This article was published on May 18, 2012

UK indie publishers Faber and Canongate to launch joint audiobook venture


UK indie publishers Faber and Canongate to launch joint audiobook venture

UK independent book publishers Canongate and Faber & Faber are launching a new audiobook venture together.

As The Bookseller reports, Canongate will manage the sales and production side of the new co-publishing operation, with Faber offering up its vast range of well-known titles to be transformed to tape.

Faber & Faber was founded in London in 1929, and is perhaps most renowned for publishing William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Publisher and playwright T.S. Eliot also served as Editor there for a large chunk of his career. Canongate was founded in Edinburgh in 1973, scooping Publisher of the Year accolades in 2003 and 2009, and is perhaps most well-known in recent times for The Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi.

The co-branded Canongate/Faber offering will be launched later this year, and will include The Remains of  the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, Country Girl, A Memoir by Edna O’Brien, and David Peace’s The Damned United. Whilst it seems that Faber is simply handing the audiobook production side of things over to Canongate, including fiction, non-fiction and children’s, it will retain perhaps what it’s most well-known for, poetry, and continue to produce its own audiobooks on this front.

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The Bookseller reports that the venture should see up to twelve titles released each year, with a particular emphasis on the smartphone and portable media market, though CDs will also be produced.

It seems that Canongate’s acquisition of audiobook specialist CSA Word back in 2010 is starting to pay off. “Canongate’s passion is backed by extremely smart investment, as anyone can see from its acquisition of CSA,” says Faber CEO Stephen Page. “This has brought them exceptional production and sales infrastructure, and invaluable experience in audio publishing.”

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