Advance Listening Editions
ONE afternoon a few months before my most recent book came out, I was procrastinating on Twitter and saw a tweet by Steph Opitz, the founding director of the Wordplay book festival in Minneapolis. “Are there any publishers who do audio galleys?” she asked. Other publishing professionals soon weighed in with enthusiasm for the idea and mentioned a few publishers who do offer advance audio editions for some titles.
I got in touch with Opitz—we are longtime friends, having met when she ran the Texas Book Festival and invited me to appear at the event—to ask why she was interested in audio galleys. “I think for most people in author events and/or book reviewing, it’s our job to know about a lot of books, but our workday doesn’t allow for time to actually read them, so we’re often cramming it in during non–work hours,” she told me. “It would be easier to multitask during that time. I have a dog that needs walking, dishes that need cleaning; listening to audiobooks actually makes me want to do laundry.”
As a writer, professor, and cohost of a literary podcast, I don’t receive nearly the volume of advance copies that most folks in publishing do, but I’d still prefer to listen rather than read them in print. That goes double for e-galleys, which have felt especially daunting during the past eighteen months in which I’ve spent so much of my pandemic more publishers offer audio galleys?
