Here are my first impressions of this book as I read through it and dart about within its pages.

As with all Penn’s books, it has three excellent characteristics: it’s comprehensive, it’s based on her experience, and it’s easy to read.

With regard to its comprehensiveness, it seems to cover pretty much everything an author might wish to know. Not just the obvious stuff, like “How do I start creating and selling audio versions of my book?”, but a much wider and deeper look at the whole field.

For example, the book goes into why audio is so important now, and by implication why the market is wide open if you have a decent book in audio format. Also covered are text to speech, speech to text, podcasts, narrating your book, licensing your voice (which I didn’t even know was a thing) and much more besides.

The key thing for me about this book is that everything I should like to know about audio is all in one place, which means no trawling the internet just to get off the starting block. Also, as someone who started podcasting in 2006 (but didn’t continue with it), this brings my knowledge right up to date.

Audio for Authors has also caused me to ponder whether I shouldn’t take podcasting up again. Sharing one’s thoughts with the world is much easier now than it was a decade and a half ago in many respects. Moreover, listening to audio is now much more natural for many people now than it was years ago. Indeed, Penn talks about the “audio first” ecosystem in some households, including her own, in which one is listening to something more or less from the moment of waking up.

From what I’ve read so far this book gives plenty of practical advice. Moreover it provides compelling reasons for including audio as an integral part of the writer’s portfolio and tools of the trade, not merely an add-on or afterthought.

Joanna Penn kindly sent me a complimentary review copy, but that has not influenced this article.