With “short-form audiobooks”, Spotify has become an independent book publisher

On the heels of Spotify’s embrace of AI-generated audiobooks through their partnership with ElevenLabs, the streaming giant is looking to further democratise and monetise audiobooks. On March 13, Spotify’s For the Record blog announced a new publishing program aimed at independent authors publishing “short-form stories”. 

Short stories have long been an integral part of the print publishing world, but Spotify’s emphasis on “short-form stories for audiobook creation” suggests the company is looking to do something more than just adapt the rich tradition of short stories to the audiobook format. Spotify may be adopting the language of short-form video to audiobooks as a marketing tactic or they may be foreshadowing a future of user-generated audio stories that Spotify owns and can be easily adapted to video. Either way, one thing is clear: Spotify is officially in the book publishing business.

How does Spotify’s audiobook publishing program work?

According to Spotify’s Short-Form Audiobooks homepage, the company is looking for audio-focused stories of 10,000-20,000 words specific to the romance, mystery / thriller, or sci-fi / fantasy genres. Importantly, submissions are reviewed by Spotify, and if accepted, the company will make an offer for an author’s audiobook rights. Spotify will then publish the audiobook, pay an advance and royalties, and manage the production process, making Spotify the publishing industry’s newest independent book publisher.

For many independent authors struggling to break through, Spotify’s new initiative may be an attractive funding and distribution opportunity, which is sure to raise the antennae of some traditional book publishers grappling with declining print sales and an explosion of self-published titles. According to Publishers Weekly, traditionally published books declined by almost 4% while self-published books increased by more than 7% from 2022 to 2023. 

With its new “short-form audiobooks” program, Spotify is doing something akin to what AWAL did in the music industry, capitalising on the independent creator market while providing some marketing and financial infrastructure for these creators. The difference is Spotify also owns the means of distribution, giving the company the power to exploit the rights to these stories from end-to-end.

Given Spotify’s foray into video in 2024, it is not difficult to imagine the company licensing rights to television and film production houses or even adapting video to these stories on-platform in an effort to compete with video streaming services like Netflix. Spotify may call these audiobooks “short-form”, but the duration of a 10,000-20,000-word audiobook is likely somewhere in the range of 1-2 hours. In other words, “short-form audiobooks” are about the duration of a feature-length film or a 3-4 episode television miniseries — and probably a fraction of the cost.