For writers, agents and rights holders
Publishing
with us
We licence audio rights for four to six books a year. We take unagented submissions, we read all of them, and we reply to all of them — currently in about fourteen weeks, which is slow and is at least honest.
What to send
Email submissions@longformaudio.co.uk with four things and nothing else:
One. The first thirty pages, as a PDF or a Word file. Not the whole manuscript, not a synopsis in place of pages.
Two. A paragraph on who holds audio rights and whether they are currently available. If you do not know, say so — a surprising number of authors have them back and have not been told.
Three. Two or three sentences on why this book wants to be heard rather than read. This is the part we actually weigh, and “it would work well as an audiobook” is not an answer.
Four. If it is already in print, the publisher, the year, and roughly how it sold. A modest print run is not a problem. Not telling us is.
What we
are looking for
Literary fiction, nature writing, narrative history, memoir and crime that is more interested in a place than a plot. Broadly: books where the sentences are doing work, because that is what a narrator has to find.
We are actively short of narrative history and of memoir that is not about recovery from something. We are extremely well supplied with nature writing in which a man walks somewhere after a bereavement.
We do not publish children's books, self-help, business, poetry collections, or fiction over 180,000 words — the last one is economics rather than taste. We are a company of four and a twenty-two-hour recording is most of a year's studio budget.
Terms
An advance against royalties, paid half on signature and half on delivery of the finished recording. Royalty on net receipts, reported twice a year with the actual retailer statements attached rather than a summary.
Term. Seven years, then it reverts to you automatically unless we both agree otherwise. We do not do life-of-copyright audio deals and we think nobody should.
Narrator approval. You get it. We will propose two or three, send you samples, and record whoever you choose. If you hate all of them we go and find more.
No synthetic narration, ever. Written into the licence. We cannot sublicense your book to anyone who intends to synthesise it, and your text cannot be used as training data by us or anyone we deal with.
Send us thirty pages
Fourteen weeks, a real reply, and a reason if the answer is no.