Independent & proudly human
Four people
above a
bike shop
Longform Audio has published from the same first-floor room on Jamaica Street since 2016. There are four of us. We have no parent company, no investor, and no plans to acquire either.
What we
actually do
We license audio rights, commission a narrator, book a studio, direct the recording, edit and master it, and get it onto eight storefronts and into eleven library catalogues. That is the whole business. We do not publish print, we do not run a podcast, and we have never once been described as a platform.
Four to six new titles a year. Sixty-one on the list. Two Avon Prize shortlists, one of which we lost to a book we would also have shortlisted.
The part nobody sees is the direction. A ten-hour recording is four days in a studio with somebody in the room making decisions about pace, breath and where a paragraph turns — and it is the difference between a book that is read aloud and a book that is performed. It is also the single largest line in our budget, and we have never reduced it.
On synthetic
narration
Since 2023 we have been offered four licensing deals conditional on synthesised voice, and a fifth that would have let us keep human narration on the front list and synthesise the backlist. We turned down all five. Between them they were worth roughly £71,000, which for a company of four is not a gesture.
The reasoning is not sentimental and it is not really about the technology. It is that the value we add is a person making thousands of small interpretive decisions about a text. Remove that and we are a file conversion service, and there is no version of that business we want to run.
There is a narrower point too. Our contracts have prohibited the use of a narrator's recordings to train a voice model since March 2023, retroactively, on every title we have ever published. Several of our narrators asked for this before we offered it, which is fair enough.
We are not asking anyone to treat this as a moral position. It is a description of what we sell.
The four
of us
Iris Callaghan — publisher. Founded the company in 2016 after eleven years in audio at a trade house in London. Reads every submission.
Devan Okonjo — production. Directs about two thirds of our recordings and books every studio day. Has strong opinions about room tone.
Marta Sowa — rights and retail. Handles licensing, the eight storefronts, and the library authorities. Negotiated the contract clause above.
Fen Ashby — editorial and everything else. Joined in 2021 as an intern on a three-month contract that nobody has got round to ending.
We are at Unit 4, Bellinger Yard, Jamaica Street, Bristol BS2 8JP. There is a bike shop downstairs and no lift, which we are sorry about — if you need to meet us and stairs are difficult, we will come to you.
Work with us
We take unagented submissions, we read all of them, and we reply within about fourteen weeks.