re talking about the narration and your opinions about that narration, talk about the story itself, how both the author’s work, and do their narrators work do or do not work together for you as a listener, right? Describe the audiobooks flow, mentioned any unique elements, was there music, are there sound effects? Is it a full cast recording or a single narrator? You know, all of those pieces that go into the experience of an audiobook are really, really important to talk about.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So let’s talk about it from a publisher perspective as well. When a publisher is putting their books out into the wild. And they’re thinking, okay, I’ve got my print book, I’ve got my ebook. A lot of times, you’re doing reviews on NetGalley for those early, pre-publication, although it’s even more common now to see them come out later, as well. And other other points in the process or flow of a book. I’m curious about the audiobook side. What’s the recommended timing for an audiobook on NetGalley?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, great question and one that publishers ask us all the time. My recommendation for an audiobook, put it on NetGalley as soon as you can. That could vary quite a bit, as you said, the production, you know, schedules and timelines and how close they are to pub date really are a little limiting in terms of that pre planned period. But we have seen a lot of evidence that the longer you keep a book on NetGalley, the more impressions and requests; you’ll fill that that activity funnel a little bit better. So over the past 12 months, what we’re actually seeing on NetGalley is that about 67% of audiobooks are being added within one month before publication. So anywhere in that month three Pub is when publishers are actually adding their books, their audiobooks to NetGalley. There are, of course, some outliers, right? There are some books that we saw added anywhere from two to four months pre pub; we have just a few even earlier than that. In some cases, those super early copies are planned for right? The production schedule may include buffer time to allow for that advanced listening copy to be made to create a really robust pre-pub marketing plan that incorporates all formats, perhaps. We have also seen some examples of publishers using AI narration or synthetic voices to create an advanced listening copy, even if the final copy is going to have a human narrator. Getting AI into the mix there to just create an audio version that perhaps is being shared with trade professionals, like we were saying before, right? Like a bookseller or librarian who might be making purchase decisions for a hardcover that’s coming out may not have time to read the printed part that you send to him or galley that you send them. And so giving them that opportunity to multitask with, you know, an audio version, even if it’s not the finished audio product, is a really great opportunity to sort of get in front of those people and give them an opportunity to understand what the content is. Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah. And I’m gonna be super interesting to see how that continues to evolve and how perceptions about AI continue to evolve. But that’s just what we’ve seen so far on the platform. But even beyond that one month pre pub window, I will say that books are staying active on NetGalley for more than one month. So about 70% of the audiobooks are active on NetGalley for anywhere up to eight weeks. That’s, again, what we’ve seen actually in the data from the past 12 months. But what I would recommend to publishers is to leave those audio books up for even longer than that. So we are seeing, our data actually shows, that keeping an audiobook active for a little bit longer, like three to four months, is really the sweet spot for filling that funnel of activity as much as you can. Impressions are continuing to grow into those three and four month periods. And then after that, we see that there’s like slightly diminishing returns in terms of the number of impressions after four months. So, three or four months on NetGalley is the sweet spot that we’re seeing right now.

Joshua Tallent
Three or four months, that’s great. And actually, it makes a bunch of sense as well, if I’m a reviewer or librarian or bookseller, whoever, and I’m wanting to consume a lot of content, because I do, I want to be able to see a lot of broad swath of what’s available and pick a lot of different things. You know, it takes a while to go through that process. So if I miss it, you know, I see it come out, and then it’s gone a month later, and I just didn’t have time to get to it yet. It’s obviously really helpful to instead have it available for longer. That’s really cool.

Kristina Radke
Yep exactly, exactly. And it gives people time to sort of discover and rediscover right, whether they have time in their schedules right at this moment to pick up that digital audio, or that digital galley and spend time with it. It just varies depending on what else is going on in their lives or in their editorial schedule.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So let’s talk about the category interest. There’s obviously a lot of audiobooks on the site, as we talked about earlier, what are you seeing as far as what people are most interested in?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, so there’s probably not going to be any big surprises here. Category interests on Net Galley broadly follows what we know about the industry at large. I always like to say NetGalley is kind of like a microcosm of the industry at large. And actually the categories I was just looking and comparing our category interests based on our members survey that we completed earlier this year with the APA consumer report that they shared information about last month, and they were very, very similar. So on NetGalley in the fiction categories, we’re seeing romance, general fiction, mystery, thrillers, sci fi, fantasy, and even YA as our top five fiction categories. So when people are coming to NetGalley and browsing, those are the categories that they’re most often clicking into. And then on the nonfiction side, the most popular are bio memoir, the general nonfiction category, true crime, no surprise there, history, self help and health, mind and body.

