Welcome to a new episode of the Make Books Travel podcast, on which I’m speaking to Lance Fitzgerald, VP, Content and Business Development for Penguin Random House Audio.
On season 1 episode 15, I interviewed Jamie Dupras, General Manager of audiobook producer Deyan Audio. What I took away from that interview was that the audiobook format is an even more important, and explosively growing, player in our industry than I’d already thought.
So I’d been wanting to speak with Lance, an audiobook publisher, to better understand this growth, and discuss what trends he has seen. Among quite a diverse set of topics, we also dive into the areas of growth he and his team at Penguin Random House Audio are specifically looking at, and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on audiobook sales and listener behavior.
Show Notes:
- Lance's (audio)book recommendations:
- Seth Rogen's Yearbook
- Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle
- Jenny Lawson's Broken (in the best possible way)
- About Lance:
Lance Fitzgerald is VP, Content and Business Development for Penguin Random House Audio, overseeing the editorial acquisitions team.
Prior to joining PRH Audio, he worked in Subsidiary Rights for twenty-five years as Subsidiary Rights Director at Crown/Random House, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Putnam.
As Rights Director, he sold international rights for numerous best-selling authors including both President Barack Obama and Former First Lady Michelle Obama, Gillian Flynn, and Andy Weir.
He is a member of the Frankfurt Book Fair Foreign Rights Advisory Board, and has been a featured speaker and panelist at London and Frankfurt Book Fairs, the Writer’s League of Texas, Authors and Artists Representatives, the Columbia and NYU Summer Publishing courses, the Young-to-Publishing Group, and at the Slice Writers Conference.
