Who publishes audiobooks?

In audiobooks, publishing means the company or organization puts up resources to turn a book into a recording. That company licenses the audio rights, hires the narrator, pays for the studio time, manages the recording, and promotes and markets the finished audiobook. Everything else is about which company does it, and how big that company is.

The audiobook you loved last week and the one you gave up on in chapter one might share the same publisher. Two recordings carry different cover art and different brand names and still trace back to one parent company. Once you can see that, the whole map opens up.

Somebody has to say yes

So an audiobook publisher is the company that decided a given book was worth bringing to listeners. Plenty of books never clear that bar, which is why your favorite novel might have no audiobook. One common way of categorizing publishers is by the relative number of audiobooks they release in a year.

The majors

Most publisher names you’d recognize trace back to five book companies or “houses”: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. Yet some of the biggest audiobook makers were never book publishers at all. Audible belongs to Amazon. RBmedia owns Recorded Books, Tor, HighBridge, and GraphicAudio among many others. If you’re already a listener you’ve almost certainly heard an RBmedia audiobook without ever seeing the name.

Here’s how we sort the players at AR:

• Major Publishers — the big five houses, plus the big audiobook-only producers like Audible, RBmedia, Podium, and Blackstone.
• Major affiliates — an affiliate is like an imprint in the book publishing business. A Del Rey fantasy and a Knopf literary novel look like rivals on your shelf, though both are imprints of Penguin Random House. Simon & Schuster, for example, has an audio-first imprint called Simon Maverick.
• Independents — roughly everyone else.

Independent Publishers

The majors and their imprints (who we call major affiliates) come to maybe forty companies. The list of independent publishers runs well into the hundreds in the U.S. alone, and it’s still growing.

“Independent” mostly means there’s no bigger company above them calling the shots, though even that varies. And independent doesn’t mean small: Blackstone is an independent (in that it does not have a parent company) it’s enormous. That’s why it’s in our Majors category. Independents, as we use the term, come in a few flavors:

• Print publishers that record in-house, like Norton and Bloomsbury, making their own audiobooks rather than licensing them out.
• Genre and production houses, where the strange, wonderful audiobooks live. LitRPG, a fast-growing genre with a devoted following, grew largely from independent and self-published roots.

Independents you wouldn’t expect

Universities make audiobooks too. Princeton has produced more than 150 in-house since 2018. They cast Simon Vance to narrate a new translation of Marx’s Capital to carry readers through an otherwise dense and challenging book.

Don’t take any of this as gospel

These aren’t clean boxes. Sometimes a publisher hires another company to actually produce the recording. Sometimes they do it all in-house. Sometimes a small house grows into a big one, or a big one spins off something small. Our point isn’t to sort every company into a slot. It’s to give you a rough map of a lively, shifting ecosystem, so publisher names start to mean something for you and perhaps help guide your listening choices. We’ll dig into the finer distinctions in a separate piece.

What this means to you

Once you know that Del Rey and Blackstone are different kinds of company, the credits line on an audiobook tells you a little about how it was made. You don’t need to memorize any of it. It just helps to know the map has different countries on it, and that the small ones are worth visiting.

Our view

There are far more independent audiobook publishers than any tier list lets on. The next time you’re between books, consider wandering off the beaten path into major affiliates and independent publishers. Some of the best listening you’ll do may come from a company you’ve never heard of or from narrators you haven’t experienced yet.