Joshua Tallent
Okay. And your members, they recognize that there’s audio available, they can see it, it’s not like it’s being hidden or anything. So how else are you engaging with the members about the audio that’s available in NetGalley?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, so as I mentioned before, we are always engaging with our members. We have this great article how to write an audiobook review. But we also are creating materials for them. We have this great book advocate toolkit to help them understand how they can best advocate for the books that they love. We also have a reading journal, which the reader or the listener customizes, so that they can track their reading goals, their reading habits, the reviews that they’re leaving, etc. We have a really robust community that’s active on social media. We’ve got a Facebook page, Instagram page and TikTok page, where our members are just constantly chattering about what they have going on in their NetGalley TBR list. Aside from that, you heard me mentioned our community survey, we do that annually so that we can really learn what it is our community is doing on the site beyond just, you know, the stats that we see in the backend that I’m talking about here today. They can really tell us what they are doing, what they are looking for, how they’re finding books, where they’re looking, that sort of thing. And then, of course, we do actively promote audiobooks, and, you know, the digital review copies, the ebooks, to our communities, both through eblasts, and newsletters and on site placement in particular categories. So there’s always opportunities for publishers to sort of put their books front and center in front of whatever segment of our community they’re trying to reach. When we launched audiobooks, we did make a conscious decision to really try to highlight that format for our members to find so if you go to netgalley.com, or netgalley.co.uk, or any of our other lenders platforms. We have French language, German, and Japanese language as well. You’ll see there is a section dedicated to audiobooks and in each category you’ll see audiobooks broken out as well. And then in addition to that, publishers can also associate formats so if they have both the audiobook format, and the eBook format available, the member will see a link to both of those formats so they can decide which format they’re most interested in.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. Okay, so we briefly talked about one of the challenges that we’re observing in the industry here on the AI side. But let’s come back to that in a second. I want to kind of end on two challenges. How are you observing publishers marketing teams kind of changing or adapting to audio? There’s obviously a lot going on in the audio space, but what are you seeing on the publishing side and how they market audio compared to how they market other types of content?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, it’s really interesting right. What I am seeing through industry news through conversations with our clients is that there seems to be some consolidation of quote unquote, audio marketing teams getting folded into or the responsibility being given over to the more general marketing teams at large. So the idea of format marketing seems to be, I don’t know, becoming a little less important. But actually, my opinion is that the change here is not necessarily that marketing of the audiobook format will go away, but rather that general marketers are going to be forced to think more broadly about where their audiences are, right? They’re gonna have to think more broadly about where are people learning about books, discovering books, who are our potential customers? Are they readers? Or are they also people who maybe wouldn’t necessarily call themself a reader, and they’re participating in other forms of media that they might discover an audiobook on, right? For example, we know that advertising alongside podcasts is a big thing and has been for a long time. But it might not be a channel that the hardcover marketers specifically have been thinking about. So now, they really do have to think, okay, no matter what the preferred way of ingesting a book is, whether that’s with your eyes or your ears, or your fingers, right, let’s talk about all accessibility. It’s where are those audiences and where can we talk to them?

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so back on AI, then, cause everybody’s talking about AI. What’s the impact? You’ve talked a little bit about kind of how some publishers are doing AI generated, or, you know, synthetic voices for some of their audiobooks, especially early ones. What do you think? Where do you think we’re headed? What do you think? Any observations that you might have on what you’re seeing happening?

Kristina Radke
I definitely do not claim to be an expert on AI. But you know, anecdotally, I hear a lot that people are concerned about AI taking over the creative jobs,the writing of a book, The narrating of a book. I do think that those are valid concerns. But I also think that there are probably plenty of opportunities for AI to help us without taking away those artistic jobs. You know, I’m thinking about work flow type planning things, right, creating productions, schedules, where you can plug in here is the pub date, we want to do a simultaneous release with all of our formats, and we want to plug in X amount of time for our pre pub marketing, like spit out a production schedule for me, at what date do I have to have my narrator in the studio, you know, that sort of thing. I think there are opportunities to use AI to help set up a human narrator for their best success, right? Have the AI look over the text of the book and identify that books tone, the important themes, key information, to give that Narrator context and help them get more quickly to the heart of the characters that they’ll be portraying. And just give them as much as possible to go into the studio with all of the tools they need to deliver a really, really great performance. Yeah, I think that there are so many ways that we could sort of lean on the help of tools like that. But those are just really my off the cuff, sort of, thoughts on AI in general. There are definitely other experts both in the AI field and the audiobook field who could speak more comprehensively about both challenges and opportunities facing our industry. And as you and I both know, some of them will be in Nashville, September for our Publishing Innovation Forum. In particular, I wanted to mention that we will have a Challenges in Audiobook Marketing session, which is going to be headed up by Jolene Barto, who’s the Marketing Director at Dreamscape Media. So I’m very much looking forward to that session.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s gonna be a really good session and AI as well. We have quite a few sessions, including a session about audiobook production with AI, and a session about AI in publishing and being led by Thad McIlroy, who has been a guest a couple times on this podcast. So yeah, definitely recommend that if you’re interested in learning more about these challenges and about audiobooks and about AI and a lot of other really important publishing topics, the Publishing Innovation Forum is going to be a great conference in September in Nashville. And you can learn more about that at publishinginnovationforum.com. Kristina, thank you so much. This has been a great conversation, it’s exciting to see how audiobooks are changing, growing on NetGalley. And how publishers are adapting to that change. I think it’s it’s obviously a very important part of the industry and a growing part of the industry. And it doesn’t seem like it’s gonna slow down anytime really soon. So it’s very exciting to see and I’m glad that NetGalleys right there in the middle of it.

Kristina Radke
Thanks, Joshua. Yeah, we are truly honored to be able to be in the middle of it and help where we can. And I just love digging into what it is that publishers need and what it is that readers need. And looking forward to lots more conversations in the Publishing Innovation Forum.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So let’s tell people where they can find out more about NetGalley and be in touch if they’re a publisher and nterested in learning more about how you can help them.

Kristina Radke
Yeah, absolutely. So if you go to netgalley.com, there’s a big button right in the middle of our homepage for publishers and authors to reach out to us to learn more about how to get started with NetGalley. If you’re interested in following along on social, LinkedIn is the best place to find us from a professional perspective. I did mention we have other social media targeted toward our members. So all of those reviewers and booksellers and librarians and educators and media, who are really looking to talk about the books themselves are on Facebook, Twitter, or X rather. And TikTok at NetGalley. We’re just at @NetGalley everywhere you can find us.

Joshua Tallent
That’s awesome. All right. Well, thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. And looking forward to seeing you in September as well. Kristina Radke Thanks, Joshua. That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please leave a review or rating in Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you’re listening to the podcast. And also please share the podcast with your colleagues so they can learn and grow with us as well. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at Joshua@Firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.