Audiobook Agreement with Tantor Media

Some excit­ing news today.

Tantor Media

Tan­tor Media is an audio­book pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny. Their library includes many award-win­ning books and New York Times best sell­ers, and they work with a pool of over 400 expe­ri­enced audio­book narrators.

What happened

Ear­li­er this fall, Tan­tor approached me about acquir­ing the audio­book rights to The Noth­ing With­in. As an invet­er­ate con­trol freak, at first I was hes­i­tant to con­sid­er let­ting some­one else pro­duce the audiobook.

But after doing research in author com­mu­ni­ties among oth­er places, I decid­ed to accept Tan­tor’s offer. Authors had good things to say about work­ing with Tan­tor, and since I’m not an audio­book con­sumer, I’m glad to have an expe­ri­enced com­pa­ny work­ing through all the pro­duc­tion details.

What’s next

I’m very much look­ing for­ward to work­ing with Tan­tor on the project. This morn­ing we fin­ished sign­ing con­tracts, and some­time (prob­a­bly ear­ly next year) they expect to start prep for pro­duc­tion. Once pro­duc­tion is com­plete, Tan­tor will dis­trib­ute it through their net­work of retail­ers includ­ing Amazon/Audible, iTunes, Kobo, Google Play, among oth­ers. They also dis­trib­ute to libraries across the US.

A special shout-out

An audio­book edi­tion is espe­cial­ly impor­tant to me since the nov­el­’s nar­ra­tor, Root, is con­gen­i­tal­ly blind.

Many, many thanks to Kather­ine Cor­bett and Jim Den­ham, two blind read­ers who gave me thought­ful input on the book in gen­er­al, and on the depic­tion of Root as a blind char­ac­ter in par­tic­u­lar. As a sight­ed writer, I real­ly need­ed their feed­back. They were kind enough to read the entire man­u­script using screen read­er software…and com­pared to an actu­al nar­ra­tor, I’m fair­ly sure it’s much less enjoy­able to read a long nov­el through an auto­mat­ed voice. I’ll be glad when I can make Root’s sto­ry avail­able in pro­fes­sion­al audio form to blind and visu­al­ly impaired readers.